Chicago and its suburbs host an array of influential “megachurch” campuses, each comprising congregations of several thousand members. Willow Creek, Harvest Bible Chapel, Christ Community and others, attempting to attract unbelieving seekers and disenfranchised Christians, typically eschew in their services the elements of “old-fashioned” worship such as hymns, pews and traditional architecture, instead using praise bands, humorous skits and theater-style seating. A lesser-known megachurch, at least among Evangelicals, is First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, located in the northwest corner of the state. Contrary to megachurch methodology, First Baptist doggedly maintains an adherence to revivalistic evangelism, the singing of gospel songs and an unwavering insistence on the King James Bible as superior to all successive translations.

Founded in 1887 by Allen Hill, First Baptist grew steadily under a series of dedicated pastors, each contributing a unique strength. Notable among them was Dr. J.M. Horton, who served for fourteen years until resigning to lead the Indiana Baptist Convention. After Horton came Dr. T. Leonard Lewis, graduate of Wheaton College and Moody Bible Institute, who served for three years until resigning to assume the presidency of Gordon College in Boston. Then in 1944 came Dr. Russell Purdy, recommended to First Baptist by Dr. Will Houghton, president of Moody Bible Institute, and Dr. Harry Ironside, pastor of Moody Memorial Church. Purdy’s 1947 departure opened the way for Dr. Owen Miller, a supporter of missions and church plants. Miller served faithfully until 1958, leaving for Riverside, California; and again First Baptist sought a pastor. Several candidates interviewed with the trustees and deacons, but the most intriguing was a young Texas firebrand named Jack Hyles. As Keith McKinney and Gail Merhalski remark in The Old Church Downtown (2001), “Pastor Hyles’s preaching was different…Most of the guest preachers were serious, staid and stiff in their delivery…The most interesting pulpit supply were faculty members from Wheaton College…to put it mildly, most could not be heard above the occasional cough…Brother Hyles, on the other hand, preached!” Not surprisingly, Hyles was elected. In addition to breathing vigor into First Baptist’s evangelistic efforts, he promptly severed its ties from both Southern and American Baptist conventions, sensing an alarming drift toward ecumenism. Under his leadership First Baptist’s various outreaches dramatically expanded; and in 1973 Christian Life magazine recognized it as conducting one of the “100 Largest Sunday Schools.” With multimillionaire contractor Russell Anderson, Hyles co-founded Hyles-Anderson College in Schererville, Indiana, in 1972.

Ministering widely within Fundamentalist circles, he enjoyed a tight friendship with Dr. John R. Rice, founder and editor of The Sword of the Lord, located in Wheaton, Illinois. In 1960 Rice asked Hyles, who had been serving as assistant editor of the newspaper, to assume the editorship, providing that he resign and move to Wheaton. Hyles, reluctant to surrender his pulpit, declined and resumed his position on the Sword’s board of directors, while Rice in 1963 moved all operations to Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

During the late 1960s Hyles spoke at Moody Founder’s Week in Chicago, Illinois, Rex Humbard’s Cathedral of Tomorrow in Akron, Ohio, and Oswald J. Smith’s People’s Temple in Toronto, Ontario. But as the years progressed, he limited his engagements, cautious of theological compromise.

In this sphere he squarely placed Wheaton College, about which he infrequently but always pointedly referenced in his preaching, as in this 1975 sermon, favorably invoking an older era to illustrate God’s restorative power:

“Right over here in Wheaton, Illinois, the President of Wheaton College, Dr. [Charles] Blanchard, told how a man had died and they had covered him up. His wife got under the sheet that was over his body. She stayed there and said, ‘He’s not going to die!’…He got up and the wife started walking out the door with him. A dead man! The doctor said, ‘Hey, you can’t walk out the door. You’re sick.’ The wife said, ‘No, he’s not sick. He’s dead. Leave us alone!’ They went home. Yes, God can still do it!”

More often, however, Hyles cited Wheaton College as a plum example of how not to administrate a Christian school, as in this 1970 sermon:

“Here is the problem, and here is what is causing these little, immature, teenage pink punks to ruin our country (and they’re letting them do it). The reason they are is because we older people are letting them do it…Let’s take an example – and I’ll just come right out and say it – let’s take over here in Wheaton College. It used to be a wonderful center for the Truth. There was a day when Wheaton College was one of the grandest and greatest colleges in America. No longer is that true…Wheaton College was in our budget when I came eleven years ago to pastor this church. As long as I’m here, it’ll never get in our budget again. Never. You say, ‘I don’t like that!’ Well, you can lump it the best way you can, because I don’t like it either. I am sick and tired of Christian colleges hiding behind last generation’s character, kowtowing to a generation of beatniks and liberals, and acting like them. Listen, if Wheaton College were what it ought to be tonight, let them take a stand on the issues of our day; let them fight and get bloody for the Bible again like they used to.”

He expresses a similar conviction in Fundamentalism in My Lifetime (2002):

“Basically, Bob Jones University was ‘The Wheaton College of the South.’ However, because Wheaton College was much older than Bob Jones University, it changed sooner. Bob Jones University remained fundamental, as nondenominationalists go, later than Wheaton College, because of its age.”

After Dr. Jack Hyles’s death in 2001, his son-in-law, Dr. Jack Schaap, was elected senior pastor. Each week First Baptist Church continues to operate a fleet of buses throughout Chicagoland and northwest Indiana. Matthew Barnett, pastor of Angelus Temple, founded by Aimee Semple McPherson in 1920, cites First Baptist as a model for urban ministry.

From its earliest days the Wheaton College community has agreed to common standards of behavior. These codes have changed significantly over the last 150 years and moved from explicitly forbidding activities to the biblically-based principles of today’s Community Covenant. Once referred to as “The Pledge”, students from previous decades contracted to refrain from a variety of activities such as movie attendance, card playing or membership in a secret society. According to Wheaton College’s first rules in the 1860 catalog:

THE FOLLOWING THINGS ARE POSITIVELY DISALLOWED, VIZ.:

• Generally, all offensive, disorderly or indecent conduct
• propagating infidel principles
• profaning the Sabbath
• profane or obscene language or behavior
• playing billiards and like games
• using intoxicating liquors or tobacco
• disorder in rooms
• disorder in or about the buildings, especially at nights
• injuring college property
• a careless use of fire
• throwing water, dirt, or other offensive things from the windows
• joining any secret society or entering the marriage relation while a member of the College

The deportment of the sexes towards each other will he particularly regarded by the Faculty, and any student whose conduct shall be, in the judgment of the Faculty, either foolish or improper, will be promptly separated from the institution, if admonition fails to correct it. In short everything is forbidden which will hinder, and everything required, which, we think, will help students in the great object for which they assemble here, which is improvement of mind, morals and heart.

The Faculty will exercise a parental and moral oversight of the character and conduct of the students, each officer having power to suspend disorderly students until next Faculty meeting. The students are required to be present at all College Exercises; to treat their officers with respect, and fellow-students with decorum; to attend church on the Sabbath; and not to leave town; or be out at night; or be out of their rooms in study hours; or absent from examinations without permission.

In the early years of Wheaton College, one could say in the early decades, as well, the college relied heavily upon the enrollment of local students. Though it broadly drew students from the region, it was the Wheaton community that served as the “bread and butter” of its tuition dollars.

In 1860 the transition of leadership from Lucius Matlack to Jonathan Blanchard, from the full control of Wesleyan Methodists to the inclusion of Congregationalists, brought new energy and resources. It also brought a different perspective. For over one hundred years a member of the Wheaton College community could not be a member of a secret oath-bound society. Of any sort. The Illinois Institute and, afterward, Wheaton College were founded on several principles: abolition, temperance and anti-secretism. It was these last two, in tension, that brought forth Wheaton College’s encounter with the Illinois legal system.

Edwin Hartley Pratt (1849-1930), a local student, was enrolled in the Academic program at Wheaton. He and several other students joined a local Good Templar’s lodge. Known officially as the Independent Order of Good Templars, this fraternal organization stood for many of the principles that Wheaton, and Jonathan Blanchard, held dear: equality for men and women, racial non-discrimination and temperance. It’s motto sounded very good and biblical — “Friendship, Hope and Charity.” However, it was still a secret society and Jonathan Blanchard would have none of it (having believed that the slave system was the work of secret societies).

So, the administration of Wheaton College (i.e. Jonathan Blanchard), tossed out Pratt and his co-secretists.

In response Pratt’s father sued Wheaton College under the belief and assumption that his son had done nothing illegal and therefore could not be expelled. A legal battle (Pratt v. Wheaton College) ensued that made its way to the Illinois Supreme Court. In a precedent-setting decision the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the right of Wheaton College, and any other school, to establish rules to govern the lives and discipline of its students, much in the same way that a parent would. As the ruling stated, “A discretionary power has been given, … [and] we have no more authority to interfere than we have to control the domestic discipline of a father in his family.” This firmly established the principle of in loco parentis.

In loco parentis is the legal doctrine that outlines a relationship that is similar to that of a parent to a child. The concept goes back hundreds of years and was embedded in English common-law that was borrowed from by American colonists. The Puritans put this idea to use and it found its way into American elementary and high schools, colleges, and universities. The legal system in the nineteenth century was unwilling to interfere when students brought grievances, particularly in the area of rules, discipline, and expulsion. However, this would change in the 1960s as all forms of authority were challenged.

One may wonder what ever happened to Pratt. After leaving Wheaton, he became a noted homeopathic physician and surgeon in Chicago and was known for his professional writing and work. He wrote Orificial Surgery And Its Application To The Treatment Of Chronic Diseases (1891 and dedicated to his father) and The composite man as comprehended in fourteen anatomical impersonations (1901 and published in several editions). He served as President of the Illinois Homoeopathic Medical Association and served on several medical boards and commissions. In 1877 he married Isadore M. Bailey (a Wheaton student from 1875-1877) with the Rev. C. P. Mercer of the Central Swedenborgen Society officiating. Pratt joined the Chicago Society of the New Jerusalem (Swedenborgian) in 1881.

Oddly enough, Pratt v. Wheaton College wasn’t the only time that Pratt was before the Illinois Supreme Court. In 1903 Pratt was sued for not gaining consent before conducting a hysterectomy on a mentally-ill patient. Pratt lost the case and was fined $3,000. He fought the ruling seeking redress before the Supreme Court. Yet, again, the court failed to rule in his favor.

Poor Pratt.

This summer marks the 135th anniversary of the founding of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Beginning in the fall of 1873 many women across Ohio and New York gathered in churches and marched at their local saloons in support of temperance. After listening to lectures by Dr. Diocletian “Dio” Lewis, groups in Fredonia, NY and Hillsboro and Washington Court House, Ohio protested against alcohol and decided that a national organization was necessary. In August 1874 at an interdenominational meeting of the National Sunday School Assembly held on the Chautauqua Grounds at Lake Chautauqua, NY, a national convention was planned for later that fall. On November 18-20, 1874, women from eighteen states gathered in the Second Presbyterian Church in Cleveland, Ohio to organize the first national convention of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). During this three day meeting, methods, plans of work, a pledge and constitution were formulated and the first set of officers was elected.

In 1879 Frances Willard became president of the WCTU and used her political prowess and moral persuasion in championing total abstinence. As president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union from 1879 to 1898, she garnered support for temperance as well as women’s suffrage, economic and religious rights, prison reforms, abstinence, education and labor reforms, and international peace. Willard’s personal motto was “do everything.” The WCTU adopted this as a policy which came to mean that all reform was interconnected and that social problems could not be separated. The use of alcohol and other drugs was a symptom of the larger problems in society such that by 1896, over two dozen of the WCTU’s departments were dealing with non-temperance issues. The WCTU would become the oldest continuing non-sectarian women’s organization in the world and continues to this day.

According to Howard A. Snyder’s “Populist Saints” (Eerdmans 2006), Wheaton College president, Jonathan Blanchard met with Francis Willard and other WCTU leaders in an attempt at joining forces, but an alliance was not forged due to WCTU ties with the Knights of Labor and Good Templars. A Wheaton chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was eventually formed and it’s records lie in the Special Collections and are composed of meeting minutes from 1906-1956. The College Archives also holds correspondence between Frances Willard and Jonathan’s wife, Mary Bent Blanchard, some of which was published in the Christian Cynosure newspaper.

Wheaton College is widely recognized for its endeavor to integrate faith and learning, so it is somewhat surprising to discover that there was a moment when its administration stoutly resisted the implementation of a theater program. It may also come as a surprise for some to learn that another Christian liberal arts college, Bob Jones University, pursued drama as a valid educational discipline decades before Wheaton.

Bob Jones College (now University) was founded in 1927 in College Point, Florida, by Methodist revivalist Dr. Bob Jones Sr. He determined that this institution defy the mockery of the day. “This college,” he said, “was founded [to] neutralize in this country the idea that if you are conservative and believe the Bible, that you are a sort of fanatic, or you’re lopsided or something. Some people – worldly, highbrowed, snooty people – think that if you’re a Christian, you’re queer…So we wanted to build a college that would neutralize in the minds of the public the idea that culture does not go hand in hand with the old-time conservative, Christian approach, and so we started off on that basis.”

But the appearance of Bob Jones College on the Christian educational scene was not welcomed by all within the conservative community. Most notably, J. Oliver Buswell, third president of Wheaton College, publicly objected, stating, “One [orthodox school] is enough. We ought to stay by that.” He added that, “Wheaton was doing everything that needed to be done.” Jones ignored Buswell and forged ahead. With its student body expanding amid the modernist/fundamentalist controversies of the 30s and 40s, the college moved from Florida to Cleveland, Tennessee, and finally to its present location in Greenville, South Carolina.

Occasionally Wheaton and Bob Jones College attempted to cooperate, but these efforts often failed. For instance, in 1929 Buswell and other Christian educators tried to convince Jones to join their fight against educational standardization. Jones resisted, stating that he wanted to cooperate with religious educators; beside that, he wanted academic standardization rather than accreditation. Just a few years later Buswell and his colleagues reversed their position, organizing an accrediting organization for religious schools. Jones refused to join, believing that any such association ran counter to the goals of Bob Jones College and its board. So Jones paid a dear price: BJC was stigmatized as anti-intellectual and publicly attacked by Buswell because it remained unaffiliated with the association he headed.

In 1940 tension between the two institutions exacerbated when the Bob Jones College Classic Players, the only college-based repertory in the nation, performed Shakespeare and Greek tragedy. Of course, BJC received pointed criticism from its Fundamentalist constituency. However, John R. Rice, editor of The Sword of the Lord, located in Wheaton, Illinois, defended the program, stating that “Shakespeare is great literature.” As with other subjects pertaining to the human experience, it was worthy of study. Again, the sharpest criticism was launched by Buswell, who had resisted drama at Wheaton College until his dismissal from its presidency in 1940, though students favored theatrical studies. Reviewing a 1949 sermon by Dr. Bob, Sr., Buswell, now serving as president of Shelton Bible College in New York, inquired: “…Let me ask you a question or two. Your own educational program is reeking with theatricals and grand opera, which lead young people, as I know, and as you ought to know, into a worldly life of sin.” John R. Rice published a three-page rebuttal in The Sword of the Lord, declaring that Buswell’s assertion was “utterly untrue.” In the years after Buswell left Wheaton, some classes were known to perform at least one short play, skit or pageant per week. Dr. Ed Hollatz, who completed his undergraduate degree at BJU and later served as professor of Speech and Communication at Wheaton, directed in 1966 Wheaton’s first “official” drama, Macbeth, inaugurating a series of successfully produced performances at Arena Theater. Stagings by others include Tartuffe, Medea, Murder in the Cathedral, The Crucible, Waiting for Godot and many more.

Since those early, steamy days, both Wheaton and Bob Jones University have enjoyed endless banquets of cultural offerings. Dr. Bob Jones, Jr., second president of the university, was an accomplished Shakespearean actor, approached by Hollywood and Broadway (refusing both), in addition to founding the largest Renaissance art collection in the western hemisphere. Similarly, Wheaton College, west of Chicago, boasts a world-renowned curriculum showcasing music, art, theater and writing, in addition to maintaining attractive, oft-visited campus museums featuring archaeological artifacts, British literature and American evangelism.

Other notable Wheaton College faculty who attended BJU include Robert E. Webber, late professor of Theology, Joseph McClatchey, late professor of English and Rolland Hein, retired professor of English.

Correspondence pertaining to the ideological complaints of Bob Jones, both Sr. and Jr., against the National Association of Evangelicals (SC-113) is maintained in Special Collections at Wheaton College.

(Much of the material for this entry is derived from Daniel L. Turner’s Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University, 2001)

Theodore Wellington Jones was born on September 19, 1853 in Hamilton, Ontario during his parents temporary residence in that city . Soon after his parents returned to their native state, New York, and there remained until Theodore was twelve years old. In 1865 this very large family decided to make Illinois their home and settled in Chicago. Because his parents were poor and unable to give him even a common school education, Jones was compelled to support himself. At the age of fifteen years he was driving an express wagon, eventually establishing a successful express and moving business.

With his business established Jones wished to obtain an education to fill in the educational gaps of his childhood. Through the aid of private tutors and the “midnight oil,” he was able, when twenty-five years of age, to enter Wheaton College, Wheaton, Ill., where he remained three years. After his time at Wheaton he returned to his business in Chicago where his prosperity continued. He became the owner of a large brick storage warehouse at Twenty-Ninth Street and Shields Avenue, along with other valuable property. His business employed at one time three clerks and about fifty men, all individuals of color. In 1894, Theodore W. Jones was elected a County Commissioner of Cook County, Illinois on the Republican ticket. He was known to ably perform the duties of his office and he labored earnestly and unselfishly to advance the interests of African Americans in Chicago. During Mr. Jones’ term of office African Americans Cook County drew $50,000 in yearly salary — about seven times the amount paid into the county treasury by them. He was a valued member of the National Negro Business League and organized the branch league in Chicago, known as the Business Men’s League of Cook County. This league entertained the National League in Chicago, August 21, 22, 23, 1901. (adapted from Daniel Culp’s Twentieth Century Negro Literature)

Jones was considered one of the principal lieutenants of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Machine in Chicago. Following Washington’s ideas, while a member of the Cook County Board of Commissioners and as an officer of the National Negro Business League, Jones sought to seek co-existence rather than integration. He didn’t view the problems of segregation as troublesome as some of his contemporaries. According to Allan Spear, in his great work Black Chicago, Jones said in January 1906 in Broad Ax that “the Southern Negro’s interest in the ballot is on the wane” and that “in these states where the disfranchisement laws are the most rigid, there thrift and repeated success has more than crowned the efforts of the Negro.” Jones later left Chicago, experiencing some difficulties. Records indicate that in 1908 he faced a bigamy charge in Kansas. Several years later he was reported to be in Richmond, Virgnia, where he was secretary-treasurer of the Negro Historical and Industrial Association, promoting the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of emancipation. (see Giles B. Jackson to BTW, Oct. 26, 1914, Con. 506, BTW Papers, OLC.)

For decades it has been believed that the Illinois Institute, and its later incarnation as Wheaton College, was a stop on the Underground Railroad. It was true that those institutions stood firmly on the principle of abolition and its leadership were heavily involved and known widely as abolitionists. They risked their lives to seek freedom for the enslaved.

Because it has been difficult to substantiate these beliefs and reports many at Wheaton College have felt less sure of the claims made by those more knowledgeable about the activities of the Underground Railroad in DuPage County. All that had been previously located was a reference to a quote by Maria Blanchard Cook that in Wheaton the Underground Railroad was operated above ground. Glennette Tilley Turner has spent decades researching and reporting on the freedrom trail as it ran through the county, but even her research had yet to uncover any written documentation to support claims that on their face held weight. It appears that the faith of many was well placed.

Dr. David Maas, of Wheaton’s history faculty, has been putting the finishing touches on a book manuscript detailing the abolitionist roots of Wheaton College and those that served in the United States Civil War. He made a recent discovery, related somewhat to Maria Cook, that challenges the cloud of uncertainty that has hung over this question.

While confirming a detail related to Ezra Cook’s service with the Thirty-ninth Regiment of the Illinois Volunteer Infantry he encountered Cook’s retelling of how he entered the service and his association with Wheaton College.

The outbreak of the war in the spring of 1861 found myself and two sisters attending Wheaton College, which had a national reputation as an Abolition school in an Abolition town. So strong was public sentiment that runaway slaves were perfectly safe in the College building, even when no attempt was made to conceal their presence, which was well known to the United States Marshal stationed there. With hundreds of others, I have seen and talked with such fugitives in the college chapel. Of course they soon took a night train well-guarded to the next station on the U. G. R. R.

Clark, Charles M. The history of the thirty-ninth regiment Illinois Volunteer Veteran Infantry. Chicago, 1889. p. 490.

This discovery is the fruition of much desire and interest. It confirms boldly–with its affirmation that “hundreds of others”–that in Wheaton the Underground Railroad was operated in full-view and above ground. It also provides very strong evidence that can support a claim that Wheaton College was a stop on the Underground Railroad. It solidifies the beliefs of many that the abolitionists in Wheaton and at the Institute and College put into action their principles despite the legal and financial risks to person and institution.

Cook’s statement has several internal strengths that help bolster his claim. He does not make himself the center of the story and states that many in the town stood behind the abolitionist activities of the school. Cook makes clear that the U.S. Marshal was aware of the activities — a statement that could easily have been challenged if it were untrue and known to be untrue by the townspeople. Finally, he states that he was not the only one to see the fugitives, but that there were hundreds of others. This could be viewed as hyperbole, but the college’s enrollment (in all of its academic programs) can support this claim.