Campus minister: Muslims not ones who asked for Wichita State chapel renovations

The removal of the pews at Wichita State University’s Grace Chapel – criticized by some as a Muslim takeover of the facility – actually was sought by a Christian campus minister and Christian students who wanted a more flexible worship space, the former campus minister and others said Monday.

“I certainly had that idea … five, six or seven of us all kind of had that idea within about the same six- to eight-month time frame three years ago,” said the Rev. Christopher Eshelman, a United Methodist minister who served as campus minister at WSU in 2011 and 2012.

“I certainly suggested it, advocated for it. I don’t know that I’m the only one that suggested it, so I’m not trying to say it was all my idea, but I was certainly one of the people who said, ‘What if we did this?’ ”

Eshelman, now associate pastor at Calvary United Methodist Church, has maintained contact with the campus ministry and is chairman of the ecumenical board that oversees it.

“We just kept broadening the circle and having these conversations,” he said. “Eventually it became kind of a student government issue.”

Then-student body president Matt Conklin, who is Christian, sponsored the changes through student government and university administration, which took most of the year he was in office, Eshelman said.

“Eventually, it was approved,” Eshelman said. “Everything went beautifully for six months and then … some people took offense and then it blew up.”

It blew up after an Oct. 2 Facebook post by WSU alumna and donor Jean Ann Cusick, who decried what she called “accommodation” of Muslim students, who have brought in a prayer rug and use the chapel for daily prayers. Cusick, who spoke to The Eagle last week, refused to comment on Monday.

Her post quickly moved through conservative Christian circles online and was picked up by national media.

In an opinion piece, Fox News characterized the changes at the chapel as “Christian cleansing” and continued: “This is what the Islamic transformation of a nation founded on Judeo-Christian values looks like, folks. The Christian faith is marginalized while the Islamic faith is given accommodation.”

Christian Today reported that “a minority group of Muslim students have succeeded in taking over what used to be the Christian chapel of their university to the dismay of the school’s majority Christian population.”

Nothing could be further from the truth, Eshelman said.

He said his first contact about the chapel with a Muslim student, a member of the Student Government Association, came long after the idea of removing the pews and at about the same time Conklin was preparing his formal proposal for the administration.

“I want to emphasize: Never in my conversations or experience did I have a Muslim insist on anything for that space,” he said. “There were no demands.”

The family that made the Harvey D. Grace Memorial chapel possible in 1964 had specified that the doors be open to all creeds and all races at the public university.

Hate mail received

The backlash against the chapel renovation has included angry mail directed at student leaders, including Joseph Shepard, WSU student body president and a licensed minister who said he preaches every fourth Sunday at St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Shepard called the criticism of the renovation and the claim that Muslims had taken over the chapel an example of “Islamophobia.”

That has brought him strident criticism on social networks and in personal messages.

“YOU CALL YOURSELF A CHRISTIAN? A MINISTER? How disgusting,” wrote one e-mail writer who accessed Shepard’s private student e-mail account. “you don’t have a right to call yourself a Christian. how can you defend a group that has much hatred towards your own. … I can’t believe you were elected and as an alumna I am disappointed!”

Shepard has organized a “Prayer with the President” gathering outside Grace Chapel at 6 p.m. Friday to which he’s inviting members of all faiths and specifically the local critics of the chapel renovation.

“I want to send them a personal invitation to show up and pray with us,” he said. “Come in peace, don’t come (to) cause distraction, but we want you to feel welcome and that you’re entitled to your opinions.”

At that gathering, he said, he will call upon people from every faith present to step forward and say a prayer.

Not much use

Other participants in the move to change the chapel confirmed it was done to make a more flexible worship space, primarily for Christians.

“The major push was from Christians,” said Chandler Williams, a WSU graduate student who attends Central Christian Church. “The Muslims were not as involved in the discussions as the Christians.”

Williams said she volunteered in 2013 to serve on a committee studying how to make the chapel more effective. The group looked up reservations paperwork to see who was using it. The answer: hardly anyone.

Some people got married there, she said. Fraternities used it for initiation rites. WSU’s school of music sometimes used it for classes.

“So then we called together community people and religious leaders, ministers from the whole community,” she said. “We got an overwhelming response about renovating the chapel and removing the pews. They said it would give the floor a more flexible space, for things like Bible studies and even more interfaith discussions.”

Calling it a Muslim takeover of the space is untrue and unfair, she said.

“It hurts to think the Muslims here are constantly framed like that,” she said.

Debate over faith

Campus Ministries rents office space in the Rhatigan Student Center. The campus minister is assigned and primarily paid by the United Methodist Church.

Although the campus minister can advocate for his or her church’s beliefs, the overall ministry is ecumenical and the minister is expected to assist any student who comes in with a spiritual issue.

Eshelman said if he couldn’t handle a situation with a student from another religion, he would connect that student with community resources of the student’s faith tradition. He said he actively welcomed students of all faiths to share the chapel.

That’s sacrilege to Lisa Ritchie, Wichita chapter leader for ACT for America, which describes itself as “a non-profit, non-partisan grassroots organization devoted to promoting national security and defeating terrorism.”

The impetus for the renovation may have started with Christians, she said, but “from what I’m reading, the Muslims are now owning it, too.”

Ritchie researched the original donation of the chapel by the Grace family and acknowledges that the family said it wanted the chapel to be open to all races and all creeds.

But she said that had a different meaning in 1964 than it does now, and it’s significant that a Protestant minister, a Catholic priest and a Jewish rabbi led the dedication, indicating it was intended to be a Judeo-Christian place of worship, a nondenominational church.

“I’m here to stand up for Jesus Christ,” Ritchie said. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable going into a synagogue to pray, or a temple or a mosque. But it’s the way of the world now that we’ve lumped ‘religion’ into ‘interfaith.’ ”

‘False witness’

Eshelman is a proponent and practitioner of interactive Christian worship, in which the message is delivered as a conversation between minister and congregation instead of a sermon from the minister to the congregation.

“The old setup, you walked in and you had fixed pews looking forward,” he said. “It was very much set up in presenter-audience mode. And if you wanted to have a conversation, it was awkward. The people in front couldn’t see the people in back. … It just didn’t work.”

One problem is that students’ schedules are often chaotic, and attendance at services varies.

In the remodeled chapel, “I could set up an altar in the center with a cross and Communion elements and the Bible open or whatever kind of central focus I wanted to have, and I could put 20, 30 chairs around it,” Eshelman said. “And if five people show up, we move a few chairs out, it feels full, and we have this great conversation. If 30 people show up, we’re in great shape.

“Before, if you didn’t have at least 40 to 50 people in there, it felt isolating and empty.”

Eshelman said he also wanted to set the record straight on claims in the national media that a Christian altar and cross were removed from the chapel with the pews.

“There was never a fixed altar; there was never a fixed cross,” he said.

He said the piece identified as an altar, an object kind of like a pyramid with a flat top, was impractical for actual use in a service and sat unused at the back of the building.

“It was not intended as anything but an art piece, I don’t think,” Eshelman said.

“I don’t know that anybody thought of it as an altar, per se. You know, it’s just bizarre how some of this stuff has mushroomed.”

Eshelman said the inter-religious cooperation to get the chapel renovations approved was the high point of his campus ministry. The recent backlash has been the low point.

“Just as a Christian, there has been so much false witness, so much anger,” he said. “And you know, Jesus said a little bit about anger.

“I’m just not experiencing the kind of grace – and not just tolerance, but love for one another – that I did in our conversations on campus as we built a coalition to make this change.”

This story was originally published October 12, 2015 at 8:56 PM with the headline "Campus minister: Muslims not ones who asked for Wichita State chapel renovations."