Dear Wheaton College Faculty and Staff,
Welcome to a new school year! And welcome to this year’s preview letter. As usual, I have important perspectives to share about the kingdom work of Wheaton College, in a format that attempts to strike a balance between brevity and comprehensiveness.
My summer highlights included visits to three university campuses with a rich legacy of Christian education: Uganda Christian (Mukono, Uganda), Daystar (Athi River, Kenya), and Princeton (New Jersey).
At Daystar and Uganda Christian, I met with school leaders, mentored students, spoke on the integration of faith and learning, proclaimed the gospel, and came away greatly encouraged by the evident success of our sister schools in educating a rising generation that makes a difference in the world for Jesus Christ.
At Princeton, I was inspired by the words of Archibald Alexander, the founding professor of the seminary there and later the president of Virginia’s Hampden-Sydney College. Alexander described Old Princeton as a “nursery for missionaries”—a place of “vital piety” and “robust theology.”
Wheaton, too, has an international legacy of evangelical orthodoxy, spiritual vitality, and kingdom mission. Many of the people I met testified to Wheaton’s treasured place in Christian higher education. My summer travels thus reminded me that we are part of something much bigger and more important than any of us: Christ-centered higher education that advances the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ around the world.
Each year, I use this letter to describe briefly the immense challenges that we face in fulfilling our mission, as well as the measures we are taking to meet those challenges. I simply note this year what some observers are saying, namely that higher education is in a polycrisis. And now the regulatory landscape surrounding higher education has changed again, in ways that require constant vigilance and active engagement as we maintain our sacred, not secular, uniquely evangelical approach to unity and diversity in the kingdom of God. To give just one example, due to changes in government policy, international students are finding it harder than ever to secure the visas they need to come to campus. Although nearly all our new undergraduates have arrived safely, some of our graduate students are still hoping and praying for permission to come to Wheaton. Staff members invested long hours this summer trying to help.
We are resolute in our commitment to meet all challenges and remain steadfast in our desire to honor Jesus Christ in everything we do. Thankfully, our new undergraduates promise to be all we could hope for in their spiritual commitments, intellectual capacity, musical ability, athletic talent, and global diversity. This year, we are receiving (once again) new students from 50 different countries, with nearly a 50/50 split between men and women. It was a joy for me to be with these new students on campus, at HoneyRock, and in Chicago during Passage Orientation. And it will be a joy for you to welcome them to the classroom and everywhere else on campus.
I urge each of you to join us—in person—for the annual renewal of our Community Covenant during Chapel Worship on the morning of Friday, August 29. Lord willing, a year from now, we will have an updated Community Covenant to use—one that is more specifically suited to public renewal. As you may have heard, the Trustees and the Senior Administrative Cabinet traveled to South Dakota in June for a retreat at our Black Hills Field Station. In addition to doing field science with our students and sharing a powwow (wacipi) with our Lakota neighbors, we also spent time discussing the Community Covenant; we hope to present a refreshed version by Spring Semester.
This year’s Core book—When Breath Becomes Air—addresses a key topic for our students and for all of us: how to live in the face of death. Hopefully, my chapel series, which is entitled “Come, Holy Spirit,” will help remind us that the education we offer is not only Christ-centered, but also Spirit-empowered. Also new this year: the Chaplain’s Office is recruiting ambassadors in departments across campus to better integrate Life with God Together into the daily spiritual rhythms of campus staff and faculty.
Looking beyond campus, we will communicate what is happening at Wheaton to our many constituencies as persuasively as possible. One of our newest communication vehicles is Wheaton Wavelength, a quarterly digital newsletter that celebrates what God is doing on our campus and highlights themes that alumni say are especially important to them: theological orthodoxy, evangelical integrity, and the value of their Wheaton College degree. Another new line of communication involves the repackaging of the “Cabinet Conversations” we have three times a year with our key donors as podcasts for a broader audience. This promises to be an especially effective way for us to answer people’s questions about the College. We also plan to send all our alumni a dynamic annual report at the end of this calendar year.
This preview letter is an ideal place for me to say how grateful we are for last year’s financial results, which are better than planned. We enter the new fiscal year (FY26) with a balanced budget, which has required very hard work over the past several years. We praise God for the continued generosity of the Wheaton community, including record giving: this year, we received more than $47 million in new gifts (not giving commitments, which we also prize, but actual gifts) to the endowment, the Wheaton Fund, and other purposes. Please re-read the previous sentence and offer it as your own prayer of thanksgiving.
Our remarkable progress with the Faithfully Forward capital campaign has led the Trustees to increase our overall target from $225 million to $275 million. Even with as much progress as we have made so far, there remains an urgent need for us to pray for our advancement team as they seek additional gifts for scholarships, for the library renovations, for expanded athletics facilities, and for other campaign projects.
Very soon, we will have much more to share about our new strategic plan, Wheaton for the World. Last spring, we shared our four main, trustee-approved priorities: Mission Integrity, Academic Vitality, Workplace Engagement, and Financial Sustainability. We also provided updates from the campus-wide working groups that drafted goals to advance these strategic priorities. Members of the staff, faculty, and administration remained active this summer in preparing 20 specific initiatives to help us meet our goals. These initiatives address everything from how all of us articulate and communicate Wheaton’s mission, to supporting innovation in our academic programs, to more effectively recruiting full and diverse classes of freshmen and transfers, to offering new learning development opportunities for employees, to growing alumni participation in annual giving, to addressing deferred maintenance.
To learn more, please attend our presentation-only Town Hall from 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, September 3 in Barrows Auditorium and then our question-and-answer session on Thursday, September 11 in Coray Alumni Gymnasium, also from 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. In between those two campus-wide meetings, we will send you four short videos to introduce the main goals for each part of the strategic plan.
I close this letter the same way I began, by welcoming you to a new school year. When I traveled to East Africa this summer, I was blessed repeatedly with this phrase: “you are most welcome” (or karibu, in Swahili). Wheaton friends and colleagues, you too are most welcome—most welcome to share this year in the eternally significant work of Christ-centered, Spirit-empowered liberal arts education.
In Christ’s service,
Philip Ryken
President