The Women of Bethel as a Cloud of Witnesses

Your turn to share stories

March has given way to April, and we have no more new devotional reflections to share with you this year. But let me close by expressing my gratitude and extending an invitation.

First, the gratitude. I need to say thank you to several people:

• All our fantastic contributors! It’s been an honor to share your stories and a joy to learn from your insights.

• Our loyal readers! We ended up with a total of over 15,000 views this month.

• Ellie Heebsh, a model Bethel student, and Sam Mulberry, a model Bethel alum and professor, who have done so much to help me research the women’s history of our university over the past year.

• Barb Martin, who organized the original women’s devotionals and inspired their revival.

• Macey Heath and her colleagues in Bethel’s Marketing office, who helped spread the word about the project.

• The Bethel women in my own life who have helped to shape and sustain my own faith and calling, a long list that includes faculty colleagues like Sara Shady, Amy Poppinga, AnneMarie Kooistra, Kathy Nevins, Marion Larson, and the late Stacey Hunter Hecht.

Thanks again to all of our contributors (seventeen of them pictured above), without whom this project would have been impossible!

I got to know several of the women thanked above as fellow members of the teaching team for Christianity and Western Culture, a first-year course that’s been part of the CAS general education curriculum for over four decades now. We always start every semester of CWC with the same verse selected by the course founders:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.

Hebrews 12:1-2

As we tell the complicated story of Christianity, we start to add more women and men to the biblical cloud — and students start to recognize all the other people who have inspired, taught, challenged, and loved them along their journey towards Jesus.

That’s what all the women I named above have done for me. Whether it’s Stacey speaking to me out of my remembered past or any of the others bearing witness by word or deed in our shared present, those women of Bethel continue to fix my eyes on Jesus, helping me to throw off whatever hinders me — my ignorance or my impatience, my self-doubt or my selfishness — as I run my race.

So now, the invitation. Before we wrap up this project, let me invite all of you to tell all of us about a woman of Bethel who’s part of your cloud of witnesses. Please feel free to use the comments section below to tell a story about a woman from the Bethel community — past or present — whose witness encourages you.

Grace and peace to you all,

Chris Gehrz, Professor of History