Earlier this week, Hunter Baker was the Evangel messenger to announce that Ken Starr will become the next president at Baylor University. Permit me to announce that Philip Graham Ryken will become the eighth president at Wheaton College. The Chairman of the Board of Trustees wrote: “The unanimous vote reflects our deep confidence in Dr. Ryken’s ability to articulate and exemplify the College’s mission, and our conviction that he will provide strong academic and Christ-centered leadership for this new chapter in the life of Wheaton College, as well as in the academy at large.”
I share this “deep confidence.” Dr. Ryken continues the pastor-scholar model of leadership, which promises to guide the College in matters of the heart and the head. As the senior minister at the historic Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia and council member of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Dr. Ryken will uphold evangelical heritage of the College. As a worldwide speaker and teacher, he will preach what philosopher Carl Raschke calls “the joyful inevitability of the coming GloboChrist.”
When I reflected on the eve of the next presidency, I claimed that what matters for the future of Evangelicalism matters for the future of the College: what are we doing to hasten the eschaton? Dr. Ryken has the intellectual and spiritual fitness to equip the heirs of Jonathan Blanchard in this vital task.
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