Pres­i­dent Chenoweth Leav­ing Bethel, Re­turn­ing to Alma Mater

MISHAWAKA—On Jan. 14, it was of­fi­cially an­nounced that Pres­i­dent Gregg Chenoweth will be leav­ing Bethel to take up a new po­si­tion as pres­i­dent of his alma mater, Olivet Nazarene Uni­ver­sity, ef­fec­tive June 1.  

When Chenoweth first came to Bethel eight years ago, he and his fam­ily had nearly no con­nec­tions to the Michi­ana area. 

“Our only con­nec­tion to the area is my wife grad­u­ated from Penn High School,” Chenoweth said. “She spent re­ally just her high school years liv­ing here... but we knew noth­ing about Bethel.” 

Chenoweth found about the pres­i­den­tial op­por­tu­nity at Bethel when he was con­tacted by an ex­ec­u­tive search firm that had been hired by Bethel to find can­di­dates that matched com­mu­nity and pro­fes­sional needs. 

“My pro­fes­sional tra­jec­tory, the work ex­pe­ri­ence I had, made me a can­di­date for this kind of as­sign­ment,” Chenoweth said. “But it was also re­ally a spir­i­tual quest to keep ask­ing God, ‘Where is my time and en­ergy and the tal­ent you gave me best used?’” 

While Bethel was con­sid­er­ing its can­di­dates, Chenoweth was si­mul­ta­ne­ously be­ing con­sid­ered for a pres­i­den­tial po­si­tion at a dif­fer­ent in­sti­tu­tion. This led to feel­ings of con­fu­sion for Chenoweth and his wife, who be­gan to pray God would bring clar­ity to them the same way He had in pre­vi­ous sit­u­a­tions: by bring­ing about change in a “whirl­wind.” 

“Sure enough,” Chenoweth said, “within two or three days... the other in­sti­tu­tion called me and said, ‘We’ve de­cided to ex­tend our process, we’re go­ing to add sev­eral months to it and a few more lay­ers of in­ter­views.’ Bethel called the same day or the day af­ter and they said, ‘We’re so sure that you’re the right per­son for us that we’re go­ing to ab­bre­vi­ate the process.’” 

Bethel has made progress and gained sta­bi­liza­tion in sev­eral ar­eas dur­ing Chenoweth’s time here, many of which are de­tailed in the of­fi­cial news re­lease; but for Chenoweth, his fa­vorite take­aways are more in­tan­gi­ble. 

“The biggest thrill I have is see­ing stu­dents get an en­counter with God,” Chenoweth said. “I have eight years' worth of pho­tographs that I’ve kept, I don’t delete them, when I see mo­ments of, for ex­am­ple, stu­dents kneel­ing in prayer be­fore the al­ter, fam­i­lies who are send­ing off their daugh­ter or son and they’re hug­ging them and pray­ing for them, things like that.” 

Chenoweth said he has loved his time at Bethel and was never at any point look­ing for an­other job, but he was of­fi­cially con­tacted by Olivet in Oc­to­ber 2020, and by De­cem­ber, they let him know they wanted to hire him.  

Chenoweth chose to ac­cept the of­fer for three rea­sons. First, he felt the sen­ti­men­tal tugs of re­turn­ing to his alma mater. Sec­ond, many of the ma­jor ini­tia­tives Bethel has com­mit­ted to com­plete over a five-year pe­riod are al­ready be­gun or done, so Chenoweth feels like this is a sta­ble time for Bethel to ex­pe­ri­ence an ad­min­is­tra­tive change. And third, sev­eral of the spir­i­tual cri­te­ria used by him and his wife for mak­ing de­ci­sions in­di­cated there was “lat­i­tude” for this re­sponse. 

Chenoweth will miss the joy­ful, en­cour­ag­ing re­la­tion­ships he has ex­pe­ri­enced in the Bethel com­mu­nity, but he is ex­cited for the new op­por­tu­ni­ties await­ing him in Illi­nois. 

“All the things that are im­por­tant to [Bethel stu­dents] are im­por­tant to the peo­ple that re­main here,” Chenoweth said, “and there’s every rea­son to ex­pect a won­der­ful fu­ture.”