Just before Thanksgiving, President Rebecca Stoltzfus announced that Goshen College has been chosen to receive a grant for just under $5 million from Lilly Endowment Inc., an organization based in Indianapolis. In a campus-wide announcement, President Stoltzfus said, “More than 1,100 organizations from across the country applied, and only 48 were selected. We are deeply honored to be among them!”
According to Lilly’s grant list, the program, entitled “National Storytelling Initiative on Christian Faith and Life,” aims to “seek out and share stories that illuminate the vitality of Christian faith and life.”GC will be putting the funding toward five major projects, all conceived of and led by faculty. These projects will be unfolding over the next five years, which is the period over which the grant is effective. “More Than Just Stories” is the name of the program as a whole.
Duane Stoltzfus, professor of communication, was the lead grant writer. He said, “In a way they were directive, but in another way it was like, ‘Wow, wide open possibilities.’ What would you do if you had up to $5 million to tell stories that are going to convey the hope, the vitality, the relevance of Christian faith and life at this moment in time? That was our invitation, that was our challenge.”
The first of these projects will be directed by Stoltzfus himself. It is a podcast, titled “The Gratitude Letters.” The format of the show will center around two guests, one of whom has written a letter of thanks to the other, who they feel embodies or has shown Christian values. It will be hosted by Jen Shenk.
Stoltzfus said, “It’s a chance to read the letter, but also have conversations.” One episode of The Gratitude Letters has already been recorded. Stoltzfus explained that the guest was “James Gunden, who is a Goshen College grad and board chair of [AMBS], retired business executive.” He went on to say how “Jim wrote a letter of thanks to his kindergarten teacher, Kathryn Aschliman, who is 94 years old, still has an office in the library basement and is very active on campus and at college events. So we brought them together in the huddle room, recorded their conversation.”
The conversation lasted for more than an hour. The episode has been edited down into three different versions: a 15-minute version, an eight-minute version and a four-minute version.
A second podcast is another of the projects. Robert Brenneman, professor of criminal justice and sociology, said, “The name of the podcast is ‘Just Stories: a podcast about the places where justice and faith intersect, and sometimes collide.’ That’s the tagline.”
He proposed the initial plan for the podcast. and Stoltzfus said, “Rob Brenneman came in with the idea for [“Just Stories”] almost immediately.”
Brenneman explained that he has had the idea for the podcast since 2020, before his time at GC began, when he brought in guests such as a state legislator and a police chief to speak in his class. He said, “The idea stayed at the back of my mind of doing podcast-type shows that are focused around a guest with professional experience in the world of criminal justice.”
Brenneman will co-host the show with Regina Shands Stoltzfus, with Brenneman doing roughly 75% of the hosting and Shands Stoltzfus doing the other 25%. They have already recorded three episodes, though they will still require some editing. The plan is to aim for two or three episodes per month over the course of the grant’s five-year period, beginning in April or May of next year.
Brenneman said that questions he needs to think about include, “Who do I invite? What’s my angle? How do I convince them to give us their time?” He explained that it would be a fairly time-intensive process, and that he would likely have a student research assistant, from his department, as well as a logistics assistant and most likely an editing assistant, both from the communication department.
A third project is “Peace Talks,” an annual oratorical competition being led by Anna Groff, associate professor of communication. The competition will, at first, follow the format of the C. Henry Smith Peace Oratorical Contest. Typically, the winner of that competition sends a video and a script to be entered into a binational competition of other Mennonite schools in the U.S. and Canada.
According to Groff, the first year of “Peace Talks” will serve to bring that competition to GC so that it can be done in person. The second year will expand to include other faith-based schools in Indiana; the third year will include all colleges in Indiana; the fourth and likely fifth years will expand to all institutions nationally.
Compared to other projects funded by the grant, Groff said, “I am excited about Peace Talks because it is something that happens in person.” She said that there was something exciting about it being “in the moment, in the flesh. People are in Umble Center watching this thing live.”
Groff also said, “They could go rogue, they could pass out. Anything could happen, you know what I mean? It’s there. And there’s just something really thrilling and special about that.”
Kyle Hufford, professor of communication, will be directing a documentary as another one of the five projects. The working title is “Beyond Sunday Service,” which he said will center around probably four people, and “follow them for the better part of a couple years.” The timeline is likely three years of filming, followed by a year of editing and a year of marketing.
Hufford said, “We’ve done something similar, just not to the scale that this will be and not of the budget that this will be.” The documentary team will not be following them steadily, but rather will drop in at various times over the course of those years.
The people featured will be from a variety of backgrounds, according to Hufford. He said they want to “feature someone in the Catholic faith, we want to feature evangelicals, we want to feature people in the Anabaptist faith, we want to try to get the spectrum. And so it’s going to require us to kind of reach out, you know, beyond maybe some of our comfort zones, but it will be really interesting.”
The final project is a conference around Christianity and the environment, which will be titled “Risk, Resilience and Love in the Time of Climate Change” and is organized by Luke Beck Kreider, associate professor of religion and sustainability. The conference will likely take place during the 2027-28 academic year.
Beck Kreider said, “We’re going to host a conference here at Goshen to invite people from around the nation to share stories about how they’re addressing climate change in their community.” This will include congregational leaders, leaders of large non-profits, local community leaders and scholars. The idea is to take several standout stories from the conference and produce documentary films about them.
Beck Kreider added, “One of the themes, at least as I’m setting it out from the beginning, is thinking about these climate change stories in reference to the idea of loving your neighbor.” He highlighted a story from the Bible. He said, “And [Jesus] is asked, you know, ‘Who is my neighbor?’ And Jesus responds to that, not with an answer, but by telling a story.”
He also said, “The demands of love, the challenges of love, what it means to love your neighbor changes with – in this case – the climate.”
With regard to the program as a whole, Stoltzfus said, “We envision Goshen College students, recent graduates in particular, in being deeply involved in these different projects.”
