Associate professor of religion Jackie Wyse-Rhodes will leave Bluffton after the spring 2022 semester.
Wyse-Rhodes has been working at Bluffton since 2015 along with a semester in 2012. She also held the role of interim campus pastor in the 2020-2021 school year.
After leaving Bluffton, Wyse-Rhodes will continue teaching at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana — the same seminary she received her Master’s in Divinity at in 2002.
“I am really excited to be working with students who feel called to be leaders in their communities and their churches,” said Wyse-Rhodes. “Some of them are feeling called to be pastors while others are exploring other vocational opportunities.”
Teaching at Anabaptist Biblical Seminary will allow Wyse-Rhodes to focus on her specialty, the Hebrew Bible.
“I will still be teaching classes about the Bible, but my teaching load will be more specialized,” said Wyse-Rhodes. “All of my classes will be about the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament.”
Although she is excited to teach the seminary students, Wyse-Rhodes said she will miss the uniqueness of students she taught at the undergraduate level.
Leah Bowman in Marbeck Center. Photo by Olivia Daugherty.
“I will miss teaching students from every single major,” said Wyse-Rhodes. “I think that kind of broad perspective makes a very energetic classroom experience, and I will miss that a lot.”
Sophomore social work major Leah Bowman worked with Wyse-Rhodes as a Becoming a Scholar mentor. Bowman had Wyse-Rhodes as a professor for Becoming a Scholar and an honor’s religion course.
“I really appreciated having Jackie as a professor,” said Bowman. “I think her classes provided me and other people a place to be themselves and say things they wanted to or ask questions without feeling stupid.”
Bowman will miss Wyse-Rhodes but is congratulatory in her future at the seminary.
“I wish I would’ve got to interact with her more and take more of her classes,” said Bowman. “But I am excited for her to begin a new step in her life.”
While she is excited to explore the new opportunities teaching at the masters’ level, Wyse-Rhodes said it was a hard choice to decide to leave Bluffton. She says she felt callings from both institutions.
“It is simultaneously so exciting to have this new opportunity and completely heartbreaking to be leaving a community I love,” said Wyse-Rhodes. “If you see me on campus and I am both smiling and there are tears in my eyes, that is going to be my permanent state of being all semester. Feel free to come up and say ‘hi,’ I would love to have some more conversations with students and colleagues before I go.”
