2006 COMMENCEMENT posted 4/30/06

Baccalaureate service - Charge to the Graduates
Rev. Chris Momany, Adrian College chaplain

April 30, 2006

The spring of 1859 was a busy time for Adrian College founder, Rev. Asa Mahan. In March of that year he helped charter a new College on these grounds. But Mahan was a veteran in higher education and had earlier served as the first president of the Oberlin Collegiate Institute.

Throughout 1859 a moral conflict raged in Mahan’s old Ohio homeland. A year earlier a courageous individual named John Price had escaped slavery and journeyed north. He sought refuge in Oberlin, Ohio, and was aided by the community. But the advocates for Price were arrested and lodged in the Cleveland jail. This jail then became a rallying place for the abolitionist movement. The Oberlin prisoners published a paper from their confinement entitled “The Rescuer,” and in May of 1859 a mass meeting was held that featured several noted speakers. One of the speakers was that trusted friend of justice, Asa Mahan.

According to an eyewitness: “President Asa Mahan being called to the stand, rejoiced to know that some of the prisoners, whom he had instructed in years past and taught them principles of liberty, were still true to their duty. He felt that he had not lived in vain.”

Then with an audacious invocation of God’s desired justice, Mahan promised to bring the movement back to Adrian. He quoted Revelation 19:6: “When the news goes to Michigan of what you have done here today, a voice will go up like the sound of many waters, that ‘the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth.’”

Class of 2006, I am haunted by these words of Mahan, and I hope that you will be haunted by them, too. Our founder faced the future with confidence, despite the presence of forces as obscene as slavery. We today may even have some catching up to do if you are going to equal the insight expressed by Asa Mahan almost 150 years ago. The world is not yet that place where God’s justice and peace reign, and your college degree is not a license to benefit from the current inequities of society.

We are counting on you to help make things better for all people. God be with you as you seek not to compete, control, or consume, but to contribute to a more just world.