It was the late spring of 1986. On a balmy Sunday evening I forced myself into Princeton Theological Seminary's Speer Library. Academic deadlines were looming, and as a second year theology student, it was time to get some work done. That week a friend had recommended that I read a book by Wesleyan church historian Donald W. Dayton, but a truckload of other obligations pressed down on me. In a moment of intellectual self-indulgence, I rationalized that I would browse through Dayton's book for just a minute. I located "Discovering An Evangelical Heritage" and "discovered" that the picture on the cover was of Asa Mahan, first president of Adrian College. I began to read and was hooked for good. Four hours later, after being evicted from the library at closing time, I finished Dayton's story in the quiet of my room. The other assignments would have to wait.

What was it about this book that spoke to my passion? It was this: Dayton told the dynamic story of nineteenth century church leaders who were involved in both spiritual revival and the movement to protect human rights, and many of these characters had lived and taught at Adrian College. My journey through Princeton led back to Adrian.

It starts with Asa Mahan (1799-1889). Born in Vernon, N.Y., Mahan was raised in the strict milieu of Reformed Protestantism. Inner turmoil and intellectual curiosity moved him to break from tradition and articulate a strong belief in human free will. People were not insignificant cogs in God's cosmic machinery. They were utterly unique and free agents of love and justice. While a pastor in Cincinnati, Mahan served on the board of trustees of Lane Theological Seminary, and when students of this institution began to organize against slavery, he supported them over the protestations of the administration.  Many of these students accompanied Mahan to Oberlin, Ohio, in 1835 where he accepted the job as president and professor of moral philosophy at the Oberlin Collegiate Institute (now Oberlin College). For15 years Asa Mahan was the driving force in making the name "Oberlin" synonymous with free will Christian doctrine and the defense of human rights. By the time the veteran college president founded Adrian College in 1859, he was already a legendary pastor, educator, social reformer, and philosopher.

At Adrian, Mahan implemented many of the same educational innovations developed at Oberlin. He affirmed the coeducation of women and men, the equal access of all people, and the intrinsic dignity of each and every student. He taught moral philosophy (ethics) and wrote a few more books. Students of Adrian College loved their president and referred to him with affection as the "Old Doctor." This is not to say that Mahan's intellectual intensity never met with good-natured critique. His infamously illegible handwriting led many students to comment that, "Greek text was easy beside his script."  In February of 1871 an Adrian College student literary society published a parody of Mahan's intellectual philosophy course. The piece tells of the Old Doctor gazing upon the "open countenances of his pupils, who, by the way, are generally possessed of very open countenances."  Adrian College students, it seems, have always posed a sharp-witted challenge to authority.

Years following Mahan's death, D. S. Stephens (himself president of Adrian College from 1882-1888) remembered the Old Doctor as a person who combined the seemingly irreconcilable. Mahan was one who embraced both the "rationalistic" and the "mystical,"  the intellectual and the deeply spiritual. After all, while living in Adrian, Asa Mahan published his 1867 work "The Science of Natural Theology," a detailed and erudite study of philosophical theology. Three years later he released a series of lectures on spiritual experience that had been a staple for Adrian College students, "The Baptism of the Holy Ghost." Today we remember with reverence Mahan's fight against slavery and his commitment to human rights. He also possessed an exuberant faith that was deeply grounded in intimate communion with God.

Soon after the turn of the twentieth century, a new voice, every bit as unique as Mahan's, arrived on campus. Lee Anna Starr (1853-1937) was one of the first women pastors of the Methodist Protestant Church. She was born in Point Pleasant, W. Va., and educated at the University of Chicago, Augustana Theological Seminary, and Northwestern University. Starr was ordained in 1895 and served a number of congregations in Illinois before coming to Adrian's Plymouth Church. Plymouth was known as the "College Church," and Starr integrated the role of community pastor and teacher of students. For a time she even lived on campus in South Hall. So beloved was Starr that upon her leaving Plymouth Church in 1909, Adrian College President B.W. Anthony led the local congregation in drafting a formal resolution of blessing. The pastor was commended for faithful work and assured that she would always possess the "loving esteem of the Methodist Protestants of Adrian."

Starr was also a noted speaker in the Temperance Movement. Some years later, church historian and pastor Lyman Davis (whose family name graces Davis Hall) recalled that Lee Anna Starr appeared on the lecture platform in almost every state in the union.

Perhaps most of all, Starr was revered for her deliberate and painstaking scholarship.  Her 1900 piece, "The Ministry of Women," confronted the exclusion of women from ordained ministry. In 1926 she offered a lengthy study of the Hebrew and Greek scriptures and their teaching regarding gender issues. "The Bible Status of Woman" received wide acclaim and was published well into the 1950s.

Starr acknowledged that many interpret the Bible as prohibiting the ordination of women, and she knew very well that some feminists dismissed scripture as no friend to equal rights. Yet, Lee Anna Starr chose a third perspective. As an evangelical Christian, her commitment to biblical authority was unshakable. As a woman called of God, she insisted that gifts for ministry are not bestowed according to some gender-related criteria.  True, the scriptures had been interpreted for almost two thousand years by a male- dominated church, but this does not preclude a corrective reading.  Starr argued that the dynamism of the Bible had been held captive by our patriarchal culture. Only when the text is set free to speak as God desires (not as dominant powers desire) will we hear the Good News. At one point she offered an especially pithy challenge: "Not the Bible, but religious hierarchs, have effected the subordination of woman." Following her death in 1937, Lee Anna Starr was celebrated as a "clear, logical and forceful" speaker and a "champion of woman's suffrage."

It is intriguing to consider that Starr was ordained in the Methodist Protestant Church and not the larger, better known Methodist Episcopal Church. The Methodist Protestants were a modest Christian body often associated with conservative theological views and a "blue-collar" social identity. While the urbane principalities and powers of the Methodist Episcopal Church could not come to terms with the ordination of women, the unpretentious Methodist Protestants, the denomination affiliated with Adrian College, led the way. 

Mahan and Starr combined proclivities and strengths often missing in today's conversations about and practices of faith. On the one hand, they both remained unreservedly grounded in the spiritual revival and biblical commitment of their tradition.  On the other hand, both stood for a radical egalitarianism and welcome of all people. There was no mutual exclusivity between the life of worship, prayer, and study and the life of God's love and justice. These things belonged together. In the 1970s, this historic uniting of personal faith and social conscience was "discovered" by Donald W. Dayton.  But it has been a living part of our story all along. When Adrian College listens to this heritage, it listens not only to the past but also to a prospective future.