around the green – campus

Service and sports medicine: Young Alumnus Award winner

This year’s Young Alumnus Award winner, Jennifer (Scott) Koontz, Park City, received a bachelor of arts degree with majors in natural sciences and psychology in 1998. Following graduation, Koontz and her husband, Matthew Koontz ’98, served in Mennonite Voluntary Service in Hamilton, Ontario, for two years, where Jennifer was a community development worker with North Hamilton Health Centre and worked on several community health projects.

After MVS, Koontz earned a master’s of public health (MPH) degree at the University of Kansas and her M.D. from the KU School of Medicine. She completed the Via Christi Family Medicine Residency Program in Wichita, including serving as chief resident 2007-08. She was board-certified in family medicine in 2008 and is currently doing a sports medicine fellowship at Via Christi. She will begin practicing family medicine and sports medicine in Newton starting in August.

Koontz’s involvement in service activity has continued well past her MVS days. She founded the JayDoc Free Clinic in Kansas City, Kan. (2003), and the JayDoc Community Clinic in Wichita (2005), student-run clinics for uninsured clients. When Koontz was working on her MPH degree at KU, she was a reading volunteer in a fourth-grade classroom in the Kansas City public schools. Her interest in that age group continues currently – she is a facilitator for “Ready, Set, Fit,” a program of the American Academy of Family Physicians that presents fitness and nutrition ideas to third- and fourth-grade students, this time in the Wichita public schools. Koontz is also currently a co-facilitator for the Clarion Project, a student multi-disciplinary team project to study new models of healthcare reform.

Koontz’s interest in sports medicine stems from her Bethel student days, when she was a member of the varsity volleyball, women’s basketball and track teams, 1994-98, including being team captain for both volleyball and basketball in her senior year, 1997-98. Koontz began gaining sports medicine experience when she was a student athletic trainer for track, volleyball and women’s basketball as a junior at Bethel. Since receiving her medical training, she has had further sports medicine experience at the U.S. Senior Open PGA Championship in Hutchinson in 2006, as well as with Wichita City League high school football, Wichita State University baseball, basketball and volleyball, Newman University basketball and soccer, and professional sports teams Wichita Wranglers and Wichita Wingnuts (minor league baseball) and Wichita Thunder (hockey). In 2007, she did sideline coverage for Thresher football.

Jenni and Matt Koontz are the parents of three young children, Caleb, Abigail and Naomi.

Koontz received the Young Alumnus Award in convocation on March 16.

Melanie Zuercher

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Sound business models: Distinguished Achievement Award winner

Howard Brenneman, this year’s Distinguished Achievement Award winner, graduated summa cum laude from Bethel College in 1963 with a B.A. in finance and business administration. He also has an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from another Bethel College, this one in Mishawaka, Ind.

Now retired in Lenexa, Brenneman served as president and chief executive officer of Mennonite Mutual Aid (MMA) in Goshen, Ind., from 1991-2005. Before graduating from Bethel, Brenneman went to work for Hesston Corporation in Hesston, a farm machinery manufacturer (now called AGCO), working his way up from a position in accounting and finance to president and chief operations officer, 1975-82, and then president and CEO from 1982-86.

After he left Hesston Corp. and before going to MMA, Brenneman started and served as president of American Medicorp, establishing drug and alcohol treatment centers in Wichita, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Amarillo, Texas. He also did business and financial consulting for clients in farm industrial equipment, health care, recreational vehicles and insurance.

Brenneman currently serves on the board of directors of Dutchman Hospitality Group, Inc. Among his numerous other board assignments have been the board of directors for both Hesston College, for which he was chair, and Bethel College (1976-83); the board of directors of First Federal Savings Bank of Newton, including chairing the Executive Committee; the board of directors of Kansas Gas & Electric; the board of directors of Oaklawn Psychiatric Center, Elkhart, Ind., and Goshen Health Systems; and the board of the Sarona Risk Capital Fund for Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA).

Brenneman is married to Sharon (King) Brenneman and they have three sons – Gregory, Rodney and Bradley – and seven grandchildren ranging in age from 21 to five years.

Brenneman and other alumni award winners will be honored at the annual Alumni Banquet Saturday, May 23, at 6 p.m. in Memorial Hall.

Melanie Zuercher

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A lifetime of harmony: Outstanding Alumnus Award winner

The 2009 Outstanding Alumnus Award winner, J. Harold Moyer, grew up at Bethel College as a “campus kid” (his father, John F. Moyer ’15, worked in the business office). He graduated in 1949 with a major in music and a minor in education.

Moyer went from Bethel to George Peabody College in Nashville, Tenn., where he earned a master of music degree with a composition major in 1951. From 1951-55, he taught at Freeman (S.D.) Junior College and Freeman Academy and then went to the University of Iowa, where he completed his Ph.D. with a music composition major.

From 1957-59, Moyer taught at Goshen (Ind.) College. He began teaching at Bethel in 1959, mainly music theory and composition. He continued to compose and arrange as he had time. Among his works during these years were Benjamin Grede (1961), an opera based on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol; The Blowing and the Bending (1975), an opera about Kansas Mennonites’ experiences during World War I, with libretto by James C. Juhnke ’62, Bethel professor emeritus of history; and the musical dramas The Plow and the Sword (1982) and Dirk’s Exodus (1990; also a collaboration with Juhnke).

From 1960-67, Moyer was involved in developing The Mennonite Hymnal (“the red hymnal”), the first joint hymnal venture between the Mennonite Church and the General Conference Mennonite Church (which combined in 2001 and re-formed into Mennonite Church Canada and Mennonite Church USA). Moyer served as vice chair of the Joint Hymnal Committee. Thirteen of the hymns in The Mennonite Hymnal contain an original Moyer tune or harmonization. Ten of the hymns in that hymnal’s successor, Hymnal: A Worship Book (“the blue hymnal”), used today in many Anabaptist congregations in North America, bear Moyer’s name as composer, arranger or tune harmonizer.

Moyer has been involved with the Kansas Mennonite Men’s Choir since 1971, almost since its inception. He has written a number of anthems for the choir, 14 of which have been published by the Mark Foster Music Co., Champaign, Ill.

Moyer retired from teaching in 1992 and received professor emeritus status the same year. He continues to give individual instruction in composition at Bethel. Moyer and Walter Jost ’49, professor emeritus of music who taught at Bethel 1960-92 and retired at the same time as Moyer, in 1992 began as volunteer coordinators of the Life Enrichment series at Bethel, geared to retirees from the community.

Moyer and his wife, Rosemary (Linscheid) Moyer ’52, have two daughters, Janet Regier ’80 and Rachel Harrison ’84, and six grandchildren, including Daniel Regier ’05 and Miriam Regier ’08, with sophomore Peter Regier currently representing the fourth generation at the college.

When Moyer and other alumni award winners are honored at the annual Alumni Banquet Saturday, May 23, at 6 p.m. in Memorial Hall, as part of the banquet program, the Bethel College Concert Choir, under the direction of William Eash, will sing several Moyer compositions or arrangements.

Melanie Zuercher

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Class teaches research methods, explores Wichita’s Black history

Bethel College students have a chance this spring to help give the gift of history to Wichita’s Black community.

Under the supervision of Wichita social scientist Galyn Vesey, an adjunct instructor at Bethel, students will contribute to the Research on Black Wichita project, which Vesey directs, by collecting data through document searches and other research methods. The specific time period in question is 1945-58.

“An underlying theme here is that history is socially interrelated by both people and ideas,” Vesey says. “We feel differently about ourselves when we find out how and why things happen, or why they may not. We take action, or we don’t, based on our knowledge of history.”

The period from 1945-58 was “the segregation era” in Wichita and there is little documentation on Wichita’s Black community at that time, Vesey says. Research on Black Wichita (ROBW) has a goal of bringing to life the areas in the city where most Black businesses and organizations thrived, which will require going through boxes of documents from archives, cemeteries and possibly even the Hutchinson salt mines, where municipal records are stored.

When Vesey took on ROBW, he says, people said to him, “This is massive. Do you know what you’ve gotten yourself into?”

“I can’t speak enough volumes about John Sheriff [Bethel executive vice president for institutional development] and his support for me personally and professionally,” Vesey says. “It was his idea to have a class.”

The course Black Wichita: 1945-1958 is designed as a collaborative-inquiry seminar for undergraduate students and is also aimed at members of the community interested in historical research. Vesey and his assistant, Sarah Price, a graduate student in public history at Wichita State University, have designed the course to be 10 percent lecture, 40 percent discussion and the rest lab – primary materials research for ROBW.

Though it is several years down the road, the tangible product of ROBW is intended to be a book that Bethel College will help publish.

“I hope that the research for this class, and ultimately the book, will renew interest in local Black history as well as pride in the Black community and our accomplishments as a people,” Vesey says. “People who get national recognition all came from a local community and there are people who mentored and nurtured them along the way.

“We can all – not just me – leave something for Wichita that is perhaps more valuable than money: a sense of who we are as a people.”

See the complete story.

Melanie Zuercher

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January term offers multiple options off campus and on

Israel’s military offensive against the Gaza Strip, begun Dec. 27, 2008, put into some doubt whether the Jerusalem Seminar would leave as scheduled a little over a week later.

After a lot of discussion, co-leaders Patty Shelly ’76, Bethel professor of Bible and religion, and Doug Miller, Tabor College professor of biblical and religious studies, decided to proceed. As in 2007, the three-week Jerusalem Seminar was a joint venture between the two colleges. The 27 participants included, in addition to Shelly and Miller, 10 Bethel students, four Tabor students, two additional Tabor faculty members and nine other non-student participants.

With the military action fairly tightly confined to the Gaza Strip, the Jerusalem Seminar group was able to go ahead with their planned itinerary, including many sites traditionally associated with Jesus’ life and ministry such as Bethlehem, the Sea of Galilee region and Jerusalem, along with other sites of historical and archaeological significance such as the Dead Sea, the Herodian fortress of Masada and the Nabatean and Roman ruins at Petra in Jordan.

“While we became familiar with the ancient history of the region and the context of the biblical stories, we also learned a great deal about the modern conflict and the struggles of Israelis and Palestinians to achieve justice and peace,” said Meredith Lehman, senior from Bluffton, Ohio. “We heard from many Palestinians who face daily the injustice and oppression of the ongoing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Even as we took advantage of our American passports and tourist status to travel through extensive checkpoints at will, we began to understand the destructive power of a wall [separating Bethlehem from Jerusalem] designed to segment Palestinian land and cut off the resources and mobility of an occupied people.

“We heard from a variety of groups and individuals whose work for peace offered some sense of hope,” she added. “We spent a night at Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salaam, an intentional community of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims and Christians living together. We learned about the work of organizations like Zochrot, a group committed to helping Israelis remember and understand the scope and tragedy of Palestinian displacement, and Combatants for Peace, made up of former Israeli and Palestinian soldiers who now seek to build bonds and bring about peaceful solutions to the conflict.”

Amanda Rempel ‘70, a Newton resident who participated in the Jerusalem Seminar with her husband, Clarence, said during a Feb. 9 convocation on the experience, “We never saw fighting. We never heard a gunshot. But Gaza was with us throughout the three weeks.”

Two other interterm classes took place off campus: Spanish Language and Culture, whose six class members joined a seventh student who had spent the previous semester studying abroad in Spain, for two weeks in the country, and German Language and Culture, with 14 Bethel students and one Baker University student spending three weeks touring Germany.

Favorites in Spain included the Prado, the Reina-Sofia and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museums of Art along with other sites in Madrid, and day trips to El Escorial, Segovia and Toledo. German students enjoyed good food and magnificent cathedrals, and found much to ponder from a visit to the site of the former Buchenwald concentration camp.

Meanwhile, a number of students who chose to stay on campus for interterm took one of three classes offered for the first time: The Graphic Novel, with Ami Regier ’85, professor of English; The Effects of a Vegetarian Diet, with Jon Piper, professor of biology; or Alternative Energy Choices, with Gary Histand, professor of chemistry, and with the lab assistance of Richard Zerger ‘69, professor of chemistry.

For more complete information on these classes, including first-person student accounts from off-campus January classes, see the News section.

Melanie Zuercher

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Student venture encourages community through coffee

With a bit of fair trade coffee, tea, chocolate and toppings, two Bethel College freshmen, though undecided in their respective majors, are learning business as fledgling entrepreneurs.

Seth Dunn and Lisa Penner, both from Fresno, Calif., recently opened a makeshift coffee shop in the lounge of Haury Hall, hoping to help increase the sense of student community.

“We would like it if there was a place that we could go … to hang out, talk or do whatever with a community atmosphere,” says Dunn. He hopes the draw of the coffee shop will be enough to bring people out of their rooms and into fellowship with one another.

“We’ve noticed that people tend to do their homework in their dorm rooms and to hang out there,” says Penner. “We wanted to create a place where a bunch of different people could hang out.”

Dunn got the idea to start a small, grassroots coffee shop during his visit to another college campus, where a student received a loan from the school for a coffee shop, started with a single pot and now has a full-fledged business with espresso machines and the works.

So far, Dunn and Penner have invested their own money for supplies. Though the still-unnamed coffee shop has yet to be profitable in its early stages, response from the student population has been encouraging.

“[Students have responded positively] both to what we are trying to do with the coffee shop and to build community,” says Dunn.

Eventually, Dunn and Penner would like to see the college take over the endeavor to provide a concrete community area and an opportunity for further student employment.

“Ultimately, we would turn it more into a coffee shop feeling,” Penner says, “eventually with more drinks, blended drinks and smoothies.”

Dunn says, “If everything were to go [according to our] plans, hopes and dreams, we’d have tables, music, student artwork on the wall – we’d like to make [the coffee shop] a name on campus.”

Dunn and Penner chose to use fair trade products in order to involve Newton’s Ten Thousand Villages store in the effort and to provide additional appeal to the conscientious student.

While still novices in the business of coffee shops, both Dunn and Penner are experienced entrepreneurs.

“My brother and I used to go to our neighbors and sell cookies and lemonade,” says Penner. “We would carry everything in our wagon.”

Dunn went a less conventional route. “When I was young, I bought a big bag of candy at Costco and sold it for $1 a piece,” he says.

“I pretended to be in a club.”

Mayeken Kehr

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A long musical road

A musical collaboration more than a decade old winds to a close with this school year.

Brett Jackson and Joel Linscheid, who graduate in May, are both Bethel music majors, completing their education licensure. Both are saxophone players. Both are student teaching this semester and applying to graduate schools for fall. They’re the same age and grew up in North Newton attending school and Bethel College Mennonite Church (BCMC) together.

The two began playing together as sixth-graders for a BCMC youth fundraiser. They took summer jazz classes through middle school, played in Jazz I at Newton High School and have been in Bethel’s Jazz Ensemble I for five years.

Linscheid and Jackson are also members, along with fellow BCMC attender Benjamin Harder, junior from Hesston (trombone), Bradley McKellip, junior from Newton (guitar and bass), Nathaniel Yoder, junior from Kalona, Iowa (percussion), and Ben Stucky, sophomore from Moon Township, Pa. (piano), of the Bethel College Jazz Combo. Jazz Combo was the second consecutive Bethel jazz group to audition successfully for the Kansas Music Educators Association annual meeting and in-service workshop in Wichita.

Timothy Shade, assistant professor of music at Bethel, joined Jazz Combo as a guest artist on trombone when they played for KMEA Feb. 28. James Pisano, associate professor of music, directs the group.

“I wouldn’t have gotten as much done or been as motivated to practice [over the years] without Brett,” Linscheid says. “Having another saxophonist at the same level [helped push me],” as did, he says, playing for most or all of those years with his brother, Aaron ’08, a trumpeter now in graduate school in Kansas City, and trombonist Andrew Toews, who is the same age as Linscheid and Jackson, is a Bethel music major and who also grew up in North Newton, Newton High School and Bethel College Mennonite Church. “That was a group of motivational musicians,” Linscheid says.

Despite the fact that, as Linscheid says, “Brett and I have had pretty much the same experience and atmosphere as far as education and playing,” both agree that “if you listen, you can tell the difference” between them.

Pisano (who plays both jazz and classical clarinet and saxophone), says Jackson is following a more traditional route and Linscheid more contemporary, though the two note that there is a lot of musical nuance to those terms.

Jazz Combo has “more emphasis on soloing and more space to improvise,” Jackson says. “We get to write and arrange our own music – it’s easier to do for four than 12” as in the larger Jazz Ensemble I. Of the five pieces on Jazz Combo’s KMEA program, Linscheid arranged two and wrote one and Jackson arranged one.

Along with all the other parallels in their lives, this KMEA appearance also marked the sixth for both Jackson and Linscheid.

Melanie Zuercher

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Caring – and sharing – kisses

Bethel students could give their friends and loved ones a visible sign of affection, and help feed the hungry in Harvey County, by participating in “Send a Kiss – Feed a Mouth” right before Valentine’s Day. Members of the Student Activities Committee (SAC) set up a table in the cafeteria at lunch and dinner for two days – adding a third dinnertime later due to popular demand – where, at 25 cents apiece or five for $1, students could write messages on lip-shaped cards with Hershey’s Kisses attached.

SAC members delivered the kisses on campus Feb. 13, and all proceeds went to the Harvey County Food Bank. SAC staff sponsor Amber Chalashtari said the total came to 242 kisses and $61.25 for the food bank. She said she can’t remember which committee member came up with the idea. “We wanted to do something on campus that was fun for Valentine’s Day,” she said, “and also something that would help others.”

Pictured at top of page: Abby Miller, left, senior from Elkhart, Ind., and Katie Robertson, senior from Lawrence, write messages on “Caring Kisses” sold by SAC member Max Wedel, senior from Tucson, Ariz.

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