Opinion: There are simply so many better things to do with your time than yell at a crowd of people calling them sinners. We should ignore them and go do cooler stuff.
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If you’ve been on campus for longer than a term, the Wellspring Bible Fellowship has probably ruined your day before. You’d recognize them by their disturbing and poorly designed signs, hoarse shouting voices and pallid balding heads.
This Baptist church is based in Roseburg, using the tagline “Worship is warfare,” on their Facebook account. They’re more than an hour’s drive from the university, yet they still find ways to close the gap to really connect with people and confirm that no one likes them.
WBF has been known to frequent the EMU Amphitheater area, though they haven’t been allowed inside. This is strange considering the acceptance rate for UO is a high 93%, though maybe higher education isn’t on their agenda.
What is on the to-do list for their semi-monthly campus visits is to shout threatening warnings to the student body about how our ways are leading us to damnation, or so I loosely gathered. That certain students’ identities, love and happiness are wrong and that they are immoral. According to WBF, women who’ve had an abortion — making perhaps a very difficult decision or have been subjected to worse — are evil and comparable to the acts of the Holocaust.
And thus, they grace campus occasionally, rain or rare shine, to aggress, aggravate, antagonize and alienate the students of a university they live nowhere close to.
Do they really have nothing better going on?
Have they never thought of, say, going bowling instead? Bowling is pretty fun. Maybe picking up any other book than the one they scream at us. There are some other pretty good ones. Start with “Frog and Toad” then work your way up. At this point, I believe taking a nap would be more productive to their day than whatever it is they think they’re accomplishing on campus. It’s always helped me when I’m cranky.
I wanted to plead this to them, so when a group from the WBF came to visit last month on Good Friday, I stopped by and faced the many recording GoPros they wear “for their protection.” At the top of the EMU Amphitheater, right at the heart of campus, a group of at least five held their repulsive yet slipshod plastic signs. Some with a printed rainbow discouraging people’s pride in their sexuality, another with a CGI’d fetus.
I first spoke with Shawn Kellim, a member of WBF. I asked why he was there, and you can probably guess his spiel. Then I asked what I thought would be the only justifiable reason they would decide to come all this way and do all of this: They’re at least paid to be there by their church, right?
“Not a dime,” Kellim said. “It cost me money to be here. I build the signs, I pay for the signs, I pay for the gas to get up here, I pay for the food afterward.”
Well then, surely there’s something else he’d rather be doing than chastising people cooler than him. Maybe there’s a movie he wanted to go see
“I don’t watch many movies or shows; it’s a waste of time,” Kellim said to me. “Could you imagine the creator of the universe coming back after being gone thousands of years and he stands before us and he starts to judge us, and you’re sitting there watching a movie or getting stoned?”
Honestly, I can imagine that. I must say, it sounds vastly more enjoyable than doing what Kellim was doing, and I wouldn’t be losing nearly as much money. Especially if Nectar has a sale going on.
I spoke to the larger group of them after finishing with Kellim, and they told me they were looking to have conversations with students. That students yelling back at them is what made things difficult.
“I think it’s a shame when someone hears something they don’t like, you immediately get called a racist, Nazi, bigot,” another protester said.
I’m not sure about that one. Usually, when I say something people don’t like, I just get told my take on “The Notebook” sucks. I don’t get called a bigot, and that sounds like a skill issue to me.
The pastor and leader of this group, Ryan Clark, told me about his problem with people taking pride in themselves. “The Bible says we’ll boast in nothing ultimately but Christ,” Clark said. “I have nothing good to offer.”
Finally, we’ve found a middle ground.
I talked to students engaging this group in conversation and debate. All of whom had something they’d either rather be doing or were planning on doing later.
“It made me uncomfortable to see such fervent anti-abortion statements, especially because they were making comparisons to the Holocaust. That wasn’t cool,” first-year Isaiah Hawk said. “I’d rather just be resting, but I want people to know that this is a space that is queer-inclusive and that hateful opinions don’t define everyone on campus.”
Hawk planned on celebrating Shabbat after leaving the scene.
“It makes me feel like these people don’t really have anything better to do,” Sofía Olivarez said. “I’m always willing to speak with someone no matter their opinion, but at the end of the day, idiots will be idiots.”
Olivarez told me they would be visiting their mother in Portland to grab dinner with her.
“If you’re volunteering to come here, it seems like you’re voluntarily starting something,” Michael Elder said. “Knowing the demographic of the school, why come here knowing it’s going to be a problem?”
Elder planned on finishing the show “Bad Batch” later that night.
I should stress that this article is not a scolding of all religious demonstrations on campus. In fact, the students I spoke to that day pointed me to a separate Christian group off to the side of the EMU. I spoke to them, and while they did not want themselves or their organization named for fear of backlash, they were fine with telling me how much they disagreed with WBF’s method of advocacy.
On April 25 a new heckler, Andy Schmelzer, stood in the middle of the EMU Amphitheater and began spouting similar rhetoric to WBF. I was expecting a scene like earlier this month, but to my amusement, the yelling man seemed to be shouting at no one.
The Amphitheater was empty, and students were entirely passing him by. The difference makers on this day were second years Alex Underwood and Alton Mills, who sat at the top of the Amphitheater holding signs that read “Do not engage” and “You are loved.”
“The more they’re able to get content, the more they’ll keep preaching hate and showing up and ruining our beautiful beautiful days,” Mills said, referring to the GoPro on Schmelzer’s chest. “I’m sitting in the sun, people are smiling at us, encouraging us, asking to take our pictures and talk to us. There’s lots of positivity in spite of it, I can’t imagine a better space to be in right now.”
Even Schmelzer seemed baffled by the lack of attention he was getting when I spoke to him. “It’s really quiet here today,” Schmelzer said. “They would be really violent, and all of a sudden it just stopped.”
Looking for any attention available, Schmelzer directed his shouts to a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses who were handing out pamphlets with resources for mental health that same day at the EMU, saying they had a “false Jesus.”
Observing the difference in scenes from earlier in April to the later nonconsensual sermon, the way to handle WBF and others on campus is clear to me.
Do not engage them; tell everyone they’re welcome instead.
Yes, it’s objectively funny to talk about having gay sex as you pass them by. Yet the reason they’ve returned here with their cameras is to catch you saying that or worse and post it to their following for validation. They’ll always keep coming back if we give them the attention they lacked as children.
I argue it was funnier to watch Schmelzer listen to his own echo off the empty amphitheater seats at the EMU for an hour. It was super embarrassing.
We have better, more fun things to do than give attention to ostentatious, petulant groupies and their tirades by the amphitheater. Go do something cool; let them strain their vocal cords being lame.
Protect yourself and others. Don’t engage with these fools. If you feel so inclined, let others know they’re welcome here despite all the noise.
Still, the onus shouldn’t be on us to ignore them. The university needs to find a way to keep the campus inclusive yet orderly, and WBF needs to find better hobbies.
Here are a few: Instead of waving signs outside of Autzen, go to a football game. Oregon vs. UCLA was so much fun, and yet, they didn’t go through the gates and kept hating from outside the club. Maybe if they didn’t pay so much for their signs they could get a ticket and “Shout” with everyone else instead of at them, for once.
Speaking of losing money, Kellim not a month prior to the day I spoke with him lost a court case and was ordered to pay two fines of $750 dollars each for noise ordinance violations he committed outside the Planned Parenthood in Springfield. Try practicing with your legal team as well, because leaders of WBF also had a case dismissed with Abolish Abortion Oregon last year.
Maybe your focus should be winning a court case rather than winning our hearts, losers.
A protestor chats with two individuals who were walking by the protest. Anti-abortion protestors are met with counter-protesters outside the Erb Memorial Union on May 5th, 2023. (Molly McPherson/Emerald)
