Who we become is shaped, in part, by the people who walk alongside us.
At IWU, education happens through coursework, study, and academic challenge, but also through hundreds of encounters along the way: a professor who asks a harder question, an advisor who listens, a mentor who recognizes a gift, a community that prays.
Brian Jaworski, Ph.D., vice president for student development, describes that environment with the image of an arrow. “The environment in which you launch an arrow impacts its trajectory,” he said. At IWU, shaping that trajectory is shared work.
Source: IWU-Marion Spiritual Formation Office, August 2026
Source: Institutional Research, August 2026
On the IWU-Marion campus, students experience community through relationships with faculty, chapel, residence life, athletics, mentoring, service, and the daily rhythms of life together. The new Welcome Center gives hospitality a visible expression of a broader commitment: people should be known, valued, loved, challenged, and invited to grow.
In IWU-National and Global's online programs, those relationships take different forms but can be just as consequential: a professor who understands the demands of work and family, an advisor who walks alongside a long-deferred calling, coursework that brings biblical truth into decisions already being made in a workplace or home.
At Wesley Seminary, where pastors, ministry leaders, and Christian leaders study while actively serving congregations and communities, formation is even more immediate. What is explored in a course one week may shape a sermon, a counseling session, or a hard conversation the next.
Wesley Seminary
Students represented through Wesley Seminary.
Source: Wesley Seminary, August 2026
Faculty are being shaped, too. Through the Center for Faith and Learning, they consider how Christianity informs the way they teach, mentor, research, and understand their disciplines. David Davies, DMA, vice president of academic affairs and chief academic officer, puts the stakes simply: “Done well, education is discipleship.”
IWU's values of humility, belonging, integrity, courage, innovation, agility, and kindness give language to that formation. Their meaning is found in practice: humility that listens, courage that acts, and integrity when no one is watching.
“We are forming disciples whose lives exude the grace, truth, and love of Christ wherever they go,” said Andrea Summers, D.Min., campus pastor. “Our hope is that people encounter Him in every place they serve.”
“We are forming disciples whose lives exude the grace, truth, and love of Christ wherever they go. Our hope is that people encounter Him in every place they serve.”
But formation is not the end of the story. The student who is deeply known learns to notice others. The one whose gifts were recognized calls out gifts in someone else. And what is formed in community does not stay here. Scripture calls believers the aroma of Christ, and an aroma cannot be contained. It saturates every room a graduate enters, long after the last class has ended.
