“I didn’t think I was the type of person who gets to be a student body chaplain,” Eliyahna Brothers ’26 said. “I thought I had to be a robust speaker or a ministry student. But my peers and supervisors saw gifts in me that I could use in that role to help other students grow in their faith.”
Seeing herself clearly like this took time. Raised in Messianic Judaism in Mishawaka, Indiana, Brothers began attending a local youth group after her family left that faith community, and it was there she came to know Jesus. “That’s where I learned that all of our practices and traditions were actually supposed to point toward someone,” she said.
At IWU-Marion, that young faith found people who could see what she could not. “The people who have encouraged me here have pointed things out in me that I wouldn’t have even seen myself,” Brothers said. Andrea Summers, D.Min., campus pastor and dean of spiritual formation, watched it happen. “What was remarkable about Eli was watching her faith become increasingly integrated across every part of her life,” Summers said. “The truth, beauty, and wisdom she encountered in the classroom became embodied through deep friendships, discipleship, the local church, and her service in Grant County. She wasn’t simply collecting meaningful experiences; she was allowing God to weave them together into a way of seeing the world, loving her neighbor, and imagining her future.”
So when students she had led, first in a freshman small group and later as an Evans Hall chaplain, urged her to apply for a role she doubted she was suited for, she took them at their word.
Source: IWU-Marion Spiritual Formation Office
The newly created position, Community Engagement Student Body Chaplain, exists to move faith off campus and into Grant County. Brothers took to it. She helped coordinate the Taste of Marion event and citywide cleanups with Marion Mayor Ronald Morrell Jr.’s office. She also organized the inaugural First-Year Experience Serve Day, placing nearly 500 first-year students with Meals on Wheels, a child advocacy center, an elementary school, local churches, and other nonprofits. At each Serve Day location, a team did “whatever would be most helpful for 25 college students to do in a single day,” she said.
The assignments were ordinary. The meaning was not. What God had been forming in Brothers at IWU was now reaching neighbors she would never meet, carried by hundreds of students she helped send: a first-year student on a cleanup crew, a carload delivering meals, and kindness showing up at doors all over Grant County with an IWU student attached to it.
Brothers graduates in December 2026 and hopes eventually to study theology and the arts, seeking purposeful work in a community of believers as she discerns where God might lead.
Wherever that is, the pattern is set. People saw Christ’s gifts in her before she could see them herself. Now what was noticed in her drifts through hundreds of others, and a county encounters the presence of the One her life points to.
