Educator and entrepreneur Ben Sprunger highlights in Audacious Servant his Depression-era childhood in Berne, Ind., followed by a career in Mennonite and other faith-based institutions. Sprunger frames his memoir as a case study of a “servant leader,” whose aptitude for overlapping areas of church, education and business stretched across a host of Mennonite-related entities, including Camp Friedenswald, Bluffton College (now Bluffton University), Mennonite Economic Development Associates, Mennonite Publishing House and Hesston College.  

The book’s opening chapters are noteworthy for Sprunger’s sensitive handling of his boyhood experiences. Shortly before his fifth birthday, he discovered his father’s death by suicide in the family’s home. The memoir offers a wrenching account of the extended aftermath of this tragedy, as young Ben, his mother and his older brother navigated their enormous loss, which impacted everything from the family’s economic status and community standing to the enlarged roles played by supportive grandparents. In small-town environs of northeastern Indiana, where Swiss Mennonite kinship and church traditions prevailed, spiritual notions could be far more harmful than helpful. For example, a few years later a schoolmate yelled “Your dad is burning in hell!,” which Sprunger associated with a sermon he’d heard declaring suicide a sin no different than murder. “Perhaps I was 10 or 11,” he recalls, “but some incidents are seared into memory.”   

Sprunger’s elementary school years were punctuated with anxiety over failing grades. In retrospect, he regards himself as having been a hyperactive, inventive child. Given his portrayal, it seems likely that he had the markers of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, a diagnosis that came to be defined later in the 20th century.  

Sprunger portrays himself as ambitious in young adulthood, fast-tracked to lead evangelical Christian institutions. He and his family moved frequently, including for graduate studies in education at Michigan State University, where in 1968 he completed his doctorate. By then he had accepted a position as associate dean of students at Wheaton College, the prominent Christian liberal arts school in northern Illinois. Through the turmoil of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Sprunger provided draft counseling to students, including those seeking conscientious objector status. In 1972, he learned that his position was being eliminated. A dream job ended abruptly. He wondered whether his support of COs had been a key factor.

Within months, a new opportunity opened, and Sprunger began a six-year stint as president of Bluffton College.  He writes, “Can you imagine receiving a letter asking if you would be open to conversation about being a college president at 34 years of age?” At the time, the small Mennonite liberal arts college was beset with financial difficulties. He would remain Bluffton’s president until 1978. 

Sprunger’s chapter on Bluffton is the portion of the memoir for which its ironic title becomes relevant. Men­no­nite scholars chronicling the university’s history — notably Perry Bush in Dancing with the Kobzar (2000) and former President Robert S. Kreider in his memoir Coming Home (2012) — have offered assessments of Sprunger’s mixed legacy, noting that he alienated some colleagues with brash, unwelcome leadership moves while aiming for the college’s financial turnaround. In recounting painful experiences, Sprunger takes issue with others’ interpretations of his leadership. He concludes that while he and his team deftly managed the school’s fiscal recovery, he fell short of convincing other stakeholders to embrace a vision that he hoped would transform the school into an evangelical Christian university known for “regional excellence.” In his telling, competing perspectives that prioritized the college’s denominational identity as a progressive Mennonite school were short-sighted, although he argues that in subsequent decades, his successors in the presidency moved Bluffton at least partially in the direction he had championed.  

This book will not be the last word on Bluffton’s history. When it appeared in 2024, the author assumed, understandably, that Bluffton was on the cusp of merging with the University of Findlay. Since then, however, the two schools’ plans to do so have ended. Regardless, memoirs such as this illuminate singular appraisals of events and places, as Sprunger’s reflections on his complex childhood, as well as his thorny years helming a Mennonite college campus, amply demonstrate.