Wallace Anderson Part II: Post-college to MTW

By Laura Kaufmann

Wallace Anderson wore a suit and tie to an interview at the Warrick Hotel in Philadelphia at the beginning of his summer off from doctoral work in music. The restaurant assumed he was applying for manager, and when he falsified his resume, he got the job.

He left behind a one-year scholarship at the Vocal Academy of the Arts in Philadelphia. He had just studied at the Jordan School of Music at Butler University in Indiana, and earned his master’s degree in music at the University of Indiana.

“That’s where I got into the drugs,” he said. “I thought drugs were going to be my life.”

The stint at the Warrick Hotel lasted three months, and eventually he ended up in New York City as the vice president for Restaurant International’s American Operations. He stayed ten years. All the while, drug addiction persisted.

“Nothing mattered to me but me,” he said. “I never realized I was a drug addict. I just wanted to be well enough to continue to work.”

In the summer of 1983, when he was 33 years old, Anderson took a business trip to London and used the flight time to read Francis Schaeffer’s book “True Spirituality,” a gift from his sister Cathie.

He told Cathie how much he hated it, but she encouraged him to read more.

“So I read one more, just to argue with her,” he said. “And within three months I was on my knees. I finally told God, ‘If you really are real, as Schaeffer says, then you get me off of drugs.’”

Anderson vowed that he would do drugs only recreationally if God could keep him off for three months.

“At that time I actually lost my job,” he said. “I was getting ready to lose it anyway because the drugs had gotten so bad. That shocked me, that drugs were such a part of my life. You can do that for years and just fake it.”

Still, he was a Christian. He joined Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church and befriended Dr. Kirkland, the chairman of the board at Princeton. But their watered-down hermeneutics confused him.

Two particular instances guided him out of the drug world and into a deep understanding of salvation.

The first was on Christmas Eve, 1983. “That night I told my friends that after church I would meet them at Studio 54,” he said. “As I left church, I took my first Quaalude [in three months].We went, and it was awful. I started getting high, and I thought, ‘This is not what I want.’ I made it till about 4 or 5 in the morning, and then I just ran – and I have never done a drug since then. It’s like the Lord let me see what the lifestyle was. I’ve never seen so clearly in my life darkness and evil.”

The second occurred in the spring, after he attended L’Abri in Massachusetts for five days. His eyes were opened even further to the liberalism in his church, and he wanted to attend seminary for one semester, just to study the Scriptures carefully.

“I decided on Covenant,” he said, “and I stayed eleven years.”

When he finished his Masters of Divinity, the seminary asked him to stay and work in Admissions and Financial Aid.

Shortly after accepting this job, Anderson met Paige Kennedy, a Wheaton graduate who enthralled him with her blonde hair and outgoing personality. He gave her a job at the seminary, and they were married a year later.

“Before I got married, I knew I didn’t want to live an ordinary life, and living with Wallace definitely has not been ordinary,” said Mrs. Anderson. “It’s been very exciting, and because of our differences in personality, God has stretched both of us.”

“We have absolutely opposite personalities,” he said. “I’m such an introvert, and she’s not. I cannot imagine that she would ever marry me.”

The couple decided to make the move from Covenant to Mission to the World (MTW) in 1996, but it wasn’t easy.

“Both Covenant and MTW were perfect choices,” he said. “It was the hardest thing I’d ever done.”

He oversaw the short-term missions program there. The seminary grew in enrollment under Anderson, as did missions activity at MTW.