In a large privately-owned apartment building right in the middle of the University of Wisconsin campus, a second-floor food court has given way to unique new meeting space called the Upper House.
The Upper House is not a ministry, or a think tank, or just a meeting space, but it has elements of each of them. It’s designed to be a place for conversation about important issues, including religious issues and community issues.
One example of what the Upper House is all about is Q Commons, a national/local forum for ideas that will feature video presentations by author Malcolm Gladwell, journalist Soledad O’Brien, and television producer Mark Burnett. It will be held at the Upper House on Thursday evening, February 26, 2015. It will also feature local live presentations by former Madison police chief Noble Wray, child advocate Jean Geran, and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship president Alec Hill.
Upper House is located at 365 East Campus Mall, overlooking University Avenue. It’s something Madison hasn’t seen before and to learn more about it I sat down with executive director John Terrill, who has just moved back to Madison from Seattle.
What is the Upper House?
The vision is to create a welcoming environment where students, faculty, administrators, and marketplace professionals can wrestle with some of the deepest issues we face as a community and as a society. 
One of the ways to do that is to create a place where people can address not only salient issues, but issues of values and ethics, and also faith. We think the Christian faith speaks into all of life, and the important issues that make up our community, and our academic and professional disciplines. So we want this to be a place where faith conversations are welcomed and part of a natural dialogue on how we think about addressing the important issues that we face.
That’s one piece, that this would be a hub or a nexus of ideas and values, a dynamic faith dialogue. I think the other component of the Upper House is that we create a multi-experiential space that is welcoming to lots of different formats of learning and connection. So we anticipate having music here, the arts, more traditional lectures and seminars, discussion groups, reading groups, a wide variety of programming.
It’s a combination of creating space for others to do their thing, so that they have a welcoming space on campus where they can gather their own communities and address some of these issues. It’s also a place where we can offer our own programming. It’s going to be important for us to establish our own brand, our own sense of what’s important and how we’re addressing important issues.
When you say “our,” what does that mean?
When I say our, I’m really referring to the Stephen and Laurel Brown Foundation, but that’s always couched in partnership with other groups. So there will be things that I’m sure we will take on single-handedly, we just decide this is an important event that we would like to sponsor, we want to host in our community.
I think one of our initial inclinations will be to always find partners to work with, on campus, church communities, campus-based ministries. So, “our,” it’s not easy to answer that. Sometimes it will be more individualistic, in that it’s the foundation that’s taking the lead and structuring most of the programming. But more times than not it will be a collective effort, where other groups are joining in to help provide guidance.
This space used to be a food court. Why is the foundation acting now, instead of when the building opened a few years ago?
Stephen and Laurel Brown are the benefactors. Stephen Brown’s business is apartment buildings; they manage a lot of properties. They developed the Lucky building (which houses the Upper House). They were in on this development from its origins. Stephen has carried this vision for a long time. His sense of vision has accelerated, at this stage of his life, where he wants to see this kind of a place established on campus.
He’s always been involved with inter-faith dialogue. He was a board member of the Lubar Institute for the Study of Abrahamic Religions for a number of years. He funded some classes with the university, mostly on the New Testament. He’s always been trying to create space for students and faculty to be able to engage Christian theology, to dialogue about faith. Dialogue is really important to him and it will be an important part of what we do here. It will be rooted in our Christian traditions and commitments.
The university offers classes that you can take to get a certificate in religious studies, there are campus Christian fellowships, there’s the Lubar Institute, somehow something else was needed?
We will hold the whole university in our purview. Some of the gruops you’ve described are thinking about a component of the university context. Most have a particular sliver that they’re focused on. And rightfully so. Our vision is to try to do things that are complementary. In some ways we’ll be able to design programs that each of these individual groups wouldn’t have done but what we do will be beneficial to the whole community.
The other thing I think is that the marketplace is something that we also care about. From my view, any time you’re working with the university, to do really good work with graduate students in particular but including faculty and undergraduate students, you have to be rightly connected to the professions.
Because a lot of students and faculty are thinking about the professions as their guild of primary attachment. So, to do good work with law students or journalism students, or med students or business students, you’ve got to be connected to those professions. And the Q conference is a good example of that.
It’s getting harder and harder for groups to meet on campuses and to have full access to campus benefits. So this is a third space in a lot of ways. It’s right in the center of campus, you can’t be more centrally located. But it’s privately owned.
And so, we’re going to be generous dialogue partners. We don’t take an antagonistic perspective to the university although there will probably be times when we disagree. But generally our posture is that the university is a place of wonderful things that are happening.
We want to affirm all of that. At the same time, we come in with a unique perspective and lens through which we’re trying to raise important issues that we face as a culture, a society, and a community. We want bring a theological perspective to bear, and we’re not restricted in how we can do that. There’s value in this third space that groups like The Upper House can offer.
We applied to and were accepted to the Consortium of Christian Study Centers, which is a group of about 20 or 25 independent Christian study centers around the country, mostly at large private or public universities. They all function with a similar vision.
You lived in Madison previously when you were director for Professional Schools Ministry for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. And then you moved on to Seattle Pacific University. What about this job enticed you back to Madison?
I was at Seatle Pacific for six and a half years. I led the Center for Integrity in Business, working with business practitioners around a Christian understanding of business. Integrity in business means business well-done, in ways that are congruent with God’s purposes.
The other part of our work was interacting with the scholarly community, and trying to enable research that was examining and investigating a theological or bigger picture of the purpose of business. There’s a lot of energy now asking what is the purpose of business? Is it primarily focused on shareholder wealth? Or are there other components of what business ought to be about in the world. All the while honoring the necessity of the profit motive. That’s crucial.
My background has been interfacing amongst a variety of communities: the church, business or the marketplace, and the academy. I think the last 15-20 years of my life have been trying to figure out how to do good work at the seam of those institutions.
So this was a natural fit, to have an opportunity to raise important, salient issues, through a theological vantage point or lens, in a big research university like the University of Wisconsin. It’s an amazing opportunity, the kind of facilities we have available to us.
It’s going to be a challenge to stay true to our mission and yet be generous with our space and build wider relationships on campus, all the while keeping a focus on faith.
The Q conference is an example of Christians in the marketplace, wrestling with big ideas, and trying to do it in a way that’s thoughtful and generous in tone at the same time.
You are also looking to hire some people?
I’m looking for a communications and technology lead person. This would be someone who could handle social media to promote our work and also every bit of technology in the building that serves the groups that are meeting here, such as the sound board.
The second person would be administrative, event planning person. There are four layers of programming: people who come in and use study spaces and meeting rooms; groups that come in to use our space and don’t need anything else; groups that want to do something but want us to help them with programming such as Freedom Week, focused on human trafficking; then the programs we put on. Anytime you say yes to an event, people will need some assistance. So there’s a vetting process because we’ll be associated with whatever happens up here.
To what extent will you be working with the broader Madison Christian community outside of campus? Are the churches in the area part of your plan?
I think they are. I would describe it as focused on campus but including churches that have ministries on campus and see the university as a place of connection and service. And it would ripple out.
The Blackhawk Church downtown campus will be located here, and we’ve talked with other churches about possible areas where we can work together. But the center of our mission is the campus and the university.