Jerry Pattengale (PhD, Miami University under mentor Edwin Yamauchi) is a scholar, researcher, author, and speaker. He has served for nearly thirty years in administrative leadership and on faculty at Indiana Wesleyan University, and is the first to earn IWU's title of University Professor. He is codirector of the Lumen Research Institute.
The author of dozens of books, Pattengale's writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Christianity Today, Washington Post, Books & Culture, Religion News Service, InsideHigherEd.com, Patheos, the Chicago Tribune, CSR, Christian Post, and various other venues. Pattengale has written numerous articles on topics ranging from the backstory of one of the modern world's biggest antiquity scandals to the forgery and international sensation known as "The Gospel of Jesus' Wife," to the discovery of the oldest known epigraph reference to "Yahweh."
Pattengale is a nationally recognized lecturer on education innovation and biblical studies. He spoke at the United Nations in 2020 on protecting religious places, and received the National Press Club's Vivian Award in 2021, the same year he received a Telly Award for his writing and historical work for the award-winning TV series, Inexplicable: How Christianity Spread to the Ends of the Earth. He won international acclaim in the mid-1990s for his work on the "Odyssey in Egypt" program, connecting U.S. middle-school students via the Internet with their archeological excavation of an early Egyptian monastery, and notice in higher education for his research and books on "purpose-guided education." He is the founder of JC Bodyshop, a prominent youth ministry and facility adjacent to the IWU campus. In the late 1980s he helped Dr. Terry Franson found and build The Night of Champions on the Azusa Pacific University campus, which became one of the nation’s largest Christian sports youth events. He was one of the two founding scholars for the Museum of the Bible in Washington D. C., opened in 2017, where he led the development of many of its programs and still serves as senior advisor.
Pattengale is the associate publisher for Christian Scholar's Review and codirector of the Lumen Research Institute. He is a senior fellow at the Sagamore Institute, an honorary senior research associate at Tyndale House, Cambridge, a distinguished fellow at Excelsia College, Australia and at Waverley Abbey, UK, and is a research scholar at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He also served as interim president for Religion News Service and serves on boards for Yale University's Jonathan Edwards Center, Africa New Life (Rwanda), Changing Destiny (addressing slave trafficking in Asia), and on the membership committee for the National Press Club.
Pattengale graduated from high school at sixteen, and was homeless, a story captured in the PBS/WIPB documentary, "Leading the Way out of Poverty" (2006). He and his wife, Cindy, have four sons and six grandchildren.
