A Call to Defend: An Interview with Bryan Wickens ‘91
ROCK President Bryan Wickens addresses the audience of the 2008 ROCK Concert about how we can protect our families and communities from the harmful effects of the sex industry. The 2008 ROCK Concert featured musical talents Mark Schulz, Big Daddy Weave and Building 429.
Bryan Wickens came to Wabash College like most other students. He wasn’t sure what to expect and he had no clue what he was going to do after graduation. Wickens’ path through Wabash and into law school sounds very familiar to many of us. His position as a partner in one of the Midwest’s largest law firms matches the career goals of many aspiring Wabash graduates. It was the typical Wabash success story.
Until he gave it up.
To be more accurate, he traded it in for something better. What seemed like a crazy decision to people around him has turned out to be more than many could ever ask for. As president of Reclaim Our Culture Kentuckiana (ROCK), Wickens is doing what he loves while making a difference for future generations. However, the compelling part of his story is not just about what he gave up, but how he came about that decision and what steps led up to his current position.
Wickens was the first person in his immediate family to attend college. He went in without a solid plan but eventually settled on pursuing law. Although he claims that law school didn’t seem to be the first thing on his mind, his mother has always disagreed. “She always used to tell me that from the earliest age on, I would sit and read the Constitution, pull out books and read about it, and say I wanted to be a lawyer some day.” Not many kids do that anyway, but for a native of Ellettsville, Indiana, an average small Hoosier town, it must have seemed especially odd. Living in Ellettsville, Wickens said, he knew very little about law when he decided to venture into the world of litigation. “When I made that decision, I didn’t know a lawyer. In fact, my family used to think that if we knew a lawyer, that was a bad thing.”
Bad thing or not, after finishing his Wabash career as a Political Science major, brother of Phi Kappa Psi, Sphinx Club member, and basketball player, he continued on to law school. When an uncle mentioned that he should come to the University of Nebraska to continue his studies, it didn’t sound too exciting but he decided to visit anyway. He quickly fell in love with the school and excelled there- something he still credits to the education he received while at Wabash.
After he had been working in Nebraska for a while, a friend from Louisville told him about a job at a firm in Louisville, Kentucky. He visited the firm and absolutely loved the area, so he took the job. Not long after that Wickens changed firms and became a partner in the New Albany office of Frost, Brown, and Todd- one of the largest law firms in the nation, with offices from Atlanta to Chicago. He traveled across the country with them, doing commercial litigation on cases ranging from unfair competition, trademark issues, and even Astro-Turf. To many Wallies this would seem like the perfect job.
However, it wasn’t as good as it seemed to be. Through it all he felt he was submerging his real passions in life underneath the success he was having as a lawyer. “From the outside looking in, I had it all: my beautiful wife Whitney, a young daughter, and a solid career. Many would say ‘This guy is doing it exactly right. He’s young, working for a large firm, and making more money than he ever thought he would.’ But all of those things just weren’t enough.”
Like many Little Giant’s who have preceded and followed him, Wickens began to take notice of what was really happening in the world around him. “I started more and more looking around and seeing what was going on in our country, moving further and further from our founding principles and what our founders warned us about- that liberty and freedom must be buttressed by morality and decency for those things to survive and sustain.” It was at this time that his true passions were bubbling to the surface. “When I saw the moral decay and attacks on our values I tried to figure out what role, if any, I was supposed to take in this. I began to ask ‘What can I do with my skills and abilities to make a difference?’”
That’s when he jumped into action. While in law school Wickens had connected with a well-known Constitutional Law professor who was a strong Christian. So he called up Professor Richard Duncan to get his advice on what he could do. Professor Duncan reminded Wickens of the bigger picture. “He told me that when the time is right, if I was serious, and if I really felt as an individual and from a faith perspective that this is what I was supposed to be doing, then I should check out training with the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF).” The Alliance Defense Fund is an army of Christian attorneys who receive training in defending issues of Christian faith, values, and morals, so that they can go back to their communities and defend them. Although he did not know much about it at the time, he decided to take a look into it.
Wickens immediately was interested, but said he initially came up with every reason not to go to the training. His wife Whitney, however, noticed his passion was becoming more and more evident and told him that if he felt as though God was calling him to do it, he needed to follow through. Wickens said lightheartedly, “I always say that I certainly didn’t want to disobey what God was telling me to do, but I didn’t want to disobey my wife, either. So I went for the ADF training.”
In this very selective, week-long training, Wickens felt his passions unite with a strong connection of faith and law. “You get scholarly Constitutional Law training, but you start off with devotions and prayer each day with fifty other attorneys who are there for the same reason and feel that God has called them to this point in their lives.” He came back from this conference more confident that he was doing what he was being called to do.
“I came back and I was on fire. I had a vision and I was passionate about it. I wish I could say that I started doing all kinds of cases, but the next year was probably one of the most frustrating times in my life. Although I came back on fire, nothing seemed to be happening.”
He recounted to me his struggle of not knowing what to do: “It wasn’t fun then, but what I can tell you now is that I learned so much about how things are not on our time. I learned patience and humility all throughout.” He was trying to follow what God was calling him to do, but he was still holding on to what was comfortable, and it didn’t work. But as God does in many situations, he reaches us when we are most broken and humble before him.
“At about that year and a half point, I just reached a point of true surrender where I just said, ‘You know what? It’s not working my way and if I need to stay in the firm and be a light there, fine. If it’s something else, that’s fine too.’ But I really just gave it up in true surrender. And in a short amount of time, I felt this weight lifted off of me and this organization called ROCK reached out to me.’”
Although he knew nothing about ROCK at the time, it was just what he had been searching for. It had started in March 2004 as a grassroots response to a series of articles written about the amount of sex industries in the Louisville metropolitan area. Through those articles, people in the community learned that it was ranked in the top five in the nation with regards to the amount of sexually oriented businesses.
The decay in all different facets of society especially concerned Wickens, although he saw it as a symptom of a bigger problem that he had been passionate about for years. “People ask me what my worst fear is. Am I afraid of the ACLU? The sex industry? Organized crime? They expect that to be my answer, but no. My greatest fear is apathy. This moral decline and attack on our values did not happen overnight. It happened incrementally over many years because people didn’t show up, get involved, and get off the sidelines.”
When Wickens accepted the job on the ROCK board of directors, he had no idea where it could lead him. He thought maybe he would continue to work in the firm and work with ROCK on the side. But God had different plans. “It wasn’t long after I started on the board that the organization was growing so much that we needed to take it to the next level and hire the first full-time president. They gave out the job description at the meeting and I looked down at it and it was everything I felt I had been called to do to utilize my skills and abilities in that area. But I looked at the salary and thought ‘My wife will think I’m absolutely nuts.’”
So Wickens kept quiet about it, struggling to seek out what God wanted him to do. But just as before, God continued to tell him that it was a part of a bigger plan, so he took it to his wife—right after they had just had their second child. “She said ‘I know it’s everything you have been called to, but how can we do it? How can we leave the security of the firm?’ So we prayed about it and decided that if the door opens, it opens, but if it doesn’t, that’s fine. We both thought at the time it would be easier that way.”
When the door was eventually opened for Wickens, he faithfully made the tough decision to trade in his successful career in law for a position as president of a risky, up-start grassroots position on the belief that it was everything he had been searching for. “God was working in so many different ways, He just made it possible. It was still scary as can be, but we took that step of faith in September of 2005 and have been blessed beyond anything I could have ever imagined.”
Although it wasn’t an easy decision to make, he knew it was the right one, even though some people might have called him crazy. Some asked how he could do that to his family, but Wickens would look at them and say, “No, I’m doing this for my family. I look at my daughters and I want to use my skills and abilities to make things better for their future.”
Since taking that leap of faith, Wickens has seen ROCK achieve unimaginable success. The number of sex industries in the area has decreased from 200 to 67, and in the last year alone ROCK saw a 700% increase in the number of people signed up to be a part of the organization. They have done community organization rallies, placed billboards along I-65, and worked hard to ensure family friendly legislation in the region’s communities. But even with the accomplishments made so far by the organization, Wickens stays humble. “It’s not about ‘Look at what we did.’ The message is clear: we can change things. We can stand up for our values as a community.”
Wickens stresses that ROCK’s work is not like that of other more radical Christian values groups that sometimes appear on TV. “We have become effective by working alongside and with people, not against them. We really try to do things differently. That’s why you’ll never see ROCK street-side protesting; never will you see hateful statements. We handle things in a very respectful and professional manner. I believe that’s the right way to do things.”
As ROCK has grown and expanded, it has given Wickens and others in the organization a platform to not only make communities more family friendly, but it has given them a chance to offer a helping hand to people who are struggling with the side effects of the sex industry. “We want to make sure we are reaching out with the other hand to help people who are caught up in the industry. It’s never about us vs. them. It’s about real people and real lives and I never want to lose sight of that.”
It’s easy to see now how giving up what seemed like a dream job has led to something even better. But we must remember that this isn’t the end of his story. At this point, Wickens knows what he’s supposed to be doing now in defending our values, but doesn’t know what that will bring during the rest of his life. “I don’t have a clue what the future holds, but if the last two years are any indicator, it’s going to be phenomenal.”
