The city of Chicago has settled with four Wheaton College students who were prohibited from evangelizing in the city’s Millennium Park in 2018. The case pushed the city to change park regulations to allow evangelizing and other public speech.
The city council approved a $205,000 settlement on Wednesday, which includes $5,000 each for the students as well as attorneys’ fees for the five-year litigation.
“I’m thankful that the gospel is going to be preached in Millennium Park again,” Caeden Hood, one of the Wheaton students, told CT. Hood has graduated from Wheaton and is now studying at Knox Theological Seminary in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “We’re willing to work with the authorities. … That’s fine. We just don’t want the proclamation of the gospel to be hindered.”
A group of Wheaton students would go to Chicago every Friday, into the subways or on street corners, and start conversations, pass out tracts, or do street preaching. Sometimes they would go to Millennium Park, one of the most popular parks in the city with the famous “Bean” sculpture.
City rules prohibited “the making of speeches” and passing out of literature in most of the 24-acre park. In 2018, park security had asked Wheaton students passing out tracts to stop, which they did, but then in subsequent interactions security also stopped them from evangelizing. Four students—Hood, Matt Swart, Jeremy Chong, and Gabriel Emerson—consulted with a Wheaton professor who reached out to a Christian law firm, Mauck & Baker.