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Kevin Tatman

tatman_kevin.jpg“CCO leaders pushed us to really think about what it means to be a Christian in a day-in and day-out way,” Kevin Tatman remembers. “Growing up, it had always been about the church for me, but no one really talked about what to do after you walk out the church doors on Sunday morning. The CCO gave me the tools to make my faith real every day. I was motivated by this new understanding of what it was to be a Christian student, to apply my faith to my studies.”

Kevin and his wife, Betty Mae, graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1978. The decisions they made as a result of being involved in the CCO’s ministry during those years completely changed the trajectory of their lives.

“The first weekend of my junior year, I went to First Baptist Church on Sunday morning,” he remembers. “There was almost no one there, and those who were there had to be 60 years and older. I got up, walked out, and headed over to Bellefield Presbyterian Church and loved it.”

Bellefield Church, positioned right in the center of Pitt’s campus, was a hub of college student outreach, and Kevin immediately got connected. He started attending worship services, Wednesday night fellowship meetings, and he became a part of a small “action group.” He attended the Jubilee conference in 1977 and 1978 as a student, and he still shows up every year to help register students.

He had made a commitment to Christ during his senior year in high school, but he credits the CCO with helping him to know what to do with it. “If the CCO hadn’t been there and I’d just continued in the vein of going to church on Sundays, who knows where I’d be today?” says Kevin Tatman. “I wouldn’t have met my wife, and we wouldn’t be living the life we were called to 30 years ago.”

Kevin ultimately became a leader in the fellowship, where he met Betty Mae, the woman he would marry. They got engaged the weekend they graduated, and received their pre-engagement and pre-marital counseling from CCO staff worker Mike Ford.

At the end of his junior year, CCO staff member Dana Shaw came to the fellowship group to recruit students to help run an after-school youth club in West Oakland, the neighborhood adjacent to Pitt’s campus. “I just felt called to do it,” Kevin remembers. “I’d never experienced anything like it; I couldn’t explain it.” He and several of his classmates went to West Oakland two days a week to hang out with the kids. By the fall of 1977, a few of the Pitt students decided to start attending Friendship Community Presbyterian Church, where Dana Shaw served as lay pastor.

“We wanted to support the church in the neighborhood where we were reaching out,” Kevin explains. Little did he know he’d still be living in that neighborhood and worshipping in that church three decades later.

Kevin has served as an elder at Friendship Church, among other leadership roles, including his current term as church treasurer. He and Betty Mae were married at Bellefield Church, but their three children were baptized at Friendship. They have continued to reach out to neighbors in the community where Kevin served as a college student, and he commutes from his inner-city home to work as a claims adjuster for an insurance company in the western suburbs of Pittsburgh.

“Those two years I was involved with the CCO on campus propelled me to live my Christian life in all aspects,” Kevin says. “We’ve tried to do that ever since.”