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CCO Campus Ministry

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Will Gigante

transformedlives_gigante.jpg“Eight different CCO staff people shared the gospel with me that summer,” says Will Gigante. “But that isn’t what sold me on Christianity. It was seeing them live it.”

Will spent the summer between his sophomore and junior year of college taking classes. He was a student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and during the summer of 1990, the CCO’s new staff training program took place on that campus. CCO staff worker Larry Hardesty met Will and invited him to play volleyball with the group of campus ministry trainees. The rest is history.

“There was nothing else going on that summer for me besides classes, so I started hanging out with these people,” Will remembers. “My attitude was, ‘you can talk to me about this Christian stuff, but I’m not going to believe you.’”

Will was invited to watch the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off with the CCO staff, which was followed by a discussion of the movie from a Christian perspective. “We watched the movie,” remembers Will, “and then they started talking about it afterward, about the spiritual implications of the film, which I thought was really ridiculous. They asked me what I thought, and I said, ‘I think you’re all idiots.’ I think I said it to test them—to see if they’d reject me. But they didn’t, and that piqued my interest.”

It piqued his interest so much that, even when Will’s summer classes ended in the middle of the summer and he went home to Pittsburgh, he found himself driving back to IUP on the weekends to hang out with the CCO staff who were still there. “I remember saying to Lew [one of the CCO trainees], ‘There’s something different about you people. There are a lot of people that talk about this stuff, but you guys really live it.’”

Ultimately, Will decided to embrace the gospel message for himself—after sitting through eight gospel presentations and spending all that time with people who were actually living it out.

The first year after that summer, Will found himself on campus without any CCO workers. By the time he was a senior, he was ready to dive in when Debbie Overholser and Steve Branton showed up to head up the ministry. He also spent summers working at Pine Springs Camp, being mentored by CCO alumni George and Lisa Foose.

In 1994, Will decided to join CCO staff himself, and served as an intern at Bellefield Presbyterian Church, working with students at the University of Pittsburgh. Since then, he has worked at Wittenberg College, the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, and he now reaches out to student athletes—and anyone else who comes across his path—at Penn State University. Will and his wife Cheryl are raising two sons, Spencer and Rocco, and they provide a safe place for students to explore their faith and just be cared for.

“I see people come to Christ because they see something different,” says Will. “We don’t have a lot, but what we do have, we’ll give.”