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CCO Campus Ministry

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Jim Wilson

wilson_jim.jpgJames Wilson was a freshman at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1971, the first year the CCO placed staff on campus. Today, Jim is an Assistant United States Attorney based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has been a federal prosecutor since 1985, and he recently spent eight months in Iraq, helping to try people for war crimes. Jim and his wife, Christina, live in Pittsburgh with their three children. They worship at Church of the Ascension.

Because of the CCO’s influence, I have this little voice in the back of my head that constantly requires excellence. I learned a number of years ago from a very persistent staff person that you do your work as unto the Lord.

I started my career as a federal prosecutor in 1985. I prosecute mostly white collar crime, which involves insurance fraud, public corruption, tax offenses, and things of that nature. In the past, I have done a wide variety of criminal prosecution, involving gang cases, drug cases, homicides, rapes, robberies—the garden variety of human activity that we would rather not look at.

When I came on campus for the first time, I was a small-town boy from a blue collar family, and I was looking to explore, can we say, the “social freedoms” of university life. The Lord had other plans, because I ran into a CCO staff worker who had the effect of one pinball hitting another and kind of knocking me off course. He had a different set of priorities for me, which had to do with focusing on academics, focusing on relationships, and focusing on the fact that my view of God’s world was altogether too constricted. That if Jesus was Lord at all, He was Lord not just over my inner feelings and my church life, but He was Lord over whatever profession or vocation I thought I might eventually be interested in. And that was a troubling idea, because it required me to work a whole lot harder than I actually wanted to.

I can say with confidence that the CCO has affected the trajectory of my life in a number of ways. The CCO has been that little voice in the back of my head that demands excellence, that demands faithfulness, that tells me that in the long run, people are important, and therefore relationships have a very, very high value. I learned from the CCO that those relationships don’t just happen, you have to work at them. And you have to be purposeful in relationships in a prayerful and intelligent way.

I have stayed in touch with the ministry of the CCO throughout the years, with law students and medical students and others, and have been able to foster continuing relationships with people who are now professionals, professors at universities, ministers, and so forth. It’s been a great experience.