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Leeann Younger

younger_leeann.jpg“The relationships and experiences that I had with CCO campus workers and the programs they sponsored really created a space for me to see God’s call to build his Kingdom very, very clearly,” says Leeann Younger. “Because of that, I have been in pursuit of that goal ever since.”

Today, Leeann pursues that goal through her role as Director of Adult & Family Ministry at Allegheny Center Alliance Church on Pittsburgh’s North Side. She and her husband, Wayne, collaborate in that position, and they live with their three children in walking distance of the church.

When Leeann first arrived at Geneva College in the mid-1980s, she soon realized that she couldn’t avoid the CCO influence. “They were everywhere!” she remembers. Her residence hall director was a CCO staff person, as were some of the other RDs who participated in the Sunday night fellowship group. Leeann eventually served as a resident assistant, and was mentored and supervised by Linda Boney, her CCO RD. “I was involved in the fellowship group on campus and was a student leader, and I remember CCO-initiated mission trips to Washington, DC. Just considering what it meant to serve the poor really rocked my world,” she remembers.

And then there was CCO associate staff member and Assistant to the Chaplain, Brad Frey. “I first met Brad at Sunday Night Fellowship, and he was very intentional about investing in me as a person and as a leader,” Leeann remembers. “I had a thing for people who were asking big questions, so I sought him out. He is responsible for getting me to go to Jubilee for the first time as a freshman. I didn’t get the whole all-of-life-redeemed, transforming-the-world thing right away, but I loved being with hundreds of other Christian college students, and I kept coming back.”

“The most significant impact of the CCO was helping me to clarify what it meant to own my faith. What did it look like to be a person of faith, and not so much follow my parents’ guidelines for that, but to figure out my own?” The significance of that was so great that Leeann decided to give back to students by working for the CCO. She graduated in 1989 with a degree in psychology and went on to work with students at Ashland University and at her alma mater, Geneva College. Since leaving staff, she has worked in a variety of other contexts—as a school principal, as a consultant to churches and nonprofits, and currently, as a mentor to men and women seeking to live out God’s call to reconciliation.

“In every single job I have had, I have been mentoring or looking for someone to mentor,” says Leeann. “I’ve been asking big questions of people who are believers or not, and looking to build structures that reflect the Gospel, whether I was working in a Christian place or not. Today, Wayne and I push hard on the questions, ‘What does it mean to be a multiethnic congregation? What does it mean to serve the poor? How have we been co-opted by American culture?’ The roots of all of that was in my training as a CCO staff person.

“We work at an urban church and we live in the city on purpose—we think that that’s part of what we’re called to do. That was shaped in me early, and I married a guy who shared that vision. The CCO’s ministry helped define my entire approach to life. I am a mom who is thinking about how to develop my kids’ worldviews. I wouldn’t have that if not for people like Brad Frey asking me really big questions. I’m always pointing the people I mentor in the direction of the bigger picture. Where is God working? What is the work of the kingdom? I live those questions.”