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Morgan Tipton

tipton_morgan.jpg“I was looking for anything but a Christian fellowship when I showed up at Kent State University,” says Morgan Tipton. “However, I did have an incredibly kind and loving roommate that invited me, so I decided to go so I wouldn’t offend her. I was really surprised by this fellowship meeting. They didn’t sing cheesy Jesus songs, make me eat a live chicken, shove little green Bibles in my backpack or even try to change my mind. They cared about what I thought. They asked hard questions about life, culture, spirituality and faith. They didn’t ask me to swallow any easy answers and they loved me just as I was—a young freshman.”

Morgan kept returning to Late Night Christian Fellowship meetings, and she accepted an invitation to attend the CCO-sponsored Jubilee conference that year. “I made a pretty irreverent commitment to Jesus at Jubilee 1999,” Morgan admits. “I basically dared Jesus to try and change me. He did!”

“I started attending a Bible study and learning about how to serve others. I went to the [CCO-sponsored] Ocean City Beach Project that summer and really grew in my faith and identity in Jesus Christ. The next year, a bunch of ladies from the fellowship lived spread out over a women’s dorm. We invited folks to the fellowship and to explore Jesus. Many women not only attended Late Night Christian Fellowship, but committed their whole lives to Him too. I served as a student leader on the Late Night ministry team for two years and then another two years as a campus ministry intern.”

Today, Morgan and her husband, Benjamin, live in Washington, DC, where Morgan works as a Volunteer Coordinator for Transitional Housing Corporation. The Tiptons are active members of Washington Community Fellowship, where they worship, attend a small-group Bible study, and where Morgan serves on the worship committee.

Morgan is grateful for the foundation of faith laid for her by the CCO’s ministry at Kent, and by the years she spent working for the CCO before transitioning to her current position.

“The CCO called me to consider Christ,” she says. “After consideration, I committed my whole life to Him. There is so much room for lasting transformation in the college years. I’m grateful that the CCO was and is a real presence in the personal revolution of college students. Campus ministers really walk with people through some of the most critical decisions of their lives, including ‘who am I?’ I live in the reality that my life is not my own, that I belong body and soul to the Lord Jesus Christ. I have a lot of campus ministers to thank for praying and sojourning with me to that truth.

“I will never forget what the impact of the CCO and its staff have meant to my education, my relationships, and my life. I’m convinced that if it were not for CCO campus ministers, I would still see Jesus as an irrelevant moral teacher, and that I would be, as Henry David Thoreau wrote, ‘leading a quiet life of desperation.’”