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Christy Wauzzinski

wauzzinski_christy.jpgChristy Buxton was a student at Allegheny College in the early 1970s when she first heard the gospel message. “John Guest was touring with his rock band, and my best friend had a renewal of faith through that ministry,” she remembers. “She started talking to me about Christ, and I didn’t want to hear it. It got to the point that I would hide from her when I saw her walking across campus. She kept reaching out to me, and it almost destroyed our relationship.”

Christy describes her college self as a “’60s cynic” and an “intentional atheist.” As she remembers, “I’d had a very bad experience with the church, and that triggered for me an onset of rationalism. I couldn’t trust the church, and I didn’t have the ears to hear, or I never really heard the gospel.”

But then her ears opened, and that changed everything. “A lot of people were praying for me, and my friends gave me a book called Know Why You Believe, which addressed a lot of my doubts. I was either going to surrender to God or go into a black hole of existentialism.”

At about the same time, a young man named Bob Wauzzinski had arrived on campus, working as an itinerant campus minister for a newly-formed organization called the Coalition for Christian Outreach. Bob and Christy started reading through Francis Shaffer’s Bible studies together, and that was when Christy finally began to comprehend the fullness of the gospel message.

“What really gripped me was seeing the logic of an integrated perspective of my faith,” says Christy. “I think I would have fallen away without the vision of this thing that was going to demand my whole life. I couldn’t stand logical inconsistencies—anything less than that whole-life kind of gospel wasn’t going to speak to me.”

Beside’s Bob’s mentoring influence, the regular contact with itinerant CCO staff worker Pete Steen was essential to Christy’s faith development. “If it hadn’t been for Pete’s ministry at Allegheny, and at the conferences that his work with older staff started, my involvement with CCO would not have continued. I lived for his weekly classes. They helped me sort through a lot of marginal and actually secular perspectives I was being taught, and they gave me a truly biblical ‘creation, fall and redemption’ perspective of the gospel.”

After graduating from Allegheny, Christy and Bob started dating and eventually got married. Christy served for a time as the CCO’s Director of Training, and she was one of the founders of the Pittsburgh Urban Christian School, which operates out of an integrated Christian curriculum. Today, the Wauzzinskis live in Muncie, Indiana, where they are active members and leaders at First Presbyterian Church. Christy teaches fourth and fifth grade students at the Laboratory School at Ball State University, and she supervises other teachers and has the opportunity to write her own curriculum.

“The time I spent with the CCO, as a student and a staff person, shapes how I approach nearly everything I do. It shaped my growth as a believer, parent, and leader,” she says. “It keeps me trying to find ways to express who I am and who the Lord of my life is in ways that are acceptable to express, even in a public school.

“I think it was crucial for me to come to Christ in college—because of the way my mind works, I was very ripe for the picking for somebody. I would have picked something else to commit my life to. It might have been drugs, or I might have given my life to an idea, like Marxism or a philosophy which would have countered the idea of God. I’m not sure I would have come to Christ through another kind of campus ministry. I appreciated and responded to the academic integrity of the CCO. That was huge for me.”