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Valerie Greenlee

greenlee_valerie.jpg“We love to tell stories, and our story often looks a little strange to people watching us,” says Valerie Greenlee. “We sometimes make ‘peculiar’ choices; for instance, deciding to move our young family into a poor, inner-city neighborhood of Pittsburgh out of concern for our children’s safety. We feared more for our children not seeing the connection between faith and action than for their physical safety. Choices like this gave us the opportunity to respond to the question of ‘Why?’ with ‘Jesus.’

“For example, as I sidled through Pittsburgh Task Force officers and handcuffed gang members one morning with Sarah and Justin on our way to their bus stop, an elderly neighbor told me, ‘Your husband is either one of the bravest white men I’ve ever known or one of the dumbest.’ My answer was, ‘No, he just has the biggest God you’ve ever known.’”

Valerie and Mark Greenlee met as students at Allegheny College in the late 1970s, where they were both involved in the CCO’s ministry. Today, the Greenlees live in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Valerie serves as an Administrative Assistant for Cleveland Heights/University Heights City School District, and Mark is an attorney with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. They are the parents of two grown children.

Valerie connected to the CCO’s ministry even before she arrived on campus as a student, since her older brother was a student at Allegheny and was involved in the ministry and had introduced to her other involved students.

“When I arrived in front of my Brooks dorm room on move-in day, two of those friends, Kim and Lee, were my RAs. Within hours, they had spread the word about CCO, and at least a dozen girls on my floor ended up as CCO-ers. I led a small-group Bible study during my sophomore year and won the fellowship Bake-Off with a mouth-watering blueberry pie!”

Between fellowship opportunities on campus and the annual Jubilee conference, Valerie left Allegheny feeling prepared to live as a Christian in the so-called real world.

“Most notably for our future lives, we were strongly influenced the year the keynote speaker was Tom Skinner,” she says. “Jubilee conferences solidified our belief in the comprehensive reach of the gospel into all areas of life.”

Mark and Valerie have been leaders in the communities where they have lived, as well as in the churches they have attended throughout the years. “We have always encouraged our churches to see the gospel as something very big, extending beyond the walls of the church and destroying the distinctions between ‘sacred’ (us) and ‘secular’ (them). We have participated in efforts to house the homeless, feed the hungry, protect the unborn, engage popular culture, and use our financial resources faithfully. We continue to long for a church where the gospel is personal enough to be about ‘Christ in me’ and public enough to be about ‘Thy kingdom come.’”