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Ken MacLeod

macleod-ken.jpg“I remember a friend at Messiah saying, ‘Let’s face it, we’re all just in college to increase our market value,’” Ken MacLeod remembers. “I didn’t like that assessment, but I didn’t have an intelligent response. Being involved with the CCO’s ministry as a student, and later as a staff member, helped me to articulate a response. Even today, my relationship with God continues to be all about purpose. Why are we here? What is the point?”

Ken transferred into Messiah College as a sophomore in the late 1980s after spending a year at a British Bible college. He first made a commitment to Christ as a five-year-old attending Vacation Bible School, but it was during his college years that he began to really take hold and understand his faith.

“While in England, I started understanding more and more about God’s claims on my life,” Ken says. “But it was during my time at Messiah that the CCO ministry helped fill in what it meant that God had those claims. The CCO’s coherent global philosophy made sense from top to bottom—from evangelism and conversion to what it means to live out our Christian faith in all of life. It provided a full picture. Messiah would have been a more confusing and frustrating place without the CCO telling me that my faith is supposed to be about my life today. Faith is relevant in everything, even in how we approach our school work.”

During his time at Messiah, Ken served as a resident assistant under CCO staff member and resident director, Doug Bradbury, and during the summer of 1990, he participated in the CCO-sponsored Christian leadership development program, the Ocean City Beach Project. He went on a short-term mission trip to Haiti and attended the Jubilee conference. And a couple of years after graduating from Messiah with his degree in communications, Ken came on staff with the CCO, first serving students at Geneva College and later working for the CCO’s training department.

Today, Ken and his wife, Lynette, are raising their three children in Pittsburgh’s East End, where they are intentionally involved in their neighbors’ lives. They are members of Bellefield Presbyterian Church, where Ken has taught adult Sunday school classes and currently serves as an elder and the chair of the University Council: Bellefield is a hub of CCO ministry to students at the University of Pittsburgh. And since 2007, Ken has served as Program Director for TWOgether Pittsburgh, a marriage preparation and enrichment program.

“I am able to comfortably talk about the marriage relationship and the deeply Christian foundation of it without explicitly quoting Bible verses,” says Ken. “I believe that Scripture provides the foundation of what everyone should know about doing marriage, but they just don’t do it. It’s like weight loss—we know that in order to lose weight, we need to eat less and exercise more. It’s just a matter of doing it. The community sites we use to do our programs are churches; our goal is to equip someone at each site to continue doing this programming after we leave.”

Ken credits the CCO with helping him to understand the biblical foundations for all areas of life, and to be able to communicate that to people—from the students he interacts with at church, to the couples he counsels at work, to his neighbors who have never set foot in a church building. “I’m not afraid to teach or train people who are clearly smarter than me,” he says. “The CCO gave me a clear understanding that everyone is gifted differently and has a different role, and they modeled for me that education doesn’t have to be hierarchical. I teach PhDs in my Sunday school class, which gives me a healthy sense of self and makes me realize that it’s really the Scripture that needs to teach.”