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Jefferson Ellis

ellis_jefferson1.jpg“On February first of my junior year, my grandfather passed away,” says Jefferson Ellis, who attended Westminster College as an undergraduate. “I was very close to him, and my grandmother had passed away at the end of my freshman year. I was really struggling.”

At that time, Jefferson was meeting regularly with CCO staff member Drew Elling, who was going through some difficult personal issues of his own. “Drew and I got together one day, and he asked what I was doing,” Jefferson remembers. “I had band practice, classes, and a lot of studying to do. Drew told me to skip it all. He said, ‘I’m taking you home.’

“My family lived about an hour and a half away in a small town in Ohio. Drew drove me home and we had dinner with my parents, and then we went to my brother’s high school band concert before driving back to school. It couldn’t have been that exciting for Drew, but it was just what I needed, and I was so grateful that he took all of that time out for me.”

That’s also when Jefferson figured out that he wanted to minister to others the way Drew had ministered to him. Jefferson graduated with a degree in music in 1996, and he joined CCO staff a year later to work with students at Youngstown State University. Jefferson worked for the CCO, at YSU and at Washington and Jefferson College, off and on until 2006. Today, he and his wife Lisa are raising four children and Jefferson is Pastor of Hanover Presbyterian Church in Beaver County, Pennsylvania.

From early in his freshman year, when his Resident Director, CCO staff member Keith TerHaar, invited him to participate in a Bible study, Jefferson plugged into the CCO’s ministry. Between his sophomore and junior years, he participated in the Ocean City Beach Project, which he now calls “one of the best experiences of my life,” and throughout his years as CCO staff person, Jefferson joked that “the Jubilee conference ruined my life,” because it caused him to ask hard questions and not be satisfied with the status quo.

“I learned what it meant to integrate my faith into all areas of my life—classes, work, friendships,” says Jefferson. “The CCO refocused and centered me. I remember taking on too many extracurricular activities, and I had all these assignments to do, and Drew and Keith would help me prioritize; they asked me what God was doing in my life. The one-on-one mentoring relationships with CCO staff members shaped my whole college experience. Things would have been quite different without that.”

The way Jefferson approaches his work as a pastor is largely shaped by how he experienced and did ministry with the CCO.

“One of the first things we did when we came here was to invite congregation members to have pizza with the pastor,” he says. “We invited them to play football with us in our backyard. People thought that was revolutionary, but to us, it just made sense. My involvement with the CCO made me think more incarnationally. Being on CCO staff and being part of the ministry as a student was better preparation for pastoral ministry than seminary.”