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Walt Mueller

walt_mueller.jpg“It was transformational for me to have a relationship with someone older, wiser, and more mature who took an interest in me,” says Walt Mueller, Founder and President of the Center for Parent/Youth Understanding. “It instilled in me a desire to invest myself in people throughout the course of my life.”

Walt first met his mentor, CCO staff worker Lowell Meek, when Walt was a student at Geneva College and Lowell was his residence hall director. “My sophomore year, Lowell formed a discipleship group and invited me to participate,” remembers Walt. “I met with him fairly regularly the last three years of college, and that’s really how I became more exposed to the ministry of the CCO.

“Lowell modeled for me the need for spiritual discipline and a deeper sense of what it means to be a follower of Christ. The whole idea of integrating our faith into all of life—I more or less grew up with that, but the CCO defined it for me in a way that made sense. I caught that more deeply as a student and later as a staff person, and for the last 30 years, it’s made me miserable about everything I see around me, because so few people in the church have it or have even heard of that vision of life. My time with the CCO nurtured a passion in me to speak it and teach it and preach it.”

That is exactly what Walt has been doing, in one way or another, since his 1978 graduation from Geneva College. That year, Walt came on staff with the CCO to reach out to students at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown in cooperation with a local Methodist congregation, where he was also doing youth ministry.

“I did both youth and college ministry during my time in Johnstown, and I felt called more and more to youth ministry,” Walt says. So after three years on CCO staff in Johnstown, he went on to pursue a degree from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

“I was doing youth ministry at a church in Philadelphia when some parents approached me to help them figure out the prevailing youth culture so that they could better understand how to connect with their kids.” That was the genesis of what Walt has been doing since 1990, when he decided to start a ministry called the Center for Parent/Youth Understanding.

Today, Walt and his wife, Lisa, live in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where they have raised their four children and where the CP/YU headquarters are located. They are active members of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Lancaster, but Walt’s busy travel and speaking schedule makes it challenging to hold any formal leadership positions. He is on the road, both nationally and internationally, at least nine months of the year, speaking to both Christian and secular audiences. And there are approximately 6,000 hits to the website everyday.

“We take the CCO’s theology of God redeeming all areas of life and get it in the hands of our broad constituency,” says Walt. “We’ve worked hard to be responsible and do excellent work full of integrity—a lot of our work isn’t faith-based but non-sectarian.” The influence of CPYU stretches from major organizations around the country, like Youth for Christ and Christian Schools International, to the U.S. Department of Justice, where Walt is just starting to do training for grantees for the faith-based initiative.

“We do a conference every year in Indiana which is a non-sectarian presentation on youth culture. We try to inform and encourage them by telling stories like the parable of the Good Samaritan. One of their leaders commented to me once that, ‘The thing I love about you guys is that you have a way of talking about God without talking about God.’”

“So much of what I experienced with the CCO—as a student, through staff training and so on—is still unfolding for me today. It is fluid and alive, and I draw from it all the time—what we heard and read, people we knew and how they lived their lives. At CPYU, we’ve been able to cast a vision for Kingdom living and integrated faith, the good theology of faith and culture that I learned at the CCO. All of it is being lived out and talked about in everything we do, and we reach a broad base of people who don’t have a theology that embraces anything.

“Vocationally, three institutions have had a huge influence on what and how we do what we do: Geneva College, the CCO, and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. The fingerprints of those three are all over everything we’re doing and the way that we’re doing it. I feel blessed to have been a part of those three places at the time that I was.”