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Yvonne Valenza

valenza_yvonne.jpg“When I came to college, I barely knew what it meant to be a Christian, and I was hungering to know more,” says Yvonne Valenza, who had made a commitment to Christ just a year before she graduated from high school. “Throughout college, I attend several Bible studies that [CCO staff member] Ronaldo led through my church. He also took me and some other students to the Leadership Advance weekend at Penn State, and that really fleshed out my understanding that God could use anyone for his purposes, and use their particular skills to do it; there wasn’t some mold that I had to fit into to make a difference.”

Yvonne met Ronaldo when she was a student at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, and while she was primarily involved with another ministry group on campus, she appreciated Ronaldo’s approach of intense discipleship.

“Generally speaking, my background was of the un-churched kind, which meant that I had a lot of stereotypes about Christians and knew squat about the Bible and what it meant to be a Christian,” Yvonne says. “By God’s grace and His Holy Spirit working in me, I had a hunger to learn more about God and earnestly desired to find out what it meant to live as someone following the ways of Jesus. Campus ministry was God’s way to work in my life and connect me to a safe community where there were older Christians who wanted to see my faith flourish. Through Bible studies and mentoring, connecting to a local church and being involved in Christian community, God was there to help me make decisions and avoid typical college entanglements that are glorified as the ‘must-have college experience.’”

When Yvonne graduated from Kutztown in 2006, she joined CCO staff herself to reach out to art students in Philadelphia at the University of the Arts and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Today, Yvonne and her husband, Scott, continue to live in Philadelphia where they are active in Liberti Church and where Yvonne works as a receptionist for a veterinary hospital.

“When I was at Kutztown, a fellow student let me borrow a book that Ronaldo had given to him called Creation Regained, and that book totally blew me away!” Yvonne remembers. “The idea that art is a legitimate Christian activity—without being relegated to Christian subculture—has been so revolutionizing for me that it’s shaped the way I create and think about art. This also informs the way I view my husband’s passion, which is music, and the way he intends to follow that as a God-given vocation. The CCO really helped to shape a more holistic view of my faith, rather than centralizing it in a Christian bubble.”

Yvonne remains grateful for the CCO’s influence in her life, both as a student and a staff member. “If the CCO weren’t a piece of my college career, I know that I would likely not have gone into ministry—or maybe I would have, but in an entirely different context. I probably would continue to think that living in the city would be awful, and continue to dwell in the suburbs. I might not even be married, since the whole reason I met my husband was through a CCO Support Raising venture!

“I think that it also would have been exponentially more difficult to embrace my gifts as an artist while remaining faithful to Christ. I more than likely would have given up art, with a lot of heartache, believing it to be a ‘lesser’ calling than ministry or doing some other type of work. While I would have still been involved in a college ministry, some key ideas about God creating all things would have been missing. The CCO taught me that ministry should be something we do no matter what our job is; there are always going to be people that need to experience the love of Christ.”