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Daniel Dlugos

Dlugos-Dan.jpg“College was a defining period of my life, when my faith and my commitment to Christ became very concrete,” says Daniel Dlugos. “Spending time with Rodney and being a part of STAND helped me move Christianity from being something I believed to something I really knew.”

When Dan started his freshman year at California University of Pennsylvania, he was “half looking, half stumbled into” Christian fellowship. He met CCO staff member Rodney Henderson when he was invited to a friend’s dorm room to watch a movie. By the time he graduated, Dan had served most of his college years as a student leader of STAND, the CCO-sponsored fellowship on campus.

“Being on the STAND leadership team is what helped my faith to become something real,” Dan says. “I was participating in Bible studies, being discipled by Rodney, leading small groups, and discipling other students.”

Dan also attended the Jubilee conference. “At school, I was always in small groups with people I knew pretty well, but at Jubilee, I was interacting with students from other colleges that I had never met before. Many of them had different backgrounds, perspectives, and points of view than I did. This helped me to look at things in a new and fresh way, making a strong impact on my worldview.”

Dan was also inspired by a seminar about living your faith in a secular world. “In college, the environment doesn’t mimic a workplace environment. College is very communal and thought-driven, and a work environment is very results-oriented. That insight really shaped my mindset and made me think, ‘what am I going to do once I graduate? I can’t just live in a commune forever.’ I knew that some of my perspectives would change once I graduated, and the Jubilee conference really helped me prepare for what came next.”

Today, Dan and his wife, Allison, live in Pittsburgh’s South Hills, where they are raising their two young sons. Dan is living his faith out within his family, as a member of Peters Creek Baptist Church, and through his two jobs: one as a communications consultant and one as a youth minister with Youth for Christ Metro Pittsburgh, the ministry through which he came to Christ as a high school student.

“Allison and I got married at the end of college, and we started having to make difficult life decisions. Where will we live? When do we start a family? (Right away!) How do we choose a church community? Being a part of the CCO and STAND at Cal U. gave me the opportunity to think through those things, and to study the Bible and to be discipled while learning to disciple others. None of that would have happened without the CCO’s ministry.”

Dan sometimes wonders how things may have turned out if he hadn’t connected with the CCO. “If I had not gotten together with Rodney and became involved with STAND, I think my worldview would be very ‘American,’” he says. “I said I was a Christian, I had my ‘fire insurance,’ but I was just going to live my life how I wanted to live it. I had no concept of living a life with the intent of serving God and others.

“My understanding during high school was that you go to college to get a degree to get a good job and make decent money. But during those four years at Cal, being a part of the CCO and working with Rodney really allowed me to evaluate my perspectives. I learned that it’s good to work hard and become successful in your career, but that it needs to be balanced with an attitude that puts serving the needs of others ahead of your own. Without the CCO, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to think through my view of the world and what it really means to follow Christ. That may have come along later in life, but that’s where it happened—in college, fresh off of my high school decision to follow Christ.”