After graduating from Michigan and working in my family’s Detroit-based business, I am beginning my 43rd year on Campus Crusade staff, and my 32nd year at UW. Jacquie’s and my focus is the UW marching band where I was a field assistant for 13 years, and where we now oversee a 35+ person group called LifeSkills. We are also asking the Lord to use us to help reopen a ministry in the fraternity and sorority system, and among the UW faculty. I’m humbled by the fact that God chooses to keep using me in the lives of students, especially here at Madison where we find the sharpest minds and huge lifetime leadership potent the U. of I.ial. What keeps me going is when the spiritual lights go on in a student’s mind and he “gets it”, and he places his trust in Christ. We have four children, four grandsons, and one granddaughter. Two of our children graduated from UW-Madison and were involved with Campus Crusade. Interesting facts: I have been the UW campus director on three different occasions; I conducted a private funeral on the Rose Bowl field on New Years day, 1994. Ask me about it sometime!
Jacquie Tanner:
At the end of my junior year at the University of Illinois, Campus Crusade spoke in my sorority house and I heard for the first time that God desired a personal relationship with me. My life had been consumed by performance and perfectionism, much of it due to growing up in a dysfunctional family, but during that talk I learned that I did not have to perform to gain God’s favor. I simply had to receive Christ’s free gift of forgiveness provided for me by his death on the cross. This was great news! That night I thought there must be hundreds of other college students who would like to know God personally if only they knew how. Part of my journey as a Christian has been learning to deal with the brokenness of my past that resulted in feelings of unworthiness and depression. I have seen how God has used difficult experiences to help me understand his incredible love and grace in my life. He has used me to help college women struggling with these same issues to find freedom in Christ. I’m excited to still be in campus ministry, especially at Wisconsin, because I know there continue to be very gifted students here who are searching like I was, and who will want to know Christ.
