Throughout the 2023-24 academic year, Lancaster Bible College | Capital Seminary & Graduate School will celebrate our 90th anniversary! Here, we introduce our community to “90 Faces of LBC” each week. Keep up with all the news and events of our 90th year, read stories and more at lbc.edu/90.
LBC alumnus Jim Strange (’85) began his college baseball career at the age of 36!
Jim Strange | ‘God Is Faithful!’
In the mid-1980s, Jim Strange (’85) was a 36-year-old father of three and a college senior. That may not seem like the perfect timing for a collegiate baseball career, but Jim hit the diamond at Lancaster Bible College anyway. Despite being the oldest on the team by more than a few years, Jim’s baseball-playing days are among his most cherished LBC memories.
In fact, Jim brought his LBC baseball jacket—it still fits like a glove, by the way—and a team trophy to the alumni baseball gathering at Homecoming 2023.
Perhaps those later-in-life baseball workouts helped keep him spry. Today, at the age of 75, the Hershey, Pa., resident continues to serve as a volunteer Salvation Army Soldier in Harrisburg along with his wife, Pam. It’s not a post they would have ever imagined for themselves, but the couple was inspired after an extended family member attended the ministry’s adult rehab center while in recovery from drug addiction.
“God spoke to me while we were attending a service one Sunday morning in 2005 saying, ‘I can use you here,’” Jim recalled. “We have had opportunities to work with the center’s beneficiaries, to teach Sunday school classes, play and sing in the worship band and chorus, fill pulpit supply during the absence of the Corps Officers, and I teach through the Old Testament on Wednesday evenings.”
In 2018, Jim retired from full-time work as a transportation manager and delivery driver for a Harrisburg company. But he’s still not slowing down; he continues to work part-time as a security officer for Hershey Entertainment & Resorts. He and Pam have enjoyed celebrating high school and college graduations with a few of their six grandchildren.
As a donor to the college for nearly 40 consecutive years, Jim says one favorite phrase from former LBC president Dr. Gilbert A. Peterson has been on repeat throughout his life: “God is faithful!”
“I find it hard to believe it has been this long since graduation from LBC, but during those years, God has left me in the pasture, learning about and observing His ‘sheep,’” Jim shared. “I have not yet stopped learning about His people.”