Trustee profile

After 12 years of Christian school, Todd Witmer ’91 says he’d planned to attend a secular college to change things up. His parents, however, encouraged him to visit just one Christian institution: Messiah College. During the campus visit, he found Messiah’s facilities, campus and classes just clicked for him. 

“God’s hand was in it,” said Witmer. “I feel that was divine intervention.”

Messiah felt like home. He majored in business administration and found Messiah’s professors did an excellent job of speaking into his life, connecting with him as mentors. Living on the third floor of Miller Residence provided him with lifelong friends. 

“I think Messiah was a safe place to figure out who I was and what I believed in,” he said. “You learn that you’re not just getting an education but you’re also there to serve, to get involved.”

With that passion to serve, he’s joining Messiah University’s Board of Trustees to give back to the institution that taught him so much. He has spent the past 30 years growing The Witmer Group, his family masonry contractor business, using the skills he learned at Messiah.

“After I got my degree, I started using all I’d learned at Messiah—business law, marketing, branding, human resources,” he said. “It was the perfect environment to use everything I’d learned. Messiah really prepared me to build the business to employ more than 200 people.”

His education and expertise will prove invaluable as he joins the board’s operations committee to help with strategic planning. More importantly, however, he wants to create a new Messiah Tradition, a “sculpture” made of scrap metal (including a basketball hoop) that mysteriously went missing after he graduated.

“I’m proud of the fact that when I was a senior, we were the last class to have the Messiah Tradition on our Homecoming float. We turned it over to juniors, and I think they stored it in one of the buildings that got torn down,” said Witmer. “My goal as a board member is to see if we can get the Messiah Tradition resurrected and get it going again. As long as we can have ‘Class of 1991’ engraved on it.”