Rev. C. Lane Glaze has been serving as the Director of the Clemson Wesley Foundation and Campus Minister for Clemson UMC since June 2001.

Originally from Charleston, South Carolina, Lane first sensed a call to ministry as a senior in high school at the age of seventeen.  But even though he had been raised in the church and had experienced God’s loving presence throughout his whole life, Lane struggled with the thought of giving ALL of his life in service to God.  As is often the case, he tried his best to ignore this calling when he left for Wofford College after graduating from James Island High School in 1984.

Lane’s years at Wofford were very busy as he played baseball, served as treasurer of Alpha Phi Omega service fraternity and dated his future wife, Anne Gillespie, who was attending the College of Charleston.  In May 1988, Lane graduated Phi Beta Kappa at the top of his class in Accounting.  As co-captain of the baseball team his senior season, Lane was named co-MVP of the team, Academic All-American, and the South Carolina student-athlete of the year for NAIA.  Lane left Spartanburg having worked hard to build a resume that he hoped would bear fruit in the future.  While he was headed for the business world, he also envisioned himself teaching Accounting on a college campus down the road.  

Within seven months after graduation, Lane and Anne were married and living in Charleston, where Lane was working toward his CPA license.  The urge to teach grew stronger, but Lane knew that he would need to return to school, first for an MBA.  In January of 1991, shortly after their first child was born, the Glazes moved to North Carolina where Lane continued to work for the same public accounting firm.  Within several months Lane had visited the business schools at both Chapel Hill and Duke, imagining that he would one day enroll to earn his MBA so that he might fulfill his growing dream of being a college professor.

While Lane’s career in business was growing, his faith and involvement in the life of the church was deepening as well.  Shortly after they married, Anne and Lane had started working with youth in their church, something that Lane continued to do when they moved to North Carolina.  After joining Front Street UMC in Burlington, NC in the spring of 1991, Lane soon began serving on the Evangelism Team.  A year later he chaired that team, and the year after that he was asked to chair the Church Council.  While Lane had tried hard for a number of years to ignore God’s call on his life, God began working through the pastors and members of FSUMC to reassert that claim.  The more time Lane dedicated toward serving God through the church and other local ministries, the more he found himself yearning to serve more.

At the age of 29, Lane was making more money that he ever imagined and had more responsibility than he wanted with a private trust company that he had helped launch in 1992.  Under an employment contract that was soon to expire, he began to reflect on what the next step should be him and his family.  For the first time in his life, Lane began praying a prayer that he had never prayed before: “God, what is it that YOU want me to do with my life?”  After six months of wrestling with God, Lane knew what God was calling him to do: full-time ministry on a college campus.  Within weeks, Lane began to take the often painful steps of leaving his career in business and entering full-time ministry in the United Methodist Church.

Lane eventually did attend Duke, but not for an MBA.  In 2001 he earned his Masters of Divinity from Duke Divinity School.  At the age of 34, Lane was appointed by the UMC to Clemson to work with college students.  Ironically, it had been seventeen years after he first sensed God’s call in his life at the age of
seventeen.

Lane, Grace, Griffin and Anne Glaze in Boston last summer

Throughout his life, Lane has experienced firsthand God’s patience and abiding presence, even when he was knowingly disobedient.  Today, in his role as Campus Minister, Lane seeks to share the Good News of a God who doesn’t give up on us, but who every day seeks to make his loving ways and purposes
known to us all.

Lane, his wife Anne, and their daughters Griffin and Grace, live within walking distance of Clemson University.