Spend a few minutes across a table from Gene and Lisa Fant, and you’ll appreciate that humor is part of the equation in getting to know North Greenville University’s new first couple.
Ask about his earliest childhood memories of Mississippi, and he’ll say, “Pine trees, rattlesnakes and tornadoes.”
Ask her what first attracted her to him, and she’ll say it was his tie. “It was very colorful.”
“It was a Ralph Lauren Polo paisley tie,” he counters, if a little defensively. “I still remember. I had it for years.”
She smiles and nods. “He wore very nice ties.”
Gene Fant and Lisa Williams met in the fall of 1987 at an orientation for new teachers in Gloucester, Va., while standing in line to take their state-mandated tuberculosis tests. A church cookout followed a couple of weeks later, and they began dating. A year later, they were engaged; six months after that, in 1989, they were married.
They moved to New Orleans, where Gene completed a master of divinity degree in biblical languages at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and began working on a Ph.D. in English at the University of Southern Mississippi. Lisa taught school and pursued a master’s degree in English literature. The couple graduated on the same day in 1995, and Gene joined the faculty of Mississippi College.
In 1998, Lisa gave birth to twins, Ethan and Emily, an event her husband describes as the “baby jackpot.” The couple had been dealing with infertility issues but had seen God bless them with a pregnancy, an experience they chronicled in a book, “Expectant Moments: Devotions for Expectant Parents” (Zondervan, 1999).
(Ethan and Emily graduated from high school in 2016. They now are gap-year students at Impact 360 Institute, a program in biblical worldview and leadership development, founded by John and Trudy Cathy White, who is the daughter of Chick-fil-A founder Truett Cathy. Fant serves on the institute’s board of directors.)
Fant, who was sure from the time he was a young boy that he wanted to be a college professor, pursued a career in academia while Lisa stayed home with their children and worked part-time teaching, writing and editing. Gene rose through the leadership ranks at Mississippi College, then Union University and Palm Beach Atlantic University, where he serves as the school’s provost and chief academic officer. He will begin his official duties as North Greenville University’s eighth president in June.
If humor is a big part of his persona (“I tell a lot of dad jokes”), embedded in his spiritual substrate are his faith (“I’m a very optimistic person because of the faith I have in Christ”) and his happy memories of growing up as the son of a pastor and a mother who was a singer/songwriter/radio host.
Fant’s father and grandfather were both Baptist pastors in Laurel, Miss., but when Gene was 4 years old, his dad answered a call to become a church planter under the auspices of the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board. Over the next seven years, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, he established nine churches in Fredonia, N.Y., not far from Buffalo.
During those early years in New York, Fant attended church services at a Johnny Carson suit factory, among rows of sewing machines and stacks of pants. Later, when his parents’ home doubled as a church meeting house, Gene and his brother, Steve, answered their dad’s call to salvation in Christ, walking forward among the folding chairs set up in their parents’ living room.
“When the weather was right,” Fant said, new believers were baptized in a kiddy pool in their backyard rather than in nearby Lake Erie, which, he said, was by turns either frozen over or “bursting into flames” from pollution.
Later, the church bought a baptistry and stored it in his family’s garage while the new church building was under construction. Fant’s dad baptized people in the garage as fellow church members looked on from the driveway. “I know the neighbors thought we were nuts,” Fant said.
After seven years of service in Fredonia, Fant’s father was called to Ivy Memorial Baptist Church in Hampton, Va., a military town, where he served for 21 years. Fant spent his teenage years playing sports and music and being “a typical pastor’s kid.” He also was in a band with his brother and his mother; they sometimes provided special music when his dad preached at area revival services.
Fant admits he often “got into scraps” as a teen, especially when playing sports. But he says he received “great mentoring” from church members at Ivy Memorial. “Man, we had some good deacons at that church who were really patient with me.”