The Lilly Endowment has in recent years invested significantly in church-related colleges and universities in order to strengthen vocational discernment and church ministry throughout the country. Nine colleges affiliated with the Lutheran church received Lilly grants. Luther College, Decorah, IA, Augsburg College, Minneapolis, MN, and Augustana College, Rock Island, IL were three colleges of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) of the more than 80 colleges across the country who received Lilly Endowment support. Each college has developed its own distinctive programs and structures to help students discern and commit themselves to their vocational callings.
In June 2004, key leaders of all the ELCA colleges that received Lilly grants gathered at Luther Seminary, St. Paul to discuss the strategic significance of these grants for Lutheran higher education and to explore their wider relationships to the church. This meeting also focused on the feasibility of conducting a demonstration project to rigorously study the effectiveness of vocation programs in collaboration with Luther Seminary’s Centered Life project and Wilder Research, St. Paul, MN. The Centered Life initiative is a multi-year project located at Luther Seminary’s Center for Lifelong Learning that seeks to strengthen the capacity of churches to inspire, equip, and send church members into their work, family, and community life in a way that is centered in their faith and their values.
This 2004 meeting concluded with the decision to propose a three college project to the Lilly Endowment in which the assessment and skill-building tools developed as part of the Centered Life project would be adapted and expanded for used on college campuses to assess vocation program effectiveness. Luther College was selected to serve as the lead institution and project administrator. Wilder Research was selected as the collaborating partner for research design and implementation.
Specifically, the Called for Life project undertook a rigorous examination of the tools, resources, programs, and structures at each of the three partnering colleges (Luther, Augsburg, Augustana) to answer the following questions:
- Have campuses increased students’ exposure to and knowledge of calling and vocation?
- Has exposure to campus programs increased students’ understanding of call and vocation?
- Are students who have been exposed to these programs more likely to report that they have identified vocations, callings, or plans for incorporating their faith and their values into their post college lives?
- What program elements appear to have the most promise of making a difference in students’ discernment of callings and preparation for vocations?
In September 2005 the Lilly Endowment awarded a 3-year grant of $278,437 for an impact assessment of vocational exploration programs and thus the Called for Life initiative was begun. Our collaboration on the Called for Life project has solidified our commitment to continuing vocational discernment on our campuses, strengthened our inter-institutional connections, and affirmed that cooperation and trust can be fostered in ways we never thought possible. We have also demonstrated the efficacy of using survey methods to evaluate and strengthen programs, but most importantly we have affirmed the value of the investment made by the Lilly Endowment to engage college students in the consideration of how their talents and gifts can be applied to respond to the needs of the world for the common good. The results of the Called for Life project are highlighted in the following pages.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
Wilhelm traces his decades-long enthusiasm for the Lutheran doctrine of vocation from his St. Olaf days reading Luther’s Open Letter to the German Nobility, notes Parker Palmer’s lecture-circuit ministry and Mark C. Taylor’s reflections on calling, and argues that ELCA colleges should claim vocation as the defining mark of Lutheran higher education—yet warns that vocation risks becoming “the program du jour” rather than a permanent hallmark.
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Article
Called for Life
Brian Pittman, Ellen Shelton, Greg Owen
Owen, Shelton, and Pittman of Wilder Research present the key findings of the Called for Life study, comparing the class of 2007 “Lilly graduates” from Luther, Augsburg, and Augustana to a pre-Lilly cohort from the class of 2001. They report that Lilly graduates were more than twice as likely to associate vocation with “calling” rather than “just a job,” and they identify four common ingredients of effective programming: relationships with caring adults, experiential learning outside the classroom, vocation-infused courses, and peer relationships within a pervasive campus culture of vocational exploration.
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Article
A College with a Calling: Vocation at Augsburg
Mark D. Tranvik
Tranvik narrates Augsburg’s decade of deep engagement with vocation—from President William Frame’s 1997 visioning process and the 2002 two-million-dollar Lilly grant for Exploring Our Gifts, through five Lutheran theological principles (vocation includes the whole life, lives for the sake of others, ranks all callings equal, cannot be reduced to ethics, and engages public life), to the Wilder Foundation’s Called for Life assessment and the 2008 founding of the Augsburg Center for Faith and Learning under Dr. Tom Morgan and the Bernhard Christensen Chair held by Dr. David Tiede.
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Article
Sense of Vocation
Ruth R. Kath
Kath describes Luther College’s Sense of Vocation program, organized into three components: General Program Initiatives (Vocation Visitors such as Parker Palmer, the Faith and Learning Workshop, self-directed reading grants, publications, and travel funds), the Church Ministry Program (Vocation Fellowships, the DIAKONOS discernment group, seminary visits, alumni discernment retreats, church leader workshops, clergy renewal, and the WIYLDE youth initiative), and the All-Student Vocation Program (Paideia I orientation, Peer Mentors, Capstone curriculum development grants, the Vocation Advising Workshop, and a Vocation Advising Handbook).
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Article
Called to Serve
Robert D. Haak
Haak describes Augustana’s Center for Vocational Reflection (CVR) and its threefold framework of skills/gifts/talents, passions/values, and needs of the community. He surveys the CVR’s Working with Faith group, seminary visits, spiritual companioning, Servant Leader Internships, international travel reflection, and the major Senior Inquiry curriculum revision—then reports the lessons learned at Augustana: that multiple exposures matter more than any single program, that the language of vocation works even for non-religious students, that student-initiated ideas (like Erin Blecha’s Athletes Giving Back) often succeed most, and that the CVR will soon merge into a new Community Engagement Center.
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Article
Professing Religion
John D. Barbour
No. 37 · Spring 2013
Barbour reflects on the vocation of a Professor of Religion at St. Olaf College, asking when and how a teacher should disclose personal faith in the classroom. Drawing on his graduate teachers Anthony C. Yu and Langdon Gilkey, and on Augustine’s Confessions, Dorothy Day, Malcolm X, C. S. Lewis, and Kathleen Norris, he argues that teaching autobiography invites teaching autobiographically—and that professing religion is finally a matter of how one believes, not just what.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 19 · Summer 2004
Christenson reflects on the scarcity of time in over-committed academic lives and posts a tongue-in-cheek help-wanted advertisement for his own successor as editor. He introduces the issue’s four authors as “three friends and one new acquaintance” whose work addresses Lutheran higher education, the significance of Paul Ricoeur, the implications of being a reformation community, and the perils of teaching ethics.
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Editorial
From the Editor: Why All This Talk About Vocation?
Colleen Windham-Hughes
No. 56 · Fall 2022
Windham-Hughes introduces the Fall 2022 issue built around Mark Wilhelm’s keynote “Why all this talk about vocation?” and previews five panel responses, two first-time conference reflections, and companion pieces on Womanist theology — framing vocation as a call not to privilege but to constructive and corrective work that undoes unjust systems.
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Article
A Lutheran Learning Paradigm
Paul J. Dovre
No. 34 · Fall 2011
Drawing on Hughes and Adrian’s Models of Christian Higher Education and on Ernest Simmons, Darrell Jodock, Tom Christenson, Robert Benne, and Richard Hughes, Dovre sketches a Lutheran learning paradigm shaped by four deep narratives—the biblical, the confessional, the theological, and the vocational—and traces their implications for curriculum (the study of scripture, theology, and vocation), for the religion faculty’s college-wide responsibility, and for pedagogy (moral deliberation, dialectic, paradox, the engagement of faith and the secular disciplines).
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Reflection
Meditation—Band Chapel Service, St. Olaf College
Erik Haaland
No. 7 · Summer 1999
Haaland, a St. Olaf senior, offers a brief Band Chapel meditation that defines art as “the expression of what is deeply human through the manipulation of the physical world” and defends worship—architecture, stained glass, music, eloquence—as an art form requiring our best and most sincere efforts. When the God we worship and the salvation we proclaim do not seem near, artful worship offers not propositions but something real and tangible to hold on to.
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Article
The Vocation of a Lutheran College
L. DeAne Lagerquist
No. 12 · Summer 2001
Lagerquist places the twenty-eight ELCA-affiliated colleges in the context of American higher education from Harvard (1636) through the “old time college,” the post-Civil-War research university, and the postwar expansion—drawing on Christopher Lucas, Philip Schaff’s Neo-Lutheran/moderate/Old Lutheran categorization, Sydney Ahlstrom’s scholastic/pietistic/critical currents, Luther’s appeal to the German nobility, Lewis Hyde’s gift economy, and Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. She proposes five characteristic practices (the school as learning community, study of Bible and Christian tradition, participation in the arts as makers and audience, application of learning in service, and on-campus Christian worship) grounded in Lutheran teaching about grace, image-and-fall, gratitude, and revelation through created “masks,” and four virtues these practices engender in graduates—loving gratitude, faithful wisdom, bold freedom, and hopeful humility.