Lutherans and Lutheran colleges talk about vocation and calling, often assigning almost mystical or magical qualities to the discernment thereof. When I hear this talk, I sometimes wonder if the discovery involves a voice like the one in Field of Dreams, or perhaps a lightning bolt. I suppose that sometimes it does.
Many are familiar with Frederick Buechner’s oft-cited description of vocation: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Working at a Lutheran college for the last 15 years, I’ve heard college presidents, faculty, and chaplains quote Buechner or come up with their own way of describing what is supposed to happen to an 18 to 22-year-old in college.
The 26 Lutheran colleges and universities have even united around a common mission related to vocation, as articulated in the statement, Rooted and Open. There, they summarize their collective work as follows:
Together, these educational communities train graduates who are called and empowered to serve the neighbor so that all may flourish. This vocation is shared by diverse institutions. While the history of each institution propels it from behind, a shared calling also draws the institutions forward, pulling them into a future that brings wholeness to the world. The Lutheran theological roots that these schools have inherited deepen their educational purpose, inform their educational commitments and anchor their educational priorities.
There is plenty of Biblical and scholarly work that reinforces this claim to vocation, and I consider it a great privilege to serve a Lutheran college and to raise my children in an ELCA congregation. But I do worry a bit about the often grandiose and erudite descriptions of calling and vocation, especially on college campuses.
I’ve been thinking about this since hearing a delightful sermon by Pastor Katy Warren, associate pastor at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Davenport, Iowa, where I am a member. Pastor Katy had the tough job of preaching a sermon through a mask, during a brief in-person, midday service of communion following the derecho (inland hurricane) that clobbered Iowa in August of 2020.
It had been quite a week—100 mile-per-hour winds, splintered trees, decimated crops, days without electricity and other services. Needless to say, we were not prepared and the damage was awful. I didn’t envy Pastor Katy’s assignment to make sense of it all.
She chose to read from 1 Peter 4: 8-11, which was an effective passage for the moment. Verse 10 stood out to me: “Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others.” Pastor Katy then shared stories of line workers from across the nation rushing to Iowa’s rescue, neighbors with power setting up charging stations for those without, strangers with chainsaws helping those with downed trees, restaurants offering freezer space, and other acts of kindness and generosity.
“Were those line workers, neighbors, restaurant owners, and chainsaw-wielding neighbors thinking about meeting the world’s deep need with their deep gladness?”
Following the service, I found myself thinking about how the message related to my own life and the work of Lutheran colleges. Were those line workers, neighbors, restaurant owners, and chainsaw-wielding neighbors thinking about meeting the world’s deep need with their deep gladness? I suppose it’s possible, but I doubt it.
This spring, summer, and into the fall, I’ve witnessed something similar at Augustana College. So many of my amazing colleagues on campus have helped where and when they have been needed throughout the pandemic. People have stepped in and up to help—the athletic trainer-turned-telecounseling outreach coordinator; the counselor now an expert contract tracer; the Sports Information Director now coordinating campus-wide surveillance testing; the hesitant email user now an expert in meeting virtually with all kinds of stakeholders. Seeing such responsiveness has made me wonder about the emphasis we place on calling. Perhaps there is more room to focus on the immediate needs of those around us, while also encouraging the discovery that accompanies vocational reflection.
I believe we should pair our important message about vocation and calling with the kinds of things we witness in the moment, such as the aftermath of the derecho here in Iowa and the campus’s response to the pandemic and changing needs.
Rather than asking college students to identify and follow their path in life, should we simply make a stronger case for responding to the moment? For just showing up, giving what you have, helping exactly where and when needed, no matter what your background?
“Should we simply make a stronger case for responding to the moment?”
We might call it “meeting immediate need with a deep willingness,” or simply, “called to the moment.” For liberal arts students educated as versatile, critical thinkers, it might be a natural impulse. I, for one, think making that case might be the true vocation of a Lutheran college.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
Wilhelm argues that the “hackneyed” expressions of higher education — “you are not just a number,” “the college experience,” “risen to the challenge” — tell the simple truth about NECU institutions even as the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed budgets, employees, and campus life to the breaking point.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn narrates a year of crisscrossing pandemics — Covid-19, economic collapse, partisan politics, and the long pandemic of white supremacy revealed anew by the murder of George Floyd — and argues that Lutheran liberal arts schools, by educating for vocation, are uniquely poised to help students respond with character and capable callings.
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Article
A New Image for an Ancient Call: Lutheran Higher Education Amidst Pandemics Today
Caryn Riswold
Pairing Wartburg’s Lebenskreuz sculpture with the Matthew 25 acts of mercy and the commitments of Rooted and Open, Riswold reads the calls to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, and care for the sick as urgent summons for Lutheran higher education in a year of overlapping pandemics — and as a call to dismantle the structures that produced them.
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Article
Learning from Luther on Covid-19
Carl Hughes
Reading Martin Luther’s 1527 treatise “Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague,” Hughes finds practical and spiritual guidance for a pandemic age: serve the neighbor, follow medical experts, honor those whose vocations put them at risk, and trust that even when we fail, God will not abandon the community.
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Article
Radical Hospitality on Haunted Grounds: Anti-Racism in Lutheran Higher Education
Krista E. Hughes
Writing from Newberry College’s campus on land once home to the Cherokee and within a day’s drive of Mother Emanuel A.M.E., Hughes argues that NECU’s call to “practice radical hospitality” demands that predominately white institutions open themselves to the hauntings of racism — pursuing belonging rather than mere welcome, and risking kenotic transformation of institutional identity itself.
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Article
Activism, Justice, and the Danger of Silence
Dezi Gillon
In conversation with Jason Mahn, Augustana College alumnux Dezi Gillon traces the call to action they felt as a Black student organizing for Black Lives Matter on a predominately white campus — through seminary, art, spirituality, and restorative justice work — and warns white professors that staying silent “actually speaks volumes.”
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Article
Leadership in Lutheran Key at a Time of Pandemics
Deanna Thompson
Thompson draws on Luther’s theology of the cross and Shelly Rambo’s theology of trauma to sketch a Lutheran model of leadership for a season of pandemics — one that is attentive to pain, responsive to need, and intentionally nourished by food, friends, and deep conversation.
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Article
Through Truth to Freedom—by Way of Reconciliation
Paul C. Pribbenow
Reflecting on Augsburg’s 150th-anniversary motto “Through truth to freedom,” Pribbenow argues that in a season of three pandemics — pandemic illness, economic collapse, and the racial sin laid bare by the murder of George Floyd — higher education’s most authentic work is to educate for truth and freedom by way of confession and reconciliation.
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Article
Finding Purpose in Chaos: Reflection In and Beyond the Public Health Classroom
Lena R. Hann
When the pandemic hit her new public health professionalism course, Hann recalibrated her teaching from the “how” of professional preparation to the “why” of vocational reflection — and recounts how Augustana public health students and alumni found purpose in the chaos through food banks, disaster response, palliative care, and research on health inequities.
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Reflection
The Long Pilgrimage of 2020-21
Kara Baylor
Drawing on Martha Stortz’s definition of pilgrimage as “intentional dislocation, for the sake of transformation, where the body teaches the soul,” Baylor invites students and educators worn out by the 2020-21 academic year to ask what is essential, to listen to what their bodies are telling their souls, and to be more open to the transformations the dislocation might still yield.
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Article
Called to Flourish: An Ethic of Care
Mindy Makant
Drawing on Lenoir-Rhyne’s core value of Care, Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, Darrel Jodock’s “Gift and Calling,” and Luther’s plague-era practice of opening his home to the sick, Makant argues that flourishing is interdependent — that self-care is a means to extending care, and that an ethic of care is the meaningful, transformative work to which Lutheran liberal arts education is called.
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Article
Reforming Lutheran Higher Education: Ecclesiological Reflection and Theological Leadership
Brian Beckstrom
No. 46 · Fall 2017
Beckstrom diagnoses an “identity crisis” at ELCA colleges and universities rooted in inherited Enlightenment assumptions and a thin functional ecclesiology, and proposes that a Trinitarian, perichoretic understanding of God offers an ecclesiological foundation that holds together unity and diversity in a pluralistic, post-Christian context.
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Article
Education as a Christian (Lutheran) Calling
Tom Christenson
No. 21 · Summer 2005
Christenson opens with an imaginative reconstruction of early Christian communities as radically egalitarian, pacifist, communitarian gatherings within the Roman Empire and argues that such communities are natural homes for the educational vocation. Naming two temptations for contemporary Christian higher education—the parochial Bible school and “Generic U”—he uses his friend Sig Rauspern’s tree metaphor to insist that a university is Christian in its trunk and roots rather than in grafted-on branches. Drawing on Wendell Berry, Jacob Bronowski, Walter Wink, Douglas John Hall, and his own Gift and Task of Lutheran Higher Education, he names faithful criticism, engaged suspiciousness, simul justus et peccator, and a fallible, love-related Lutheran epistemology as the particular gifts Lutherans bring to the Christian educational calling.
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Article
Gen Z is Made for Lutheran Higher Education
W. Kent Barnds
No. 51 · Spring 2020
Barnds argues that Generation Z’s defining traits — socially responsible, purpose-driven, cost-conscious, culturally open, and tech-expectant — align almost perfectly with the missions of NECU institutions, and offers concrete suggestions (from replacing “vocation” with “purpose” to embracing Gen X parents as co-pilots) for Lutheran colleges seeking to attract and serve this generation.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 53 · Spring 2021
Wilhelm reflects on an NPR report of teenagers’ pandemic diaries and the fraught Christian history of struggling to live out Jesus’s ethic of love, framing the issue as a record of NECU institutions working out how to act for the common good through the pandemic of 2020–2021.
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Article
Responding to Student Hunger at NECU Institutions
Kristen Glass Perez
No. 51 · Spring 2020
Glass Perez recounts how her work as college chaplain at Augustana and Muhlenberg evolved after a student offhandedly declared, “I am always so hungry at this school,” and shares five lessons learned from launching campus pantries, emergency grant programs, and the HOPE Survey to address food insecurity as a defining calling of NECU institutions.
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Article
Of Fathers and Feminism: How One Lutheran Woman Came to a Vocation
Karla G. Bohmbach
No. 14 · Summer 2002
Bohmbach, a recently tenured Susquehanna University feminist biblical scholar one month shy of forty, traces her vocation back through a Vacation Bible School injury, an LCMS upbringing in which only men could preach or preside, her father’s contradictory message that she could do anything while modeling a church that limited women, St. Olaf’s revelation of a Lutheran female face, and a Duke graduate seminar on the History of Feminist Thought with Carol Meyers. Her published feminist work on biblical daughters and on the concubine of Judges 19 is read alongside Kathleen Norris’s account of word-bombardment in church, Michel Tournier on childhood as “ardent confusion,” and her own recent participation as both student and teacher in an Authorized Lay Worship Leaders Program.