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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.”
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Article
A Response to Paul Santmire: The Lutheran Liberal Arts College and Care for the Earth
Arthur A. Preisinger
No. 4 · Winter 1998
Preisinger commends much of Paul Santmire’s earlier essay—the critique of the “back-to-nature” cult, the call for a holistic environmental ethos, the suggestion of a cosmic liturgical praxis—but takes issue with Santmire’s reading of classical Lutheran social ethics. He argues that the two kingdoms doctrine was not a systematic Lutheran treatise (the term itself became common only in the 1930s), that the doctrine’s misuse by some twentieth-century German theologians does not condemn its proper use, and that the South African Council of Churches actually deployed the doctrine (correctly interpreted) against apartheid. Drawing on Karl Hertz, Ulrich Duchrow, Tom Strieter, and F. Edward Cranz, Preisinger defends the doctrine as complementary duality—left hand and right hand of God, governances to be distinguished but never separated—and concludes with Bill Lazareth that the skeletons in the Lutheran closet are not Luther but departures from Luther.
-
Article
The Breadth and the Depth: Dimensions of Christian-Muslim Relations at Educational Institutions of the ELCA
Mark N. Swanson
No. 33 · Spring 2011
Swanson reflects on the spatial metaphors of depth and breadth that shape Lutheran higher education and argues that the study of Islam and real conversation between Christians and Muslims can contribute to both the broadening of horizons and the deepening of faith, drawing on his experience at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago and pointing to hospitality as a Christian practice in which depth and breadth come together.
-
Article
The Church in Education? Education in the Church? Ten Theses on Why These Questions Matter
Leonard G. Schulze
No. 21 · Summer 2005
Writing in the months before the August 2005 Churchwide Assembly that will decommission DHES, Schulze frames his vision for the division as ten Lutheran-style theses, each followed by Luther’s catechetical question “What does this mean?” He argues that critical thinking and moral deliberation are in the Lutheran gene pool; that Luther’s devotion to learning was an expression of Christian vocation; that the rise of the research university and the binary public meaning of “evangelical” have marginalized church-related colleges; that DHES has been wrongly perceived as marginal; and that the reformed concept of vocation must drive the soon-to-be-created program unit for Vocation and Education. An appendix reproduces the 2005 DHES strategic planning overview.
-
Book Review
Paul Dovre, ed.: The Future of Religious Colleges
Baird Tipson
No. 15 · Winter 2002
Tipson, president of Wittenberg University, reviews Paul Dovre’s edited proceedings of the October 2000 Harvard Conference on the Future of Religious Colleges (Eerdmans, 2002), summarizing essays by Douglas Sloan on the failure of the “two-realm theory of truth,” George Marsden on faith-shaped scholarship, DeAne Lagerquist, Father David O’Connell, Mark Noll, Robert Benne, Mark Roche on Notre Dame, Joel Carpenter on neo-Calvinist Kuyperianism, and Mark Schwehn on a Lutheran “college-related church” and the centrality of vocation. Against Benne’s suggestion that only two or three robustly Lutheran colleges can be sustained, Tipson defends a less robust but still authentically Lutheran model embodied at places like Wittenberg, Gettysburg, and Roanoke, arguing for the enlightenment commitment to subjecting all truth claims to rigorous criticism and for hiring Marsden-style faith-shaped scholars rather than counting Lutheran heads.
-
Article
Access, Accessibility, & Change: A Call for Trustworthy Leadership in Higher Education
Emma Jones
No. 60 · Fall 2024
Jones surveys the converging pressures on higher education — cost, the enrollment cliff, shifting demographics, and declining public confidence — and uses Reichheld and Dunlap’s four factors of trust (transparency, capability, reliability, humanity) to call campus leaders to rebuild trustworthy leadership from the inside out.
-
Article
The Marks of an ELCA College: One Bishop's Reflections
Stanley Olson
No. 15 · Winter 2002
Olson, speaking as a bishop and “Harness Boy” whose job is to keep the church’s connections working, replaces his original four-noun outline (fealty, ingenuity, insouciance, focus) with eight marks the ELCA should be able to observe in its colleges: intentional Lutheran identity, significant Lutheran presence, Christian faith at every table, freedom of inquiry, coaching toward vocation, gravity and grace, nurtured community, and excellence by its own standards. Drawing on his survey of all twenty-eight ELCA college mission statements (two tables) and on Darrell Jodock and Mark Edwards, he argues that the Lutheran connection must be made explicit in mission, marketing, and faculty searches, and closes with six reciprocal expectations the colleges should hold of the ELCA—commissioner, mature parent, supporter of adventurous teenagers, advocate, steward of graduates, and a church faithful to its own Lutheran mission.