An Ecotone is a transitional area between two ecosystems, containing characteristics of both. Teeming with life, that is, mingling with other species from ecosystems different from their own, it is also a space where new plant and animal species are birthed. Often found where one body of water meets another (think lagoons), you can find creatures adapted to salt water evolving to live in freshwater. It’s an ecological wonder. It is also theologically rich; the space where our creator God continues to speak new life into being. A place where kairos moments are born and, if we’re open, new experiences, life, and possibilities are revealed.
It is also a space we are living in as Church and Body today.
In John 6:31, the crowd tells Jesus “Our ancestors ate manna in the wilderness” and Jesus replies, “Very truly I tell you…it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world….I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”
When looking at the Greek tense, scripture tells us “manna” is not simply a story that resides in the faithful past of our forebears, but is an ongoing gift of God in the present. God’s liberating power is not confined to the past tense but is seen in the ever-present action of love. It is a life-giving power that originates in heaven and comes to us through Christ.
In ministry, it is common to hear a longing for the past–a time when things were “more stable” and when people “weren’t so distracted.” A time when the pews were full and the budget covered our vision. Those of us in ministry for less than 15 years have a gift—we’ve never seen or experienced times of stability in the Church. The world of our adult years has always been in flux. We have never known a time when there was harmony (perhaps fictional) between the Church and the world.
We were born in the ecotone.
“The world of our adult years has always been in flux. We have never known a time when there was harmony (perhaps fictional) between the Church and the world.”
In the kingdom of God’s ecotone, people are fed and nourished by manna from heaven…giving us new life here and now. Now, this takes us to a new ecosystem: a place where heaven and earth become one through the ONE. Ruach is breathing new life into being before our eyes…using our minds and bodies to speak the TRUTH. Ruach is creating kairos moments where we ourselves are evolving into something new. We have characteristics of what we once were, mixing with the beauty of God’s creation, and seeing within ourselves that we are being made new.
Ministry of this era is unbound–we don’t know what is to come, or how the Church will emerge. Life in the ecotones is all we have known. The previous freshwater ecosystem can’t support the new life being formed in the salty water. Yet all that is to come isn’t quite ready for the open ocean either. Something new is being nourished and emerging.
We aren’t called to minister in the world of the past. We won’t be equipped for the ministry that is to come in 50 years. Instead, we are empowered to nurture the ecotone that is RIGHT NOW. We can see the previous freshwater world that no longer exists, while also catching glimpses of the open ocean that will be.
“We aren’t called to minister in the world of the past. We won’t be equipped for the ministry that is to come in 50 years. Instead, we are empowered to nurture the ecotone that is RIGHT NOW. We can see the previous freshwater world that no longer exists, while also catching glimpses of the open ocean that will be.”
So live into THIS ecotone. Live into the LIFE God is creating. Feast on the manna and water of life that flows from above. Know that you are called and equipped by God.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Lamont Anthony Wells
Wells introduces So That All May Belong: Lutheran Roots for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice as a theological and institutional articulation of NECU’s commitments, and previews four accompanying essays that frame vocation as a societal responsibility rooted in justice and not solely an individual pursuit.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes
Windham-Hughes uses Fred Rogers’ neighborhood as a living embodiment of a Lutheran understanding of vocation — seeing dignity in each person, offering one’s gifts generously, and trusting that the well-being of the neighborhood is intrinsically connected to the well-being of every neighbor.
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Institutional Focus
So That All May Belong: Lutheran Roots for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice
Altheia Richardson, Angie Hambrick, Caryn Riswold, Colleen Windham-Hughes, Deanna Thompson, Marcia Bunge, Robert Clay
The full NECU statement grounds DEIJ work in Luther’s 16th-century reforms and Lutheran theological claims about the image of God, equal dignity, and the limits of human knowing — offering definitions, Lutheran roots, and calls to action for diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, with belonging as the outcome of DEIJ at work.
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Institutional Focus
Scriptures That Inspire Work for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice
Altheia Richardson, Angie Hambrick, Caryn Riswold, Colleen Windham-Hughes, Deanna Thompson, Marcia Bunge, Robert Clay
A companion list of biblical verses — from Genesis 1:27 and Galatians 3:28 to Micah 6:8 and Luke 4:18-19 — that grounded NECU’s drafting of So That All May Belong, organized by the four DEIJ commitments and offered as an invitation to share other texts that ground and sustain the work.
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Institutional Focus
So That All May Belong: Lutheran Roots for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice [abridged]
Altheia Richardson, Angie Hambrick, Caryn Riswold, Colleen Windham-Hughes, Deanna Thompson, Marcia Bunge, Robert Clay
A condensed version of the NECU statement that consolidates Lutheran theological grounding for DEIJ and a single combined call to action for Lutheran colleges and universities — offered as a shareable summary alongside the complete document.
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Article
Vocation at Full Stretch: Reflections on Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling and its Use among College Students
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn engages Bonnie Miller-McLemore’s Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling as required reading in a sophomore religion course, showing how her categories of missed, blocked, conflicted, fractured, unexpected, and relinquished callings empower young adults to perceive embodied, unplanned, and often painful dimensions of life as essential parts of vocation — and help close the gap between mission-driven and tuition-driven realities.
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Article
How Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Reminds Us About Work
Than Oo
Drawing on a Season 15 arc of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in which residents redirect pool funds to fix a plumbing problem, Oo finds in Fred Rogers’ vocation-honoring storytelling a reminder that limited resources are an invitation to creativity, perseverance, and optimism in higher education.
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Article
Finding the Miracle in the Intersection of Mission and Limitations: Lessons from Latin America
Kat Peters
Peters draws on her time interning with Lutheran World Relief and leading a study abroad program in Central America — including a Costa Rican women’s farm cooperative whose ecotourism project was “unprofitable” but life-giving — to argue that the intersection of God’s preference for struggle and God’s desire for abundant life is itself the miracle higher education can claim amid scarcity.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 41 · Spring 2015
Mahn introduces the “Called to Leadership” issue by worrying that training for leadership has become so ubiquitous in higher education as to be nearly meaningless, and recovers Luther’s sense of leadership as service — a calling to be a “slave” whose learning, power, and wisdom belong to the unlearned, the oppressed, and the foolish — as the shared mission of Lutheran colleges to train servant-leaders.
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Article
Vocation and the Common Good
Mark Wilhelm
No. 42 · Fall 2015
Wilhelm argues that ELCA colleges and universities are Lutheran not by ethnic culture or institutional checklists but because they stand in a 500-year-old intellectual tradition that educates for vocation. He draws out two insights from that tradition — a common walk of life shared across callings, and a humility about claims to know the good — to ground the schools’ commitment to prepare students for the common good.
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Response
Response to Mark Wilhelm: Vocation, Mission and Privilege
Marit Trelstad
No. 56 · Fall 2022
Trelstad affirms Wilhelm’s claim that vocation is the foundational shared mission of Lutheran higher education rather than one program among many, and presses the critique that calls to “vocational reflection” can mask privilege — arguing that an intersectional lens shows vocational discernment is in fact a matter of survival and flourishing for students from marginalized communities.
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Article
Impelled to Pluralism: Thoughts About Teaching in a Lutheran University
Jim Huffman
No. 17 · Summer 2003
Huffman traces his personal journey through three stages of faith—the “comfortable Christ” of his Midwestern Christian childhood, Clark Pinnock’s “faith principle” of accessible salvation, and finally Christ as the “humble teacher”—to a pluralism that rejects religious triumphalism without abandoning Christian commitment. Drawing on Diana Eck, Wesley Ariarajah, John Cobb, the Catholic novelist Endo Shusaku, and the histories of Confucian China and imperial Japan, he then describes how this commitment shapes his teaching of East Asian religion and nationalism at Wittenberg University: insisting on respectful language, working sympathetically through doctrines like Buddhist non-attachment, and helping students see the pernicious effects of triumphalism in both religious and political life.
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Article
An Ecosystem of Democracy
David Thomason
No. 63 · Spring 2026
6 min audio
Thomason argues that faith-based institutions should equip students not to dominate the public sphere with their convictions but to cultivate an “ecosystem of democracy” — pursuing universal values with virtue and tolerance while acknowledging humanity’s incomplete grasp of truth.
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Book Review
Review of Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education
Tom Christenson
No. 20 · Fall 2004
Christenson reviews Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education (Eerdmans, 2004), edited by C.W. Joldersma and G.G. Stronks. After recounting his own early prejudice against Wolterstorff’s Reason Within the Bounds of Religion and his subsequent conversion through Art in Action, he focuses on two threads: Wolterstorff’s expansive reading of shalom—not merely peace but justice, community, communal responsibility, and delight—as the overall goal of Christian collegiate education, and the influence of Abraham Kuyper’s claim of “privileged cognitive access” for Christian inquirers, which Wolterstorff demonstrates rather than declares.