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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Book Review
Vocation on Campus: Reading Mark Tranvik's Martin Luther and the Called Life at Pacific Lutheran University
Alex Lund, Michael Halvorson
No. 47 · Spring 2018
Halvorson and Lund — faculty member and student — review Mark Tranvik’s Martin Luther and the Called Life alongside PLU’s Wild Hope Center for Vocation, weighing the book’s warning against “vocation lite” against the challenge of speaking of God’s call to students in the Pacific Northwest’s “None Zone,” where most students have little exposure to Lutheranism.
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Reflection
Reflections on Lutheran Identity on Reformation Sunday
Thomas W. Martin
No. 19 · Summer 2004
Beginning with an “intellectual vertigo” experienced when his celebrant announced that “today the Church gathers to celebrate the Reformation,” Martin—a biblical scholar who has belonged to four Protestant denominations—asks how Lutherans should tell their own foundational myth. He argues that the Reformation was a mixed bag whose dark side includes a century of religious warfare and the killing of Anabaptists; that Luther himself is too mythic a figure to monopolize; and that distinguishing “constitutive” from “prophetic” reading (after James Sanders) opens the way to a Reformation Sunday told “together with” rather than “over and against” the rest of the Church—one that mixes repentance for the dark with celebration of the glory.
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Institutional Focus
Facing Tornados and Climate Change: An Interview with Jim Dontje about Environmental Innovation at Gustavus
Jim Dontje
No. 36 · Fall 2012
Dontje, director of the Johnson Center for Environmental Innovation at Gustavus Adolphus College, describes the Center’s work with solar thermal and photovoltaic systems, LEED certification of Beck Hall, recycling and conservation initiatives, the Linnaeus Arboretum, and the difficult work of building consensus around climate response—reflecting on how Gustavus’s 1998 tornado recovery shaped a community capable of collective action, and on how the “Lutheran identity” both restrains and energizes the college’s environmental ethos.
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Article
Views on Flourishing After the Age of Roe
Caryn Riswold, Mary J. Streufert
No. 57 · Spring 2023
Riswold and Streufert reflect on the Radcliffe Institute’s January 2023 conference “The Age of Roe” and argue that the ELCA’s 1991 Social Statement on Abortion and its 2019 statement Faith, Sexism, and Justice offer Lutheran higher education a third way to approach reproductive justice grounded in serving the neighbor so that all may flourish.
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Article
"Annoying the Student With Her Rights:" Human Life Coram Hominibus; Reflections on Vocation, Hope, and Politics
Caryn Riswold
No. 32 · Spring 2010
Riswold takes a student’s course-evaluation complaint that she had been “annoyed with her rights” about voting as the entry point for reflection on fear of change, mistrust of difference, and right-wing extremist violence—Poplawski, Von Brunn, Roeder, and the Sotomayor hearings. Drawing on Gerhard Ebeling’s reading of Luther’s fourfold relationality (coram Deo, mundo, meipso, hominibus), Brian Gerrish, Alister McGrath, Gustaf Wingren, Philip Hefner, Mary Rose O’Reilley, and bell hooks, she argues that the vocation of the Lutheran college is precisely to “annoy students with their rights” by forming them for socially responsible voice grounded in faith active in love.
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Article
Sharing Leadership within Colleges and Universities
Leanne Neilson
No. 41 · Spring 2015
Building on Jodock’s framework, Neilson applies vocational leadership to the unique work environment of higher education — mission statements, faculty governance, the slow pace of consensus, and the sometimes uneasy relationships between faculty and staff — and asks how leaders, followers, and team players can create an atmosphere of mutual empowerment on Lutheran college campuses.