Training for “leadership” is so ubiquitously heralded in higher education as to become almost meaningless. Institutions nationwide create leadership development programs for their students, and leadership itself is one of the fastest growing fields in American higher education, from residential colleges to on-line education to doctoral programs. Employers, we are told, look to hire students with “leadership skills.” To meet demand, there are leadership labs, programs, certificates, retreats, majors, emphases within majors, and countless other ways to credential students as leaders. If in Lake Wobegone all the children are above average, in college they must be a good deal higher than that.
The pervasiveness of would-be leaders would be a contradiction in terms (or worse, would cultivate an upward-bound rat-race, where second from the top means failure) if leadership really meant being on top and in control and having no one to answer to. I fear it is often so in our dominant culture. Whether it’s Donald Trump wagging his finger at Hollywood has-beens on television, Oprah giving things away, or presidential candidates looking “electable,” we are inundated with images of leadership that fascinate and even inspire but rarely empower and almost never serve. If they represent all that leadership means, many of us would be authentically called away from it.
Martin Luther had a different understanding of leadership. Because Christ led and leads others by serving them—as the early Christ-hymn puts it, by becoming “a slave”—followers of Christ also are called to lives of self-giving service, to the point where “my learning is not my own; it belongs to the unlearned and it is a debt I owe to them…[and where] my wisdom belongs to the foolish, my power to the oppressed” (Luther’s Work, Vol. 27, 393).
Lutheran colleges and universities are no longer places where Lutherans alone, or Christians alone, work and learn. Our missions now go beyond the training of future pastors and teachers to tend to the needs of German or Scandinavian immigrants. Still, our different institutional DNAs continue to carry forward a shared mission to train servant-leaders—those who lead by serving and serve by leading. Witness the pairing in many of our mission statements of “leading” and “leadership” with language of responsibility, service, citizenship, community, justice, participation, purpose, and care.
Essays by Jodock, Neilson , Ngunjiri, Hasseler, and Johnson in this issue of Intersections were first delivered at the 2014 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference at Augsburg College under the theme, “The Vocation of Leadership: What does this Mean?” They flesh out what leadership might mean among students, faculty, administration, and staff on our campuses. The shorter essay by Hughes, the creative reflections of Warren, and the book review by Hanson and Crowe also call us back to our central gifts and tasks. I thank each author for her or his wisdom and care, and for readers of Intersections for sustaining this ongoing conversation about the vocation of ELCA colleges and universities.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
Wilhelm celebrates the leadership of ELCA colleges and universities within American higher education — from presidential service in major higher-education agencies to recognized leadership in global education and interfaith understanding — and lifts up the health of the ELCA network of schools as a church-related community that maintains shared identity while living as good citizens of the larger academy.
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Article
Vocational Leadership
Darrell Jodock
Jodock proposes “vocational leadership” as a name for a distinctive educational value at the heart of a Lutheran college — one that seeks to benefit the neighbor and the community, inspires and invites others to participate in that service, and is institutionally anchored in the Lutheran concept of vocation. He unpacks twelve facets of vocational leadership and ties them to Luther’s own leadership around indulgences, public schooling, and beggary.
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Article
Sharing Leadership within Colleges and Universities
Leanne Neilson
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.
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Article
Mentoring in the Academy: Of Gurus, Coaches, and Sponsors
Faith Wambura Ngunjiri
Ngunjiri urges faculty, staff, and administrators in faith-based institutions to assemble a “personal board of directors” of mentors — connectors, sponsors, taskmasters, motivators, dreamers, sages, and proofers — and reflects on how race and gender complicate mentoring in predominantly white, male-led ELCA institutions, where women and minorities must reach out to build the “cloud of witnesses” they need to thrive.
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Article
The Dangers of "Vocation" for Students Thinking about Career
Carl Hughes
Hughes warns that Lutherans too often use “vocation” as a theologically glorified synonym for a fulfilling career — a misuse that constricts God’s call to our jobs and excludes minimum-wage workers, caregivers, and others from the dignity of calling. Recovering Luther’s expansive understanding, he argues that vocation refers first to people, not professions, and must always be bigger than any one aspect of our lives.
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Article
Women in Leadership: Obstacles, Opportunities, and Entry Points
Susan Hasseler
Drawing on two focus-group conversations with female faculty and academic administrators at Augustana College (Sioux Falls), Hasseler traces four obstacle/opportunity themes for women in academic leadership — valuing the intellectual work of leadership, religious and cultural interpretations of gender roles, caregiving realities, and embracing a strong voice — and proposes deliberate next steps for cultivating inclusive excellence on ELCA campuses.
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Article
Superheroes and Origin Stories: Tools to Discover and Claim One's Callings
TJ Warren
Warren argues that the “Hero’s Journey” — Joseph Campbell’s monomyth with its ordinary world, call to adventure, mentors, and return with the elixir — offers a powerful pedagogical tool for helping college students discover their origin stories and claim their callings. Drawing on Superman, Wonder Woman, and Rosa Parks alike, he invites educators to mentor students into becoming the heroes of their own lives.
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Article
Leading from Within: Peer-Learning Consultations to Explore Our Callings and Campus Capacities for Leadership
Chris Johnson
Johnson reframes vocational leadership as “soul work” that calls for the deep mind as much as the conscious one, and offers two practices — deep listening and a modified Quaker clearness consultation — as ways for campus colleagues to listen one another into existence. Drawing on Sharon Daloz Parks, Marshall Ganz, Parker Palmer, and Mary Rose O’Reilley, he invites readers to map their stories of self, us, and now.
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Book Review
Old and New Ideas of the Liberal Arts: A Review of Claiming Our Callings
David Crowe, Katie Hanson
Crowe and Hanson review Claiming Our Callings: Toward a New Understanding of Vocation in the Liberal Arts (Oxford 2014), a collection of thirteen essays by St. Olaf faculty edited by Kaethe Schwehn and L. DeAne Lagerquist. They commend the book’s thoughtful, sincere engagement with consumerism, sustainability, Buddhist meditation, and Lutheran-Bonhoefferian theology — and recommend it for any liberal arts campus pulled between idealistic mission and career-minded pressure.
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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
No. 61 · Spring 2025
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
On Recruiting Diverse Students, Rooted in Mission
Eric Rowell, Jason A. Mahn
No. 59 · Spring 2024
Jason Mahn interviews Eric Rowell, Assistant Director of Admissions and Diversity Outreach at Augustana College, about how recruiting students from a wide variety of backgrounds — rooted in Augustana’s Lutheran commitment to vocation and educating across difference — remains essentially unchanged in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decisions on affirmative action.
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Editorial
From the Outgoing Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 55 · Spring 2022
Mahn closes out a decade of editing Intersections, passes the duties to Colleen Windham-Hughes, gives thanks to Mark Wilhelm and Augustana College, and introduces an issue largely drawn from comments by Lutheran faculty, staff, and administrators at the 2022 NetVUE national gathering.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 54 · Fall 2021
Mahn introduces the “Called to Place” theme of the 2021 VLHE Conference, arguing that Lutheran higher education’s emphasis on vocation must be grounded in particular geographies and embodied communities — for, as Wallace Stegner put it, “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.”
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Reflection
Shelter in Place: Reflections from March 22, 2020
Jason A. Mahn
No. 53 · Spring 2021
On the fourth Sunday of Lent in 2020, Mahn meditates on the etymology of “shelter” (from shield) and on an email from a former student in Boston whose mutual-aid organizing models a Lutheran understanding of vocation: the upending of ego by divine love that frees us, finally, to see and serve the neighbor.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 52 · Fall 2020
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
ELCA Social Teaching for the Classroom?
Roger A. Willer
No. 51 · Spring 2020
Willer argues that the body of ELCA social teaching, taken as a whole, constitutes an actual social ethic — relatively comprehensive, responsibly consistent, and remarkably cogent — whose mode of responsibility ethics commends it as a classroom resource for any discipline that wrestles with moral questions.
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Article
Deep Roots, Big Questions, Bold Goals
Colleen Windham-Hughes
No. 49 · Spring 2019
Adapted from a presentation to the California Lutheran University Board of Regents, Windham-Hughes reads the title Rooted and Open as both reaching back into the Lutheran tradition and opening forward into a shared future, then unpacks the document’s “called and empowered — to serve the neighbor — so that all may flourish” through the lenses of freedom of inquiry as a third path, vocation-centered education, radical hospitality, and civil discourse oriented toward the common good.
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Article
Say Something Theological: A Meditation on the Vocation of Lutheran Colleges and Universities to Serve the Common Good
Paul C. Pribbenow
No. 42 · Fall 2015
Pribbenow expands Luther’s “priesthood of all believers” into a meditation on doing theology with the Bible in one hand and the New York Times in the other — reading Luke 14 alongside walls, immigration, and hunger in his Minneapolis neighborhood — and argues that the leadership of Lutheran colleges demands a willingness to engage the theological issues at the heart of their public vocation.
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Article
Money, Sex and Power: An Exploration of Some Controversial Issues in the Public Witness of the Church
Pamela K. Brubaker
No. 21 · Summer 2005
Brubaker explores two controversial issues in the church’s public witness—homosexuality and economic life—and the challenges they present for both church and college. Drawing on Beverly Harrison, Elizabeth Bounds, Ron Thiemann, Linell Cady, Marcia Bunge, Richard Hughes, Darrell Jodock, Ernest Simmons, Karen Bloomquist, Garth Kasimu Baker-Fletcher, and Larry Rasmussen, and on episodes at California Lutheran University around “Harmony Week” and Bishop Paul Egertson’s participation in Anita Hill’s ordination, she argues that colleges related to the ELCA are called to educate for “critical citizenship” by hosting rigorous, bold, and unfettered debate—including debate over the neo-liberal globalism that she names a form of economic fundamentalism.
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Article
Ethical Leadership: Rooted, Open, Generative, and Mindful
John Arthur Nunes
No. 62 · Fall 2025
25 min audio
As he prepares to teach an Ethical Leadership First Year Seminar at California Lutheran, Nunes organizes his pedagogy around three mutually-reinforcing “turns” — inward, outward, and intellectual — grounded in Luther’s mandatum dei and larvae dei, Bonhoeffer’s estates, and Howard Thurman’s call to hear “the sound of the genuine” in oneself.
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Institutional Focus
Putting Principles into Practice: An Interview with Kenneth Foster about Concordia's Sustainability Council
Kenneth Foster
No. 36 · Fall 2012
Foster, chair of Concordia College’s President’s Sustainability Council, describes the Council’s formation under President William Craft in 2011 as a re-energization of stalled task-force work, its coordination with grass-roots campus initiatives, and its strategy of moving from principles to practice in stewardship of natural resources at a Lutheran liberal arts college.