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
"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.
-
Response
Disputatio Pro Quo? The Search for Lutheran Education
Jon-David Hague, Kimberly Hague
No. 2 · Winter 1997
Kimberly and Jon-David Hague—both Luther College graduates completing graduate studies at Berkeley and Boston University respectively—respond to Bouman by offering Luther’s curriculum reform at Wittenberg University in the spring of 1518, only months after the 95 theses, as a model of the Lutheran voice in higher education. Inspired by humanistic principles, Luther introduced lectures on classical authors and the first instruction in Greek and Hebrew, giving students the tools to encounter scripture directly rather than receive dictated doctrine. The spirit of that reform—providing students with every possible tool while acknowledging that an instructor’s perspective is neither ultimate authority nor final word—remains useful for the search for Lutheran academia today.
-
Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
No. 24 · Fall 2006
Selbyg situates this issue in the ongoing ELCA conversation about education that began with the 2005 conference and is feeding into the second draft of the ELCA Social Statement on Education, previews the 2007 conference (“The Vocation of a Lutheran College — Engaging the World”) at Augustana College, Rock Island, and lifts up Luther’s insistence that the church and its members contribute to their wider communities rather than retreat into self-centered enclaves.
-
Article
Holy Odors
John P. Trump
No. 14 · Summer 2002
A one-act play by John P. Trump, premiered at Pacific Lutheran University, in which Maggie, a senior studying Reformation history in the library stacks, falls asleep over the Apology of Augsburg and dreams a 16th-century pickled-herring merchant—Herr Leonard Kopp, the man who smuggled Katie von Bora and eight other nuns out of the convent—into existence to argue that her call to archaeology (“digging up old bones”) is as holy as ordained ministry, with Luther’s joke that the church burns incense to insulate priests from the “holy odors” (not holy orders) of everyday life.
-
Article
The Vocation of a Lutheran College
L. DeAne Lagerquist
No. 12 · Summer 2001
Lagerquist places the twenty-eight ELCA-affiliated colleges in the context of American higher education from Harvard (1636) through the “old time college,” the post-Civil-War research university, and the postwar expansion—drawing on Christopher Lucas, Philip Schaff’s Neo-Lutheran/moderate/Old Lutheran categorization, Sydney Ahlstrom’s scholastic/pietistic/critical currents, Luther’s appeal to the German nobility, Lewis Hyde’s gift economy, and Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. She proposes five characteristic practices (the school as learning community, study of Bible and Christian tradition, participation in the arts as makers and audience, application of learning in service, and on-campus Christian worship) grounded in Lutheran teaching about grace, image-and-fall, gratitude, and revelation through created “masks,” and four virtues these practices engender in graduates—loving gratitude, faithful wisdom, bold freedom, and hopeful humility.
-
Article
Conciliatory and Queer: The Radical Love of Lutheran Higher Education
Kiki Kosnick, Sharon Varallo
No. 50 · Fall 2019
Kosnick and Varallo reflect in conversation on how Augustana’s Five Faith Commitments and its conciliatory ecumenical roots in the Augsburg Confession have given them — a non-binary queer first-generation faculty member and a twenty-one-year veteran — the “street cred” to act on radical love, build bridges to imprisoned and non-binary communities, and discover that Augustana is welcoming not despite the fact that it is Lutheran, but because of it.