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
5 min audio
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
5 min audio
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
22 min audio
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
9 min audio
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
8 min audio
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
43 min audio
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
5 min audio
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
14 min audio
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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Article
The Identity, Mission, Vision, and Goals of a Lutheran College vis a vis Bacon's "Of Studies" and Newman's "The Idea of a University"
Cora Lazor, Mary Theresa Hall
No. 15 · Winter 2002
Hall, an Associate Professor of English at Thiel, and Lazor, a Thiel junior and 2002 ELCA Division for Higher Education summer intern, read Thiel College’s Statements of Identity, Mission, Vision, and Goals alongside Sir Francis Bacon’s “Of Studies” (1625) and John Henry Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of a University (engaging Azade Seyhan’s May 2002 PMLA essay along the way). They argue that Bacon’s “Read…to weigh and consider” and Newman’s defense of liberal over technical training underwrite Thiel’s new Writing-Intensive Course requirement, its ten institutional objectives, and its commitment to “service to society” in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
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Institutional Focus
Embodying the Tradition: The Case of Wittenberg University
Baird Tipson
No. 2 · Winter 1997
Tipson, President of Wittenberg University, locates Wittenberg in the “American” strain of Ohio Lutheranism founded in 1845 under Ezra Keller (a Pennsylvania College and Gettysburg Seminary graduate and disciple of Samuel Simon Schmucker), with English-language preaching, financial support from the pan-Protestant New England Society, Presbyterians on the Board, and an Episcopalian teaching Latin. He names two ongoing challenges—remaining authentically Lutheran while welcoming a pluralistic student body (just under a quarter are Lutheran in a primary service area that is 5% Lutheran), and making the tradition clear and compelling to non-Lutheran or lukewarm Lutheran students—and presents the five things every Wittenberg graduate should be able to do (respond to the human condition; recognize, define, and solve problems; develop a sense of vocation; assume servant-leadership; take moral responsibility) as authentic expressions of the Gospel and of the university’s ELCA relationship.
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Reflection
Finding Words That Matter (Proverbs 1:20-21; 4:10-13)
Harvard Stevens Jr.
No. 21 · Summer 2005
In a brief homiletic reflection on Proverbs, Stevens addresses Lutheran educators as “merchants of wisdom” competing with a crowded contemporary marketplace of internet, cable TV, and rap music alongside “Hedonism 101,” “Advanced Voyeurism,” and “Pure Escapism.” Recounting an evening with a Carthage student poetry club, he shares the poem wisdom whispered to him there and offers thanks for the high calling to teach “words that matter.”
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Article
Cultivating Staff Flourishing in Lutheran Higher Education: A Framework for Advocacy and Engagement
Laree Winer
No. 58 · Fall 2023
Winer narrates her own “love affair” with Lutheran Higher Education to argue that the heart of the tradition — vocation, de-emphasized hierarchy, and shared humanity — equips NECU institutions to advocate for staff flourishing through data collection, professional development, and ongoing relational commitment.
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Article
Celebrating the Reformation: The Lutheran Foundation of a Called Life
Mark D. Tranvik
No. 46 · Fall 2017
Tranvik traces vocation from the monastic impulse through Luther’s rejection of the monk’s vow as the only true calling, and translates the “called life” for twenty-first-century Lutheran colleges — institutions that see students as made in the image of God, enlist the whole community in discernment, and make room for faith and its convictions.
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Reflection
Vocation
Matt Peterson
No. 10 · Fall 2000
In a chapel homily, St. Olaf student Matt Peterson quotes former St. Olaf professor Howard Hong’s 1955 Our Church and the World—“the tragedy is that we seem to have lost the full grasp of the Christian vocation”—to argue that vocation, from the Latin vocare, is centrally a call into daily communion with God and into continually becoming Christian, not the title of a successful career marked by GPA, win-loss records, honorary degrees, or net worth. Drawing on Anthony Bloom on prayer that must be lived, he indicts the dread of Monday, the “come hell or high water” demand for production, and the “faith community” that we take on faith.