This question warrants a long list, but one thing belongs at the top: cultivating trustworthy communities. This is a patient and delicate process but the good news is, these communities can form anywhere—in a classroom, in a campus ministry, in a congregation, in a home, on a neighborhood block…. Anywhere there are people, there are opportunities for relationship. Wherever there is relationship, there is opportunity to cultivate trustworthy community. In turn, these trustworthy communities, made up of trustworthy relationships, equip us with the collective wisdom, care, and accountability needed to be the kind of people the world needs.
Trustworthy communities have always been needed, but perhaps part of the reason we are where we are is because too often our society has NOT invested in cultivating trustworthy communities. Instead choosing practices of exploitation and violence, eroding trust and convincing us that those around us are more likely a threat than a neighbor.
When I see many challenges around us, I fear that the world is ending. Maybe it is. Maybe (probably) parts of it should. This is scary and when we are scared it is easy to turn inward, to scapegoat our fears onto “others.” Ethical leadership when the world is changing—and perhaps ending—means resisting that impulse and instead doubling down on setting more tables, doing the slow relationship work, being bold and humble as we engage with people around us.
We need to be the kind of people and create the kinds of communities the world needs when it’s ending.
As a former youth ministry director, camp counselor and convener of congregations through my work at Augsburg with the Riverside Innovation Hub—my instinct as a leader has been to carry the bulk of the responsibility to build this kind of community and then invite others into it. But this is a lopsided approach.
Cultivating trustworthy community is a group effort. Leaders may take initiative, but the work isn’t to build for, but to set a table where something new can be nurtured—more accurately, to co-create trustworthy community.
My thinking about this has been particularly shaped through a recent book project I led. Hungry for Hope, Letters to the Church from Young Adults, released this summer, is the culmination of three years of stewarding a writing community of twenty-five people. Many of them are young adults who brought to the table their hopes, heartaches and imaginations of another way possible for the church and the world.
The process of co-creating this book mirrors the final product, which is an invitation to sit at the table together and wrestle with the questions of our time, ones that really matter to young adults (and folks of all ages!) Rev. Lamont Wells concluding remarks at this summer’s gathering landed home for me when he quoted Sharon Daloz Parks. Ethical leadership is “not about having the right answers, but about cultivating the courage to hold questions that matter and walk with others through them.” These are the first faithful steps towards co-creating trustworthy communities. These are the kinds of communities that not only are needed when worlds are ending, but are needed to seed what new worlds may begin to emerge.
For more information about the book, Hungry for Hope: Letters to the Church from Young Adults, visit the book’s website at www.hungryforhopebook.com.
-
Editorial
From the Publisher
Lamont Anthony Wells
Wells frames the issue as a record of the 2025 VLHE Conference at Augsburg under the theme “Ethical Leadership in a Changing World,” arguing that vocation is never solitary but a collective, public witness of ethical formation, theology and care, flourishing and belonging, and leadership rooted in God’s grace.
-
Editorial
From the Editor
Colleen Windham-Hughes
Windham-Hughes plays on the shared Latin root of “education” and “seduction” (ducere, to lead) to warn against the No-saying seductions of giving up or condemnation, and to call educators to the riskier Yes of showing up to build third-space communities of truth-telling and hope.
-
Article
Wake Up Running! A Call to Ethical Leaders in Quest of Democratic Space
Walter Earl Fluker
Abridged from his VLHE keynote, Fluker draws on Habakkuk and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower to call a new generation of ethical leaders to “wake up running” toward democratic futures, packing their runaway bags with love-filled-justice, grace-filled-empathy, and hope-filled-resiliency for the soul-filled work the moment requires.
-
Article
Building a Third Space in the Age of AI: A Conversation with Dr. Walter Earl Fluker
Elizabeth Kubek
Prompted by AI chatbots being marketed to students as a safer alternative to messy human relationships, Kubek interviews Fluker on how Howard Thurman’s vision of common consciousness, somaesthetics, and nature-rooted learning offers educators a “third space” alternative to AI’s hall of mirrors.
-
Article
Ethical Leadership: Rooted, Open, Generative, and Mindful
John Arthur Nunes
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.
-
Article
Ethical Leadership for a Changing World: A Shared Calling from Cradle to Career
Cory Newman, Janelle Rozek Hooper
Hooper and Newman recount how an ELCA Barna survey on early childhood education sparked the realization at VLHE 2025 that ELCA colleges and the 1,200 Lutheran schools and early learning centers share identical challenges — and an untapped potential to form ethical leaders across the full educational continuum from cradle to career.
-
Article
What is Required of You?: Higher Education Leadership in a Moral Key
Paul C. Pribbenow
Drawing on Micah 6:8 and Stephen Carter’s “etiquette of democracy,” Pribbenow describes the three things Augsburg requires of every incoming student — show up, pay attention, and do the work — as a democratic social ethic that prepares students for engaged citizenship in a fractured public life.
-
Article
Fostering Moral Imagination and Inclusivity: The Role of Ethical Leadership in ELCA Colleges and Universities Amid Societal Challenges
Lamont Anthony Wells
Wells argues that “moral imagination” — the capacity to envision ethical alternatives, empathize across difference, and respond creatively to injustice — is the heart of ethical leadership in NECU institutions, and that anchoring leadership in this principle positions Lutheran higher education to cultivate socially responsible citizens.
-
Reflection
VLHE—Wednesday Morning Sacred Pause
Ann Rosendale
Rosendale draws on Esther 4:14 and the Lutheran practice of holding death and resurrection together — with “and” as the hardest word — to argue that the calling of Lutheran higher education for “just such a time as this” requires us to remember and name out loud that ours are places where God is at work.
-
Article
The Idea of a Christian University
Richard Hughes
No. 11 · Spring 2001
Hughes’s lecture at the inauguration of Andrew K. Benton as the seventh president of Pepperdine argues that a Pepperdine-wide “strategy of community-wide conversation,” carried by the new Pepperdine University Center for Faith and Learning, can sustain the school as a Christian university by leaning into the paradox of Christian particularity rather than around it. Drawing on the incarnation, the Matthew 5 and Luke 14 teachings of Jesus, the Quaker and Cane Ridge (Joseph Thomas) abolition traditions, Galatians 2 and Romans 8, and Luther’s simul Justus et peccator as the gospel that frees the scholar to be wrong, to doubt, and to confess “Lord I believe; help thou mine unbelief,” he mines the Churches of Christ heritage—Alexander Campbell, Barton W. Stone, and John Rogers of Carlisle, Kentucky—as a unity-and-freedom tradition that grounds both diversity and academic freedom.
-
Article
Down and Out: First Year Students Encounter Lutheran Theology
Lindsey Leonard
No. 53 · Spring 2021
Leonard describes how Wartburg’s IS 101 first-year seminar wove the Dalai Lama, Paul Kingsnorth, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Mary Robinson’s Climate Justice into the Fall 2020 reader so the “COVID class” could encounter Lutheran theology’s call to serve the neighbor across the pandemics of disease, racism, and climate change.
-
Article
The Lutheran Theological Tradition and Recruiting Lutheran Students
Ernest L. Simmons
No. 13 · Winter 2002
Simmons opens with an Abraham-and-Isaac “Windows 98” joke to illustrate the dialectic of faith and learning, then argues that in a new market era of limited religious background, intentional mission and marketing go together. Drawing on Levine and Cureton’s When Hope and Fear Collide for the Millennial Generation born in 1982 and Tom Beaudoin’s Virtual Faith for their GenX parents, he reads “Reclaiming Lutheran Students” survey results showing 86% strong community at ELCA colleges versus 54% at flagship publics and 61% alumni mentoring versus 39%. He then develops three areas where the Lutheran tradition uniquely equips its colleges—community, mentoring and vocation, and the integration of faith and values—using Luther’s “two kingdoms” image of the “Left Hand” (reason) and “Right Hand” (faith) of God, with academic freedom as a product of Ahlstrom’s “Critical Current” in the tradition, and closes with three challenges: recruiting and retaining mentoring faculty, educating church leaders, and reaching potential students and parents.
-
Article
Dual Citizenship: Reflections on Educating Citizens at Augsburg College
Paul C. Pribbenow
No. 29 · Spring 2009
Pribbenow argues that the vocation of Augsburg College is to educate “dual citizens”—those able to live within the messiness of common work rather than resolve every tension once and for all. Drawing on John Courtney Murray on democracy as “the intersection of conspiracies,” Bill Moyers, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Stephen Carter, and the Augsburg vision statement “We believe we are called to serve our neighbor,” he names four common commitments and five principles of civic education that ground Augsburg’s incarnational mission in its city neighborhood.
-
Institutional Focus
Health Food in the Inner City: An Interview with Brian Noy about Augsburg's Campus Kitchen
Brian Noy
No. 36 · Fall 2012
Noy, Director of Campus Kitchen at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, describes the Kitchen’s four-fold program—Food to Share (2,000 meals per month from surplus dining-services food and Campus Cooking Classes), Food to Grow (an 80-plot community garden), Food to Buy (two farmers markets that accept EBT/food stamps), and Food to Know (educational programming)—and the deep history of Augsburg’s service to the immigrant communities of the Cedar Riverside neighborhood, now Somali and Mexican as well as historically Norwegian.
-
Article
Leading from Within: Peer-Learning Consultations to Explore Our Callings and Campus Capacities for Leadership
Chris Johnson
No. 41 · Spring 2015
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.