At the Christensen Center for Vocation, we believe every person deserves to thrive—a common thread woven through our stories, our struggles, and our joys. We accompany students, faculty, and staff as they listen deeply to their lives, ask courageous questions, and step boldly into the work of mutual thriving. Through high-impact learning, storytelling, mentorship, and community, we cultivate the imagination and practices that lead to more just, sustainable, and thriving lives and communities.
Augsburg University is a university of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Our commitment to helping our students and our world thrive is rooted in the university’s Lutheran theological heritage, particularly its understanding of vocation. This theological understanding of vocation can best be summarized with these words from Martin Luther’s The Freedom of a Christian (1520).
“. . . we should be guided in all our works by this one thought alone—that we may strive and benefit others in everything that is done, having nothing else before our eyes except the need and advantage of the neighbor.”
What is vocation?
The origin of the word “vocation” is the Latin word vocatio, which means “calling.” One way to think about vocation is as your calling or those things in life you just can’t not do because they are so important to you and integral to your life and values. In order to understand this word more fully, it is important to briefly look at the context in which it arose and the person who gave the word importance.
Martin Luther was a 16th-century German monk who became the leader of what is known as the Protestant Reformation, or the movement that broke off from the Roman Catholic Church during the early 1500s. Luther’s theology of vocation was one of the key ideas that caused this split.
During Luther’s time, the church taught that people could earn their salvation and God’s favor by doing good works. These good works were often in the form of donations to the church or buying indulgences—slips of paper intended to lessen the punishment you or your loved ones would receive for your sins. In this context, the church often used “vocation” to refer only to those who were fully committed to the religious life, such as monks, nuns, and priests. In this viewpoint, the purpose of vocation was to serve the church or to serve God by serving the church. Martin Luther flipped this teaching on its head.
According to Luther and the other reformers, everyone has a vocation. Luther’s argument was that we do not need to earn God’s favor; it is a free gift given to us, not something we need to purchase through the church. Therefore, vocation should be directed toward serving the neighbor, not serving the church or God. One of Martin Luther’s interpreters, Gustaf Wingren, said, “God does not need our good works, but our neighbor does.”
From this perspective, our vocations are the ways we do God’s work by serving our neighbors in all the ordinary roles we play in life. Luther identified three main areas of life where we live out our vocation: within the family, through our work, and in civic life as engaged citizens. It is in these ordinary, daily, mundane roles that we live out our vocations as students, roommates, employees, partners, parents, siblings, offspring, friends, and neighbors. If the work we do in these roles brings about healing and wholeness for others, then it is considered to be our vocation. According to Luther, this ordinary, mundane, daily work was just as sacred as the work done by monks, nuns, and priests. Luther’s thoughts on vocation brought God’s work and spiritual meaning into the daily tasks of our lives—how we study, how we work, how we shop, how we drive, how we parent, how we befriend, etc.
Vocation serves as a corrective against a culture that values wealth, possessions, and status above all else. It frames our lives as an act of service rather than a rat race toward status. College is not only about earning a degree to get a job; it is also an opportunity to learn what you have to offer in service to the world. Our careers are not only sources of income, but opportunities for us to use our unique gifts to make our world more just and sustainable for all living things. Our vocations are the way we will all work in collaboration with one another to heal our planet and our collective lives.
Why does vocation matter today at Augsburg University?
The centrality of our collective well-being or thriving (particularly among those who are most vulnerable) is a central focal point of higher education within the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and at Augsburg University. Therefore, you could say the purpose of a college education is to (1) develop the mindset and skills necessary to discover what our neighbors need in order to thrive, and (2) develop the mindset and skills necessary to pragmatically meet those needs. Every single discipline at Augsburg University—including literature, business, history, sociology, philosophy, economics, theater, political science, etc.—can and will increase our ability to “benefit others in everything we do.”
How do we explore vocation at Augsburg University?
One does not need to understand or even subscribe to the Lutheran theological origins of vocation in order for it to be useful in their life. Our goal is for every student, faculty member, and staff member at Augsburg University to have a deeper sense of how they are called – uniquely inspired, equipped, and empowered to help our world thrive. Therefore, you will hear the word “thrive” more often than you will hear “vocation” these days at Augsburg.
Augsburg University’s vision statement proclaims “we educate students to thrive in their lives.” Every student graduating from Augsburg University will understand what it takes for them to thrive, for their communities to thrive, and for our world to thrive. Our students thrive when they are actively expressing the unique ways they are inspired, equipped, and empowered to create a more just and sustainable world.
Vocation is our commitment to thriving—our own personal thriving, our neighbors’ thriving, our community’s thriving, and our planet’s thriving. Thriving is never something that happens in isolation from others. We thrive in community, we thrive as community, we thrive with community. I am only thriving if you are also thriving. We are only thriving if they are also thriving. Thriving is always something we do together.
THRIVE is an acronym that breaks vocation down into various components that help us understand our vocations more clearly. Traits – Health – Responsibility – Inspiration – Voice – Empathy
Our vocations are the ways in which we incorporate these components into our philosophy of life, our daily work, and all the various roles we play. The Christensen Center for Vocation is committed to helping every member of our community learn to thrive by exploring these six components through high-impact learning, storytelling, mentorship, and community. Through these efforts, we cultivate the imagination and practices that lead to more just, sustainable, and thriving lives and communities.
You can learn more and support this work at our website: The Christensen Center for Vocation.
