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.
What’s Vocation?
Vocation is an idea rooted in the same Lutheran theological tradition as Augsburg University’s origin. Within this tradition, it has been used to describe the ways each person partners with God to heal the world through their various roles—partner, employee, student, sibling, roommate, co-worker, neighbor, offspring, parent, spouse, etc. This tradition believes we are each called to work for sustainability, justice, equity, reconciliation, and restoration in every aspect of life. At Augsburg, we talk about vocation as thriving. It is how you are inspired, equipped, and empowered to promote thriving in your own life but also in the lives of those around you—your neighbors, family, friends, community, the earth, the water, the critters—all living things!
Programs and Services
Our work is facilitated through a variety of programs. Each program is uniquely designed to accompany members of our community through vocational discernment and discovery in creative and engaging ways.
The Christensen Scholars Program engages ten selected students in a deeper interdisciplinary exploration of Christian theological reflection and vocational discernment related to their personal lives and social realities of the world they live in.
The Confluence is a weeklong, on-campus, summer experience for high school students that empowers them to explore how their personal story, the world’s story, and God’s story flow together to inspire them to create a loving and just world.
The Christensen Symposium provides an annual opportunity for the Augsburg community to gather with an influential thought leader who will challenge and inspire us to live in deeper alignment with our individual and collective calls to promote thriving in our lives and communities.
“How We Thrive” is a collaboration between CCV and Campus Ministry and takes place on the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays of each month from 12:00-12:20 p.m. in Hoversten Chapel. It is a time when members of the Augsburg community share their own stories of how they thrive and live out their calls.
In collaboration with other campus departments, the Christensen Center for Vocation helps first-year students articulate strengths and passions, identify core values and sources of inspiration, and learn ways to practice self-care, all as ways to live into thriving and vocation.
Stephen '27
I grew up in Liberia where community was an important part of everyday life. I never realized how much I missed that sense of community after moving here until i became involved with the Christensen Center for Vocation. I found community again through The Confluence and the Christensen Scholars. I remembered what an important part of my life it ways. My involvement in these programs has helped me realize I want to be a leader who is always creating community, places where people know they belong.