students and vocation
Posted by Paul | Filed under work
Recently I’ve been think a lot about how we can help the students in church as they head out into careers. I’m particularly interested in how we can help them integrate the working side of their life with Sunday mornings. (You never know, I may get around to blogging about this more in the future.) One thing at the front of my mind is that they may only ever hear a handful of talks/sermons/etc. on work life. Considering this takes up a significant proportion of life it seems to be a major omission.
With this in mind, I was interested to read this post by Richard Mouw. After reporting on the vitality of Christian colleges in the US, he ends with the following comments:
What I do worry about in all of this is whether the evangelical churches are prepared to receive and nurture the students graduating from these colleges and universities. On many of these campuses, Lilly-funded programs on the importance of seeing one’s daily work as “vocation” have inspired students to see so-called “secular” occupations as Kingdom service. They are looking for the kind of preaching and sacramental life, as well as continuing education, to which they have become accustomed on their undergraduate campuses. If the evangelical churches fail to meet their expectations, they will go elsewhere. It will not likely be in the direction of liberal Protestantism—more likely they will move toward Anglicanism, Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Or maybe they will contribute to new forms of evangelical church life.
This brings up wider issues: Only a small proportion have even this sort of grounding. How do we serve those who do not so that they enter working life with some sense of “daily work as vocation”? And, equally important, how do we continue this by supporting and educating as part of church life?
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...