What difference should the gospel make to the work lives and to the life’s work of our students and faculty?
If it is true that Christ is the one through whom, and for whom all things are made, how can I prepare the people of the university to direct their labors so as to serve Christ, their true and appropriate end?
These daunting questions, whether articulated explicitly or just felt as “groanings too deep for words,” are the questions that keep me up at night. They are also the questions that drew me to GFM in the first place. That is why I was delighted when Bobby Gross invited Pete Williamson (GFM Team Leader at Harvard University, 2013-present) and me to organize, coordinate, and direct the Vocational Stewardship Project last spring.
Sponsored by a generous grant from the New York-based Grace & Mercy Foundation, the Vocational Stewardship Project represents GFM’s most ambitious effort, to date, to assess and enhance our ministry’s efforts in the crucial work of helping students and faculty to integrate their faith, scholarship, work, and lives. The aim of the project was, first, to evaluate our overall effectiveness as a movement in cultivating faith-work integration among our students and faculty; second, to gather the best tools and practices being developed among us; and, third, to suggest ways to enhance our integration efforts, building upon what we have learned from each other.
Pete and I recruited a team of more than thirty GFM staff from our four regions to share their experiences and wisdom, and to help us survey students and faculty from universities across the country. Participating staff:
- Shared the aspects of their Annual Ministry Plans oriented towards faith-work integration, and Reported on how their plans worked out (or didn’t work out) in practice.
- Conducted Surveys of the students and faculty they serve, gathering crucial data on how our people think of vocation and work.
- Participated in a series of Zoom Calls in which we explored a range of questions about our common challenges, our preferred ministry approaches, our felt needs, and our favorite resources.
CONVERSATIONS
Our conversations with participating staff, our reviews of their reports, and our analysis of the student and faculty surveys both challenged and encouraged us.
We were challenged by our discovery that GFM staff (ourselves included!) typically describe our integrative work as helping students to be able to Understand and Articulate the interrelations between their faith and their work, but we do not typically think of our work as helping them to Practice integration in their work lives. While our approaches to Spiritual Formation might be hands-on and praxis-oriented, we instinctively tend to speak of Integration as though it were almost exclusively a cognitive and conceptual matter.
We also found that most of us see GFM’s core ministry commitments (Community, Spiritual Formation, Evangelism/Service, and Integration) as standing in a zero-sum relationship with each other, such that attending to one core commitment (say, evangelism) requires neglecting or deemphasizing another (usually, faith-work integration). Many of us lament that all too often our efforts at cultivating community, reaching out to new corners of the campus, and discipling students crowd out the demanding and time intensive task of helping students and faculty to integrate their faith with their work. Ironically, we found that, despite our commitment to Integration, we have not always integrated our core ministry commitments with each other.
But despite these more challenging findings, we were also encouraged and inspired by the creative work being done by our colleagues. We were surprised to discover that non-Christian seekers often found conversations about the implications of the gospel for their work and their studies to be highly engaging. It turns out that grappling with challenging questions about, say, faith and science, or Christian medical ethics, need not be thought of as a second order activity for already committed Christians, but can be a necessary part of spiritually curious students or faculty members’ clearly seeing Jesus’s relevance to their lives and of counting the potential cost of following Him. The possibilities for integrating Evangelism and Integration cry out for further exploration.
*Purple = Very Satisfied, Blue = Very Dissatisfied
|
Satisfaction with treatment of vocation in Undergrad Ministries*
|
Satisfaction with treatment of vocation in IVCF/GFM
|
SURVEYS
Our surveys, while not large enough to technically constitute a statistically significant sample, polled nearly 200 students and faculty served by GFM across the country about their attitudes towards and understandings of the relationship between faith and work. Here are some of the most striking findings from our survey data:
- 49.5% of students and faculty polled most emphatically agreed that Every Work is a Calling
- 22.7% most strongly believed “calling” to be a matter of Simply Living as Christians
- 33.6% very strongly disagree with the notion that Religious life is separate from daily life/work
- 15% still believed that Religious life is separate from daily life/work
- 15% still said they Do not know how to think about vocation/calling
We felt that these results indicate that we have much to celebrate, but we still have much room for growth as well. What would it take for all of our students and faculty to approach their work in a clear-eyed way as a matter of faithfulness to Christ’s unique calling upon their lives?
POTENTIAL PATHWAYS FORWARD
Part of our task in undertaking this national assessment was to propose some potential pathways forward as we seek to advance a vision of Christian discipleship that informs every aspect of our students and faculty members’ lives, including their work lives. After much prayer and deliberation, Pete and I suggested to the GFM Leadership Team that we, as a movement, commit ourselves to reaching the following goals in the next 4 years:
- The majority of graduating GFM chapter members and committed faculty understand, actively practice, and can clearly articulate an integrated faith;
- GFM members and staff will be using a shared, but flexible, set of concepts, language, and habits that naturally integrate our core ministry commitments with each other.
To achieve these goals we will need tools, and, so, we have also proposed that we develop an interactive, investigative, manuscript-based Bible study curriculum focusing on questions of Integration, and a workshop where students/faculty will develop talks in which they articulate the relationship between their faith and their work. Our hope is that these tools will help us to do the sort of holistic, transformative discipleship that we all long to do. If you are interested in participating in the next, developmental phase of the Vocational Stewardship Project, please contact me at david.williams@intervarsity.org.
To all the staff who helped us to conduct this self-study, we are profoundly grateful. Thank you for giving us your time and for sharing your wisdom.
