The Richness of Vocation
By: Bobby Gross
Bobby Gross has worked in campus ministry with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship for 48 years and served as National Director for Graduate & Faculty Ministries from 2009-2022. He is the author of Living the Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God.
The first essay on this year’s series asking what every college student needs to learn was titled “Looking beyond Career Skills.” Aware that the great majority of students say they are pursuing a degree primarily to prepare for a career, Daniel Williams urged wider aspirations: ask larger questions about the world, explore transcendent principles, gain a framework for a meaningful life. Amen to that!
Now, in this final essay of the series, I want to come full circle and help us think about career and work. When I say “us,” I first have in mind students soon embarking on their careers but also those later in the process, including professors, administrators, and others advancing the mission of universities and colleges. I also include myself as someone with a long career in campus ministry. Even on the verge of retirement I am still keenly interested in what makes for meaningful work. Careers, as such, come to an end, but fruitful work continues because all our good endeavors are embedded in something larger and richer than career: vocation.
The word vocation comes from the Latin vocare, which means “call.” To put it succinctly, to have a vocation is to be called in some way and to be called implies someone or something doing the calling. To put it more eloquently, Steve Garber’s Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good (2014) begins by insisting that vocation addresses “the wholeness of life, the range of relationships and responsibilities,” and is:
never the same word as occupation, just as calling is never the same word as career. Sometimes, by grace, the words and the realities they represent do overlap, even significantly; sometimes, in the incompleteness of life in a fallen world, there is not much overlap at all.
Garber hints at a capacious understanding of vocation, something more than remunerative work by which we might earn a living or support a family or ensure a comfortable life. In his vision work is deeply human and can be profoundly meaningful. This is what every student needs to begin to grasp, along with an open-eyed awareness that this ideal will crash up against a world that can be beautiful but is often broken and unjust.
Like Garber, I am writing here out of a Christian worldview, but this pleading for a deeper understanding and practice of vocation resonates with thinkers who do not identify as Christian. Journalist Brigid Schulte, for example, has written in Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play when No One has the Time (2014) a penetrating critique of how people, especially women, are trapped not only by problematic work environments but also unhealthy mentalities. We have to rethink and reform how we work (and require others to work), she says, so that we can safeguard time for meaningful relationships and satisfying pursuits.
Any discussion of vocation is bound up in what students are facing today. On the plus side: to be studying and earning a bachelor’s or advanced degree imparts an extraordinary level of advantage when it comes to job prospects and income possibilities. For this, one should be grateful but also cognizant of the attendant societal implications of such privilege: How do conditions of injustice keep many capable young women and men from even reaching the higher education doorway? How do we address the yawning socioeconomic divide, as David Brooks writes about in a recent Atlantic article, between the financial security and social stability of the highly educated and the economic and social disadvantages of the less educated..
On the peril side: there are many sources of anxiety and uncertainty facing today’s students. Each is forced to ask: Will I be able to pay off my student debt? What will the job market be like for me? As I am writing this essay, tens of thousands of government employees are losing their jobs; billions of dollars for research are being cut; the global trade economy is being upended, and recession fears are growing. Meanwhile, AI progresses at a stunning pace, and no one fully understands the implications of this technological revolution for work, but intuitively we know they will be huge.
I wish that I’d had a robust theology of vocation when I was a student. As a fervent young Christian, I unthinkingly bought into a hierarchy of vocations based on a sacred-secular dichotomy in which pastors and missionaries ranked higher in value than, say, professors or merchants—with helping professions somewhere in the middle. I spurned secular options like law or business and chose campus ministry instead. I lacked a vision for how all legitimate vocations could glorify God and serve his purposes in the world, how almost any job could be a means of loving God and caring for neighbor.
One theological underpinning for this view of vocation derives from the Grand Story found in scripture, a drama in four acts: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation. This meta-narrative begins in the Edenic Garden and ends in the Eternal City, with much disaster and redemption in between. This framework provides a simple but helpful lens:
Creation tells us that work is good
Fallenness helps us understand why work is hard
Redemption underscores that work is spiritual
Consummation intimates that work is eternal
The Creation narrative in Genesis contains elements rich with meaning: God works. God also rests! Human work (and rest) therefore images God. Humans are seen as partners with God, exercising a delegated stewardship (keep the garden, have dominion). Work is integral to human experience, a basic need like food, sex, rest, and relationships. Work is social, we do it with other people. By work we make something of the world (gardens and cities, beauty and culture, knowledge and technology). Work enables human flourishing. Work brings satisfaction (It was good).
Tim Keller and Katherine Leary Alsdorf write in Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work (the single best primer on faith and work, in my view):
We are called to stand in for God here in this world, exercising stewardship over the rest of creation in his place as vice-regents. We share in the things that God has done in creation—bringing order out of chaos, creatively building civilization out of the material of physical and human nature, caring for all that God has made. This is a major part of what we were created to be.
The cultivation in the garden extends to culture-making in the world.
Things then take a bad turn (Genesis 3). The humans use their freedom in God to act in a ways counter to God, leading to woeful consequences: painful labor for the woman in childbirth, painful toil for the man in agriculture, distortion in relationships, disharmony with nature, and, alas, mortality. But the creational mandate remains intact for both women and men: to be fruitful in both cultural production and biological reproduction. We are still called to the two great tasks of work and love, however hard they now may be.
As Keller and Leary catalog, work can frequently seem frustratingly fruitless or depressingly pointless or dangerously selfish or seductively idolatrous (we can love it too much).
The Preacher of Ecclesiastes lamented: “So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.” Anthropologist David Graeber echoes the ancient Preacher in his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), ranting against the enormous percentage of jobs that he regards as pointless and the “psychological violence” they can do to those who hold them. Work is hard.
From a faith perspective, work is inherently spiritual in that it can reflect God’s being and enact his purposes. As Garber writes, “We are called to be common grace for the common good.” But this requires us to think about work more imaginatively. As the apostle Paul urges: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God” (Romans 12:2). So, we ask ourselves:
How could work in my particular field or organization serve God’s purposes in the world?
What is wrong or damaging in my sphere of work, which raises further questions of ethics and justice and outcomes for society and the environment?
What are the redemptive opportunities in my field to repair what is broken or enhance what is good or bring about innovation?
Finally, and intriguingly, we might surmise that work is eternal. In Revelation 21, the seer sees how “the kings of the earth will bring their glory into [the new Jerusalem].” In Work in the Spirit (1991), theologian Miroslav Volf interprets the scene:
The noble products of human ingenuity, “whatever is beautiful, true and good in human cultures,” will be cleansed from impurity, perfected, and transfigured to become a part of God’s new creation.
One implication of this theology of vocation is that work will continue in heaven. In the new cosmos, we will not cease to be human; indeed, we will become more fully human, which will mean imaging and glorifying God through good work that, happily, will be without the encumbrance of human sin and recalcitrant creation. Fruitful, meaningful, worshipful work.
In a 2019 Atlantic article, The Religion of Workism, David Thompson traces the historical shift from jobs to careers to callings, from “necessity to status to meaning.” He observes how more and more of us are making work central to our identity and life purpose, and he warns “To make [work or success] the centerpiece of one’s life is to place one’s esteem in the hand of the marketplace. To be a workist is to worship a god with firing power.” Our desks were never meant to be our altars, he adds.
But if our view of work is shaped by an encompassing theology of vocation, we can give ourselves to it without eclipsing our other callings—to relationships, to joyful leisure, to worship. Furthermore, we will have resources to fortify us in the most difficult work environments and to inspire us in the more propitious settings.
Paul encouraged the early Christians to view their labor foremost as service to God, even if they found themselves in the unjust, intolerable arrangement of Roman slavery (which was not to counsel acquiescence to dehumanizing conditions). Likewise, even in bullshit jobs, we can still ask ourselves: what purpose am I serving and for whose sake?
Students, even in your part-time employment or summer jobs or work-study assignments, you can begin to practice this approach to work: How am I doing good? Who am I serving? How can I be a caring co-worker? What does integrity require of me? How am I honoring God?
I hope you are on a path toward a job that accords with your sense of vocation, where your gifts and passions align with opportunities to make a difference in the world at a point of great need.
Maybe you will be seized with a vocational epiphany to become someone David Brooks describes as “able to hear that still, soft voice inside… They are open to being surprised, and when that constructive disorientation happens, they stop and contemplate: What am I being called upon to do here?”
Such a calling could lead you to work that is both utterly demanding and deeply satisfying, work that aligns with God’s work, work that is enriched by a profound sense of vocation.
The Raised Hand is a project of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers and serves its mission to catalyze and empower thoughtful Christian presence and practice at colleges and universities around the world, in service of the common good. To learn more visit cscmovement.org.