Helping People See Vocation in College and Workplace An Interview with Dr. Steven Garber

There’s a delicious congruity to Steve Garber’s return to Geneva College as a speaker and mentor. That’s where his grandfather met his grandmother, where his father met his mother, and where he met his wife. Now Steve’s book The Fabric of Faithfulness, selected as a Christianity Today book of the year, is included in the Geneva curriculum to help students understand vocation from a Reformed world view. (continued below)

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Watch Steve Garber on why we need artists with a biblical view of vocation

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Listen to Steve Garber talk about business and entertainment leaders he has worked with

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In the swimming pool at the RP national conference at Carleton College in 1970, Steve spoke with another young man, the editor of the Geneva College student newspaper, who used the term world view. Steve says, “I wasn’t quite sure what it meant but I thought I should have one; I wanted to have one.”

He began a pilgrimage that took him to Geneva College and eventually to Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri. Soon his pursuit of world view caused him to focus his life on, “What does it mean to be made in the image of God? How does that work out in the late 20th Century?”

His pursuit further drew him to R. C. Sproul and others at Ligonier Valley Study Center and to be a part of a Reformed Presbyterian congregation in Pittsburgh, Pa. After receiving his masters and doctoral degrees, Steve moved to Washington, D.C., to teach at the American Studies Program. He was scholar in residence for the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities and so began to work closely with many schools that taught from a Christian perspective. Again it was a question that drove him. “What does higher education look like, and what ought it to be like?”

The Lilly Endowment had given grants to 90 Christian colleges and universities to develop a vision of vocation. Lilly noticed that Steve was already involved with the topic of vocation on many of these campuses, and they invited him to give input. His chief concern was that institutions might do a great job of teaching vocation but that the application of that teaching might falter if students did not connect to a good congregation after college and were supported in their desire to live out their Christian calling in the trenches.

That led to the founding grant for the Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation, and Culture, of which Steve is the founder and principal. And, though continuing his work with colleges and seminaries, his work has gone into the workplace as well. He is a mentor to a number of well-known musicians as well as a mentor to CEOs of some large and small corporations. These are “Christian people working in a secular company trying to be Daniel-like people—people with wisdom and judgment and influence,” Steve says.

RP Witness: It strikes me that what you are doing is unique. Would you say it is unique, or at least rare, and why do you think that is?

SG: I have an urgency about it. Whether it’s rare or not I don’t know. I have a sense of vocation about it. What I began to do in that first year or so of the Lilly grant to me was to travel across the country talking to colleges that had received these two-million-dollar grants, asking “So what are you doing with the grant in terms of what it will mean for the years after college?” Everybody was wonderfully grateful for the money they had received, but I didn’t find a college anywhere that had the institutional energy to pursue that question.

I understand that, as they already have a lot to do. So I began to rethink the strategy of our grant from Lilly and what could be done. I eventually decided that we should probably go to seminaries, because seminaries were where people were being trained to become pastors. And Lilly had chosen ecclesially rooted institutions, whether it was Geneva or Notre Dame to give the money to. So in some ways it was a larger concern on Lilly’s part for the church in America and its ministry to the world. So I began to travel across the country talking to seminary deans and presidents, asking, “How do you teach vocation to your pastoral students, people being trained to become pastors in your church?” And everywhere I went I heard eerily the same words from really good people doing very good work. “What you’re saying is our theology, but we don’t teach that here.”

The grant that we’d been given from Lilly was titled “Connecting Calling, Colleges and Congregations.” And so that really was a wedge into this for me, because in some ways Lilly is such a respected name, I could go anywhere whether it was Duke University and its divinity school or Gordon College and Gordon-Conwell Seminary, or Covenant College and Covenant Seminary or Geneva College and the RP Seminary.

RP Witness: In what ways does the Washington Institute try to help people with vocation?

SG: There are two words that characterize everything we do. One is the word coherence and the other is the word collegiality.

We are always pressing this coherence of faith to vocation to culture. It’s the thesis that faith shapes vocation, which shapes culture, for blessing or for curse. So whether you’re a Hindu, whether you’re a Maoist, whether you’re an evolutionary materialist, whether you’re a Christian—that these deepest things you believe to be true about the world shape how you live in the world, and that has consequence for the world, for blessing or for curse.

The other word is collegiality. So we’ve chosen to always work collegially with other institutions and organizations. We have probably 10 different organizations and institutions that we work with like that. We’re not a seminary, but we teach with Covenant Seminary and Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS). I teach two courses a year for RTS, and we co-sponsor a D.Min. degree with Covenant.

We work with a retreat center in Texas called the Laity Lodge. The dominant grocery store company in Texas is called H-E-B and it’s a family-owned company that has been there for 100 years. They bought a ranch in the hill country of Texas and called it the Laity Lodge. It does awfully good work. We plan retreats with them. Last spring it was a conference for people in the marketplace, from the business world. We invited CEOs and then people who were more thirty-year-olds to come together for several days to rethink what the vocations in the business world look like.

This spring we are doing a retreat with triads of people from their congregations. So it’s a pastor, a person from the marketplace and then a younger person the pastor is apprenticing. In some ways it goes back to the Lilly Endowment question for me, because we’re asking the question for this retreat, “How could we congregationally rethink, recast the paradigm of vocation in relationship to the missio Dei?”

We work with foundations in several different ways. One foundation is the Murdoch Trust in the Pacific Northwest, where we do leadership development projects. I call them a “common grace for the common good” foundation. They are neither parochially Christian nor parochially secular. You don’t have to believe in the Nicene Creed to get their money, but you don’t have to not believe in it either. They generously support Quaker colleges in Oregon, and Catholic, Presbyterian and Wesleyan colleges in Washington, and Lutheran Bible camps in Idaho, and ministries to trafficked women in Seattle, and Young Life in Portland. But they also support the Oregon Shakespeare Theater, clean water projects in Idaho, and fisheries projects in Montana, and chemistry labs at the University of Washington.

RP Witness: I’d like to follow up on your work with congregations. What can congregations do that will further this vision and help people to integrate faith with vocation, and ultimately with culture?

SG: It’s a million-dollar question. We’re doing four projects right now that are all about this. One is a foundation called the Kern Foundation. They came to us about two years ago and said, “We keep hearing from seminaries that you’re working with them on this vocational question. What are you doing?” Eventually they said, “Would you create a pilot project for us?” And we’ve done that. The credo of the Washington Institute is “Vocation is Integral, not Incidental, to the missio Dei [mission of God]” So this project is called “Integral, not Incidental,” and it’s a gathering of about 20 pastors from across Washington, D.C., who for a year meet together over a two-hour lunch. We give books to them, we get people in to speak to them. It’s really meant to rethink the paradigm. As they’ve said to us, “We believe you. This is what we believe to be true theologically, but we don’t know how to do this as pastors. And so the whole year project is on helping pastors begin to understand what this would look like, to give pastoral leadership to a congregation that actually begins to take vocation as a serious vision of what God is doing in the world, as integral to what God is doing in the world. Another project is with Covenant Seminary in a D.Min. degree on Faith, Vocation and Culture. For three years, we will be working with about 12 pastors across America who have banded together to be more theologically and pastorally hospitable to people who have labored for six days in the course of a week. They’re not asking the pastor to speak into the detail of carpentry or farming or the work of a lawyer or a doctor. What they’re hoping is when they come to worship on the Sabbath day that they would be able to hear something that helps them go at it again for another week, to understand that what you worked hard at all week long matters to God and the world.

Another project is we’ve been asked to help advocate a book called Work Matters by a pastor named Tom Nelson from Kansas City. Crossways published the book last fall on Reformation Day, and it is the first book by a pastor on this question of vocation. I was part of the birthing of the book, and we’ve chosen to travel across the country together visiting cities with seminaries and raising this question in each of these places, with seminary leaders, pastors in the area, and business leaders: “What would it look like to take vocation seriously within the context of seminary education, pastoral and congregational life, and within the lives of the marketplace people here as well?”

Another project is at Laity Lodge, gathering about 20 pastors for several days in May to work on that very question.

Yet another project is with an author of a good book just released called Kingdom Callings by Amy Sherman. We’ve been asked by a foundation to create a learning community; so we will gathering about 20 pastors, apprentices, and business people from across America. I’ve invited an RP pastor to be a part of this, as we come together for a year. We’ll meet in L.A., Washington, Kansas City, New York probably, and they’ll read things together, they will be in video webinars together. But the whole point is to work together as a little community learning to rethink this relation of vocation to the missio Dei.

RP Witness: What is a question you often get from students?

SG: “If I give myself to something that matters, what if it doesn’t work out?” The heart of that question in some ways is, “Is it possible to know the world and still love the world? I’m really getting to know the world in my studies in history (or philosophy or chemistry or whatever it might be). I’m really beginning to understand through the disciplines of my major here that this is a more complicated world than I thought it was when I was 15.” And there are a lot of people in the course of the next four or five or six of life, from adolescence into adulthood, who just are going to decide in fact it no longer makes sense. “When I was 17 I thought it did, my parents believed it and my pastor believed it. But now I’m 23. I’ve studied a lot, I’ve read a lot and it isn’t quite like that, it isn’t as simple as that. I wish it was.” So much of it in my mind revolves around the complexity of the question, “Can you really know the world and still love the world?”

RP Witness: I think you’ve already given away your answer to that question, but what is it?

SG: I think the primordial question asked of Father Adam and Mother Eve was this in Genesis 3: What will you do with what you know? Of course, as Romans 1 interprets that dynamic for all of us, there is a repressing, a suppressing of what we know to be true. Because we don’t want it to be. We choose to live otherwise, actually. We’d rather have it be like this instead. I want to live like this instead. But because it is too painful actually to live in a world dissonant with how God ordered it, we suppress that and we turn it into versions of stoicism and cynicism. Both are ways to protect your heart from what you know to be true and from its implications.

Stoicism of course turns the barometer of your heart down, it says, “I won’t care. I’m not going to get that close to it.” Cynicism has a more sneering response to what you know and says, “When I was 20 I was naïve, I didn’t know any better. I’ve grown up now. I’ve lived in the world. It isn’t like that. Come on, grow up yourself, don’t be so stupid, really.” And if the Incarnation has not happened, if there’s not been an Incarnation, then I would say those are pretty good answers. They’re not cheap answers actually. They’re not cheap.

But you see, if God actually has known the world, and loved the world, incarnate in Christ, then it changes everything. And if we’re called to imitate the vocation of God in our vocations, then there’s a possibility to actually have a good life.