Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Calvin Theological Seminary reflections on Jubilee 2006
Fiona Baker, Administrative Assistant for Continuing Education and the Making Connections Initiative at Calvin Theological Seminary, traveled to Pittsburgh last month to help represent CTS at Jubilee 2006. She reported to our staff meeting last week, and submitted these written reflections.
As a former staff member of the Coalition for Christian Outreach (CCO), a campus ministry organization based in Pittsburgh, the Jubilee conference was one of my favorite times of the year. So you can imagine my excitement at the opportunity to attend Jubilee 2006 with two other Calvin Theological Seminary colleagues. Jubilee is the signature event of the CCO. The conference allows students to explore specific areas of study or vocation with the belief that as Christians we are to invite Christ into every area of our life—including our studies, college life and vocation. By doing so, we can then have kingdom influence in every sphere of life.
At Jubilee, people from many different vocations led sessions about how they approach their work with a Christian worldview, and the implications of this approach. This year, breakout sessions covered topics such as technology, teaching, architecture, art, medicine, law, sexuality, reconciliation, advertising and more. As a CCO staff alumnus, I can vouch for the fact that this experience can be life-changing for students. When I was a campus minister, I worked with many students who did not think about how their Christian faith affected their work, studies and college life. More often than not, they possessed a compartmentalized understanding of their faith, keeping their Christian faith confined to certain areas of their lives, missing out on the (somewhat scary) challenge of engaging their studies from a kingdom perspective. Not only that, but they were missing out on understanding God’s purpose and calling for them in their areas of study. Jubilee puts faces on these concepts that we were trying to help students understand. Often, students walked away having met with God, with a deeper understanding of his call on their life. Also, the opportunity to worship with 1,500 other students provided them with an expanded vision of God’s work on other college campuses.
It was with this focus in mind—CCO’s effort to help students understand that God has created them for a specific vocation, for the purpose of furthering Christ’s kingdom whether they are called to homemaking or politics, teaching or medicine, ministry or janitorial work—that Heidi De Jonge (Pastor for Discernment at CTS), Darwin Glassford (MA Director and Associate Professor of Church Education at CTS) and I (Administrative Assistant for the Making Connections Initiative) attended Jubilee 2006. Our plan was to ‘work’ the CTS display table and have conversations with students about discernment and calling.
Heidi De Jonge’s work at the seminary involves connecting with people who are considering whether God might be calling them to ministry—whether in high school, college or beyond—so the opportunity to bring that work to Jubilee was perfect! As we talked with the students who stopped by the table about the issue of discernment—or pointed them to Heidi—their eyes lit up. I believe this happened because this approach is authentic; although we would love people to attend CTS, our main concern is their heart, what God is doing in their lives and how he is calling them to serve. Not only that, but this approach is familiar to these students whose mentors and campus ministry leaders speak the same language of discernment and calling and who encourage students to think in this way.
The other way we connected with the CCO was with the staff. Looking at both the Seminary and CCO, we realized that there is much we can offer each other. It made sense to find out if there are ways that we can collaborate with the organization. Perhaps Heidi can do a Discerning Your Calling Workshop at Jubilee, or maybe one or more of our faculty could speak at a staff seminar. We had fruitful conversations in this area with several CCO staff members and look forward to possible collaboration in the future.
We pray that these connections, conversations, and possible collaborations will be one more way in which we can further the work of helping people to discern a call to ministry.
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