Finding a New Way to Serve
Story: Brooke Lange
Photos: Liz Kucera
Concordia is fostering a Christ-centered community to try to encourage future church workers in traditional and not-so-traditional roles.
If you were a high school student coming to Concordia University, Nebraska for a visit day, you would first enter the front doors of Weller Hall. Immediately in front of you, you would find a baptismal font and, about 50 feet past that, a cross hanging in the university’s chapel.
On campus, there is a clear, present desire to have faith fostering opportunities for all students. There are eight or more worship opportunities during the week, six bible studies one can be a part of if they so choose and every staff member that comes through Concordia’s doors has an interview with president Dr. Bernard Bull, personally, about their religious beliefs to determine if they are a good culture fit. Giant decals of Bible verses are spread throughout the campus. Resident assistants are encouraged to host Bible studies for their residents. Christianity is essentially unavoidable.
This strong sense of Christianity can have a profound impact on the students. In the beginning of these interviews, I spoke to Dr. Bull about this impact. Before his time at Concordia, Dr. Bull served at two other colleges and interviewed people at many others. “I have spent my life studying and interviewing people from hundreds of schools. And never have I encountered one like this one,” he told me.
I have worked in the marketing and communications office at Concordia for all of my three years of college, and I have interviewed around fifty people of all different ages and majors. In every interview, every person stated that their favorite part about Concordia is the Christian Community. Sometimes they mentioned it by sharing stories about professors that went the extra mile to fix their washing machine for them, or when they were lost as a freshman and someone helped them find their class, but it was always there. “The community is absolutely vibrant here,” said Deborah Holle, a senior at Concordia. “God’s love just radiates from this place, and there’s no way to deny it.”
“Concordia is centered around God and built on the principle that we are all flawed, sinful people who believe in a God that loves us more than we could ever imagine,” said Dr. Bull. As a result, or maybe a side effect of this centering on Christianity, 27 percent of Concordia’s student body is pursuing church work. Concordia’s church work population is comprised of five different church work programs: Director of Christian Education, pre-seminary, pre-deaconess, Lutheran Teachers Diploma and church music.
Out of the seven different Concordias in the Concordia University System, Seward graduates account for over one fifth of the church workers in the LCMS. In other words, Concordia Nebraska has been quite successful in putting church workers into the LCMS.
Despite this success, there has been a steady decline in the overall number of students pursuing church work since the school’s beginning.
“It’s not easy to be a church worker these days,” said Rev. Russ Sommerfeld, director of church engagement. “Some teachers are not paid very much, and there are some pastors in rural communities that serve three or four churches at a time. It’s not an easy field to go into.”
There seem to be two different ways to go about solving that issue. One is the need to explicitly tell people that you see the gifts that they have within themselves that might make them excellent church workers. The second is that church work may look different from before, and we need to find new ways to encourage people to do it.
The first way to fill the church work gap is communicating to people about the need for church workers. I had the opportunity to have a conversation with Dr. Sommerfeld, a former pastor, about his calling to be a church worker. Surprisingly, it did not start with him figuring that out on his own. It started with his confirmation pastor who pulled him aside and told him that he would make a good pastor.
“I was a very shy kid,” Sommerfeld told me, in a voice that always reminds me of Santa, “and one day my confirmation teacher in seventh grade told me to meet him after class, which was very scary to me, and he told me: ‘I want you to pray about being a pastor. You love what you’re doing. You love what we’re learning.’ And that, along with my parents’ encouragement, planted a seed that grew through me throughout the years.”
It took Sommerfeld more time to eventually recognize his call to be a church worker. But he attributes the encouragement from his confirmation teacher as the first step. “What people don’t often realize that God can use His whole church to raise a church worker. We need to be able to nurture that along.”
It's very empowering to be able to use the gifts I already have to serve God.
Professors and other students help to foster that community at Concordia. “Usually, the people who want to be DCEs are leaders in their youth groups at their own church, and they come here wanting to be what their DCEs were,” said Dr. Mark Blanke, chair of the DCE program. “In the DCE program, we attempt to show them the depth and complexity of the task, while also teaching them to come into their own with it. They can grow with their peers and instructors and learn what being a DCE will look like for them.”
Sommerfeld also mentioned that there are times when people come into Concordia planning to do church work and then eventually find that it is not the best fit for them.“Students do not always have the skill set that matches a church work program,” said Rev. Dr. Chuck Blanco, pre-seminary program director. “And they should not feel bad about that, because church work is not a higher calling than any other vocation. It just means that they are finding a different way to serve. Students are more satisfied when they find a way to serve God that fits with who they are. "As a pastor for many years, Dr. Blanco found that their parishioners were often able to spread the gospel, just in different ways. “We’re just supposed to point other people to God. I was just humbled at how my parishioners used their gifts in their secular jobs to be able to spread God’s word.”
Deborah Holle was one of the students who took some time finding how she would serve God. Throughout her college career, Holle majored in business, elementary education and Christian education leadership. “They all seemed pretty random at the time,” said Holle, “but the main consistency is that I wanted to share the love of Jesus with other people.”
Even though Deborah loved to tell people about Jesus, she didn’t necessarily know how to do it. “At one point, I had to shadow in a third-grade classroom, and it was at that moment, I realized that this wasn’t going to be my path in life.”
When Deborah got her job managing 10:31, Concordia’s coffee shop on campus, she started to get a better sense of how she could serve God with her talents. “I love budgeting, Excel and general organization of things. I started doing all of those things while working at 10:31; I learned foundational things that people should know while working at a coffee shop.”
Not only was Deborah able to use her organizational skills at the coffee shop, she also found that there’s a great opportunity to create Christian community. “I try to ensure that 10:31 is an environment that reflects Christian living. In the way I oversee and train my employees, and with the people I hire, I try to make it a place where we make good coffee and we make disciples of Jesus.”
Deborah then decided to change her majors to Christian education leadership and theology, so she could get a solid foundation in theology and then move from there. She hopes to work for a registered service organization and then eventually, if she can, buy a coffee shop and use it to help people learn about Jesus. “It's very empowering to be able to use the gifts I already have to serve God.”
Regardless of where you will end up, or maybe have already ended up, there is a common theme: we need to tell people. Tell people when you think they have gifts for a certain calling. Tell the people you work with why you believe what you believe. Regardless of what our occupations end up looking like on this earth, the most important part is that we can show and tell people about the profound hope and rest with God. And that’s something people always need to hear in all jobs, all places, all throughout the world.