Calling

Dori Baker

Scholar-in-Residence

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October 16, 2009

In the Season of Transplanting: Investing in the College Years as a Vocation Care Practice

Call asks that we set out from a place that is familiar and relatively secure for a destination that can be only dimly perceived, and that we cannot be at all certain of reaching, so many are the obstacles that will loom along the way.

—Elizabeth O’Connor, Cry Pain, Cry Hope

“When you walked into our church, you saw a lot of gray staring back at you,” says Chris Enstad former associate pastor at Normandale ELCA, a 2,700-member church in the southwest suburbs of Minneapolis. Fresh out of seminary at age 27, Enstad was to pastor youth and young adults in a church that had few visible members between the ages of 13 and 30.

Enstad’s own history as a young Lutheran college student held the seed of an idea he hoped might help this thriving, mission-oriented, well-resourced church grow younger, while also engaging the gifts of its older members. Given time, this small seed of an idea bloomed: four students discerned a call to ministry and enrolled in seminary over the course of eight years. The idea lives on—beyond Enstad’s tenure at Normandale—in a team of lay people who minister intentionally to members during the sometimes difficult transition between adolescence and emerging adulthood.

THE IDEA: What if we provide consistent, ongoing nurture of the ones we baptize?

“When I went off to college, it was like I fell of the face of the planet” Enstad says, remembering the disconnection he felt from his church, despite a need for its ongoing nurture. Too much freedom resulted in low grades and a year off to reset his priorities. “I could have saved a lot of blood, sweat, and tears if someone who knew me had come alongside me with gentle advice,” Enstad recalls.

“College is the time when you are making such huge decisions,” Enstad says. “The church has a vocabulary to help with these decisions and a sense of how to walk beside young people, but we pretty much hand them off.”

Enstad sees the young adult years as a critical moment for the church to remember and act on its baptismal vows. “They’re still our members. We baptized them. We made promises to them,” he says. “Now they’re starting to live the life for which they need the tools we’ve given them.”

Based on his heartfelt urge to be present to college students as they began to make big decisions about life, Enstad regularly visited colleges where Normandale members attended, letting the students set the agenda for the visits. “I was just checking in. I wanted to hear how life was going. I would just gather as many students as I could and invite them to grab a bite to eat.”

THE INVESTMENT: A well-resourced church acts on its history

The challenge of a capital campaign recalled a potential to connect two strong strains of Normandale’s identity—mission outreach and leadership development. “We realized we were a healthy place that should be producing leaders, not just for ourselves, but for the whole church,” Enstad says.

From this realization, an initiative called Sending Forth earmarked $100,000 specifically to:

• Help find the next generation of future leaders for the church
• Support young leaders whose primary interest was serving congregations
• Provide significant funding for all three years of seminary
• Make the first year of seminary free.

In addition youth identified as potential leaders received intentional nurture. “I pulled them aside and checked on them more personally. It was not a heavy hand, but I put a hand on them” Enstad recalls. “These kids might have a call, but if no one is helping them access it, they may not hear it.”

THE FRUIT: A Trellis of Support

When Meta Carlson (FTE Congregational Fellow ’04) graduated from high school, she was one of those students Enstad visited. “While I was fascinated by worship and the church, I never wanted to be a pastor,” she says. “I studied religion in college, but refused to admit that God had plans for me in the parish. And then I met Pastor Chris, a young pastor and mentor who came to serve my home congregation while I was away at college. He wandered with me on my vocational journey.”

During college, she identified a calling to seminary. The Sending Forth team at Normandale became her nurturing community. They encircled her in care and became trusted conversation partners as she navigated her way through the candidacy process and the sometimes cumbersome benchmarks that lead to ordination. Meta graduated from Luther Seminary in 2008 and is now serving St. John’s Lutheran Church in south Minneapolis.

Meta was also among those college students who served a summer internship at Normandale, the better to come closer to a calling that has now become hers. In speaking of the lay people who nurtured her during her internship, Meta says, “They thanked me for helping with worship and called me a blessing from God. Each small comment of appreciation and encouragement named me as a member of Christ’s body and called my attention to God’s vocational plan for my life.”

Now, the Normandale congregation has three young members in seminary. The church is providing financial assistance and has teams of lay people who will surround these students with support, come together to pray with them, send them a care package once in a while, and phone to check in with them once a quarter. This congregational team has become that voice of care and concern that stands alongside them in the sometimes tumultuous path toward one’s calling.

In inviting college interns, the pastors would say “We want you to see what it looks like from the inside. Some of it’s boring and some of it’s exciting. Some of it is just being present in places of fear in the life of a family. That’s what makes it a holy calling.”

The first among these college interns at Normandale, aggressively recruited and encouraged to take the position, became a catalyst for his peers. Eight years later, the church has seven college applicants for the two internships it provides. Teens in the church, now accustomed to seeing their friends return from college and serve as summer interns, are more likely to consider their gifts for leading. Teens serve on committees regularly, and there is no such thing as a “youth Sunday” because teens are present in worship every Sunday.

And the adults? They’re more ready to say to the young in their midst “Now, how can we walk together toward who you want to be, toward who God wants you to be, toward your preferred future?”

Chris Enstad is currently Associate Pastor at Mt. Olivet Lutheran Church in Plymouth, MN.

Dr. Dori Baker is an FTE/Calling Congregations program partner and consultant, after a decade of teaching youth ministry and religious education at various seminaries. She is the co-author of “Lives to Offer: Accompanying Youth on the Quest for Vocation” (Pilgrim Press, 2007), which grew out of research on the Youth Theological Initiative, a Lilly Endowment program for high school youth at Candler School of Theology. Dori lives in Altavista, Virginia, where she continues to teach, write and to provide leadership for retreats and conferences. To read Dr. Baker’s entire Normandale ELCA profile download this pdf.

To read Meta Herrick Carlson’s call story, visit the CALLING archives.