The Lilly Center for Vocation and Values provides a variety of programs that help participants, especially students, discover and use their gifts in ways that serve others and improve the world around them. Thoughtful and thought-provoking programs, as well as vocational retreats and mini-retreats are offered each year. A special area of emphasis is to encourage interested students to consider how they can make a positive difference in their community and beyond through Christian ministry.
The Lilly Center for Vocation and Values grew out of an awareness that college students often feel unsure about having a real sense of purpose in life, a sense of their unique gifts and how those gifts might be used to make a positive difference in the world around them. Many students arrive at college with little or no idea of their "vocation" in the word's original sense of "calling." Popular culture flaunts wealth and status, but students can see on social media the unhappy lives of so many celebrities and they realize that being rich and famous doesn’t provide personal fulfillment or give life real meaning. Seeing that, students want to discover and understand how to live a life that does.
The Lilly Center and its programs are designed:
- To help students begin the process of identifying their own unique sense of vocation, their "calling" in life. Frederick Buechner, in his book Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC, refers to this sense of vocation as "the place where [their] deep gladness meets the world's deep need."
- To encourage students to consider how their religious faith relates, or could relate, to their choice of vocation.
- To encourage students to consider the many ways that Christian leadership, community service, and a secular career can be combined within a broad concept of vocation.
- To promote a serious exploration of the idea of vocation among all students at Catawba College, including those with less immediate interest in a theological career or a career in community service.
The Center believes that all students, if encouraged to consider seriously their lives and their futures, will prefer a path that enables them to improve the world in which they live.
