About The Washington Institute
Our Purpose: Learning to see oneself as responsible--for love's sake--for the way the world is and isn’t: a worthy ambition for Everyman, for every son of Adam and every daughter of Eve, isn't it? The reason for which The Washington Institute exists is to encourage the recovery of the integral relationship of faith to vocation to the responsible engagement of the culture across the country and beyond.
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How We Serve: Day in day out, we carry out our calling through conversations, tutorials and classes; seminars and writing; consulting and speaking—all with the intent to serve the church and the world. We also maintain a strategic partnership and work with other organizations who share our purpose: The Center for Faith and Work at Redeemer Church in New York City; the Work Life Institute in Toronto; Canada; and the Max De Pree Center for Leadership in Pasadena, CA all of whom are also co-publishers of Comment Magazine.
The Need: In our work we continue to discover the deep, personal, sometimes aching need of people in all walks of life for wholeness in Christ. Instead, what so many find as they enter their callings and live in their communities is that there is fragmentation, a depersonalizing experience, where daily work and daily relationships have become disconnected from faith. Sunday and Monday do not talk to each other nor do they speak the same language if they do converse.
This gap is most often due to the theology people have come to understand whether it is from their church experience, from their personal reading of Scripture, or simply the daily drag of an info glut culture and its secularizing tendencies. The opportunity that we have experienced to impact individuals, local churches, organizations and seminaries in our work since our founding in 2005 is extensive simply because of the hunger to live such that all of life is to be redeemed be it work, worship, families or souls. People resonate with the understanding that vocation is integral, not incidental to the Missio Dei. Somewhere in the flow of modernity that centuries old connection has been obscured. The ancient word for living such a whole and coherent life is wisdom. Imparting wisdom and helping each other engage in wisdom—this is at the heart of the mission of The Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation & Culture.
The Results: At our core--faith... vocation... culture--the biblical vision of life and the world, pondered and practiced for many centuries in myriad cultures... forming what we do and why we do what we do... forming our responsibility for history, for the way culture is and isn't. The end result? That we might develop eyes to see the world as God does—and then to act, to take responsibility for what we see. Or in the words of Bono, poet of Dublin and conscience to the world, "to feel the world" as God does.
