Finding Faithful Vocation
10-01-2022
For Dr. Reggie Williams, theological education can help one thoughtfully consider their worldview and see how their chosen vocation is also interconnected with the well-being of the people around them.
When Dr. Reggie Williams thinks about vocation, he’s often reminded of words penned by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from a Birmingham jail cell. “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” wrote Dr. King. “And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.”
From those words, Dr. Williams, associate professor, Christian Ethics, sees God’s universe as a community. When community is central, “all of life becomes a theological classroom where we become more aware of how the undercurrent of religion impacts everything we do and how we do it,” Dr. Williams says.
“One of the things a theological education offers,” continues Dr. Williams, author of Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance, “is a space where inherited beliefs can surface so that we can determine whether those beliefs are consistent with the way of Jesus…the way of justice. We can see if our societies, our vocations, our lives are based on ideals that seek the well-being of the entire community.”
During the past year, Dr. Williams was on a research sabbatical in France where he became part of the community at the American Church in Paris. As the pastoral scholar in residence, his scholarship wove together the cultural, religious, and social realities of people of faith. While in Europe, he also was selected to be a research fellow for the International Baptist Theological Study Center in Amsterdam and expanded community through online lectures to schools in Salisbury, England and Claremont, California.
In the process of finding vocation in community, Dr. Williams notes, it’s important to realize how we have been shaped by the cultural structures and political systems that manage our nation and world. “We all have ideologies that capture our loyalties,” says Dr. Williams, who is also a member of the American Academy of Religion and Society for the Study of Black Religion. “Our notions of race, gender, sexuality, economics, and care for the earth are just some of the areas of life that are filtered through our religious claims. These claims guide how we construct our lives, our prison system, how we treat the poor…even how we define justice – is it about meritocracy or making sure everyone has what they need.”
Dr. Williams finds this diversity to be an opportunity for everyone in the McCormick community to examine their beliefs and how those beliefs impact the lives and world around them. “I find McCormick to be a place that helps us move far beyond the memorizing and monitoring of a particular kind of tradition or belief,” he says. “What Dr. King and many others envisioned was a way of organizing community that called for listening and imagining what can be. At McCormick, this is an ongoing process that’s meant to keep us – faculty, staff, students, and our Chicago neighbors – open to the mission of God, committed to being a community of learners, and willing to work for the good of others in any vocational choice we make.”
Dr. Reggie Williams
Professor of Christian Ethics