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Lauren Sable

sable_lauren.jpg“The CCO’s ministry had a profound affect on my life on many levels and I would not be who I am today without it,” says Lauren Sable. “It truly did lay a foundation in my life on which God continues to build.”

Before she even left home for her first year at the University of Pittsburgh, one of Lauren’s youth ministers advised her that the most important thing she could do when she started college was to find a good Christian community. He went a step further and gave her the names of CCO staff workers at Pitt—BJ and Katrina Woodworth. “At first, I could not remember their names, but I attended Cornerstone’s ice cream social during orientation week,” Lauren remembers. “BJ and Katrina did have my name from my home church, and I had dinner at their house either that first week or the following week. I later learned that the couple I had been searching for was actually the Woodworths. The rest is history, and I realize now that God was very gracious and intentional about connecting me to Cornerstone.”

Today, Lauren lives in Washington, DC, where she serves as a team leader of a small team that focuses on operations for grant-funded relief and development programming within World Vision United States. “Through development, we walk along beside communities as a part of God’s ongoing work of restoring true identity, recovering vocation, promoting justice, restoring and stewarding creation, and transforming systems and structures so that children, families, communities, can experience the rebuilding, healing, transformation, and well-being that the prophets spoke to in the Old Testament and Jesus announced his fulfillment of throughout the Gospels.” Lauren thinks back to her years at Pitt and her involvement in the ministry there as instrumental in directing her to the work she is pursuing today.

“Katrina was profoundly influential in the formation of my worldview and helped me to think through life on many levels,” says Lauren. “I was on track to be a lawyer, and I asked a lot of questions about public policy and the Kingdom of God. She connected me to the American Studies Program through Steve Garber, where I discovered a vocational passion and desire to meet people’s basic needs and to see transformation come in tangible ways for the poor. Studying at ASP introduced me to development, as it was not an active societal interest back then.

“I really believe that the twenties are about figuring out who you are—who God created you to be, who he is calling you to be, and how to surrender to him so he can bring about his desires. Cornerstone laid the foundation by equipping me with a strong theological understanding of who God is and what he is doing in the world. It also cultivated leadership skills and helped me to figure out my God-given passions. It provided a forum to explore service. It also helped me to see the profound role that community has in a person’s life. This understanding has influenced my decisions since then, in that I have made decisions on where I live, work, and attend church based on the ability to remain or be with an intimate community.”

About four years ago, Lauren moved into a house in a marginalized DC neighborhood to work with friends to start a small Anglican church and intentional community, St. Brendan’s in the City. “I have helped to foster its DNA and worked with others to figure out how we can fully live into the way of life to which we believe God has called us. We would love to be very involved in our community or neighborhood and moved into a poor part of the city to try to be a redemptive presence. We struggle, though, with how to be present in the midst of vocations that require us to be away from home a lot. I travel internationally about 25-30 percent of the year.”

Although there is a lot of joy when working in development, it holds a lot of sadness too. “When I meet with families in Bangladesh after a cyclone and I can see no easy answer to their poverty, I draw on my faith and my understanding of who God is,” Lauren says. “Part of the understanding that I reach for reaches back to the teaching my campus ministers provided in those formative years. Now as I look to the contemplative traditions of the Christian faith in order to learn how to withstand in the midst of a lot of sadness and brokenness, I feel a lot of freedom to do so because of the solid biblical teaching I received during those formative college years.”