A Letter from the Executive Director

As 2021 draws to a close, I’d like to tell you a story that captures why I believe God has established the Octet Collaborative at MIT now - in the middle of a global pandemic, with cultural confusions swirling. Two stories, actually.

This fall I had the pleasure to gather about twice a month with a group of Christian MIT faculty - mostly in person but always with one or two Zooming in from other locations. At the suggestion of longtime InterVarsity leader Kevin Ford, the group had adopted a format modeled after the Inklings of Lewis and Tolkien’s day, each taking a turn to read aloud a short piece of work, for comment, critique, and prayer.

On one particular afternoon, the piece in question was a draft of a new values statement being written for MIT. In God’s providence, the co-chair of the committee writing the statement is Dan Hastings, a longtime MIT faculty member, faithful follower of Christ, and Octet Collaborative faculty advisor. It was a robust discussion, reflecting in equal measure a love for MIT and a desire to serve Christ in vocation. One comment in particular stood out to me.

“When I think about MIT’s values,” one of the group members said, “I ask myself, When was I proud to be a member of this community?”

“And what comes to mind,” he continued, “is last January, when the vaccines were first available, and MIT chose to give the first shot to the lead housekeeper at MIT Medical. Not a Nobel laureate, nobody anyone had ever heard of - a relatively unknown woman who had been putting in eighty-hour weeks since March to keep the hospital clean and safe for all the front-line workers and patients.”

“That needs to be reflected in this values statement somewhere,” he said. “MIT may be an elite institution, but we should put in writing that we don’t value people for their intelligence alone.”

This is exactly the kind of engagement that supporters of the Octet Collaborative - most of them individuals like you - make possible: connections that bend the culture and the very institutions of MIT toward human flourishing as defined by the gospel.

And the second story? It comes from another conversation I had over coffee with an MIT staffer in October.

She reminded me of 2018, when a series of scandals rocked MIT’s campus - scandals which played no small part in the origin of the Values Statement committee! But before that, in the midst of the turmoil, the MIT staffer and some of her colleagues, fellow Christians, took prayer walks around the campus and prayed for God to send someone to MIT to help the Institute engage the ethics of its activities in a way that would honor the dignity and worth of every human being it touches. What else was happening in 2018? That was the year that Mia Chung-Yee, Octet’s board chair and founder, met with me and other members of what was then the steering committee for a proposed study center in Cambridge, and decided that our focus needed to be on MIT in particular. Six months later, Veritas Forum would sponsor a forum with us and MIT faculty to lay out our vision, and within two years the study center would be named the Octet Collaborative and would get to work gathering a community of students, faculty, staff, and alumni.

The Octet Collaborative concluded its first fiscal year in June of this year, and is now wrapping up its first semester with an on-campus presence. Very little of what has transpired over the past couple of years has followed anything like the plans that steering committee laid out. But one constant has been that, time and again, God’s Spirit has shown up at just the right time, making just the right connections.

Yours with gratitude,

Read on to learn more about the first year of the Octet Collaborative, and the work that depends so crucially on the generosity and prayers of individuals such as yourself.

A Community of Understanding:

The Octet Collaborative is a community of students, faculty, and staff at MIT, dedicated to human flourishing, formed by the historic Christian faith. Our aim is to promote flourishing by championing an awareness of who we are as persons created in God’s image, fully integrated in mind, hand, heart, and soul. We equip students, faculty, and staff at MIT to pursue the scholarly vocation in a way that is fully human, in community.

How does this take place? In two major ways: a) interdisciplinary exploration: we connect scientific conversations to theological ones, explore the importance of beauty and artistry in connection with their impact on our minds, bodies, and souls, and treat emotions not as inconvenient distractions, but as integral to who we are as human beings and how God would have us pursue wisdom; and b) community: we amplify the experience of co-laboring by creating an environment where individuals are not merely working side by side, cohabiting and coexisting in a shared space, but collaborate and commune as scholars working on these topics in ways that are mutually upbuilding and supportive.

In our first year, we prioritized relationship building with students, faculty, staff and alumni, joining them in the work they are already doing and together, dreaming about how Octet might support and enhance their aspirations.

So far, we have done this by:

Participating in the faculty and staff fellowships and prayer meetings;

Laying the groundwork for a series of working groups, leading up to a conference, on the theme of Cultivating Wisdom in a Technological Age, with the hope of bringing theologians and philosophers from outside the Institute together with MIT scholars on the forefront of science and tech;

Hosting a reading group open to all MIT community members in the history of science and religion in conjunction with the Concourse Program, an MIT program that integrates the humanities into the first-year science core curriculum, and is directed by Octet faculty advisor Anne McCants.

Whole-Life Formation:

The second pillar of Octet’s mission is to provide whole-life formation for all members of the MIT community, beginning with alumni. Discipleship is a lifelong journey and periods of growth and flourishing can be followed by periods of disruption, with consequences on mental health, spiritual growth, relationships, and faith. A true and biblical commitment to human flourishing must attend to the whole of life, not only one particular area.

While there are numerous strong and faithful fellowships already at MIT among students, faculty and staff, many alumni have reported struggling to find similar communities after graduating. Recent graduates face the added challenges of new environments, unfamiliar situations, and ethical questions at work during this transition.

In response to this stated need, the Octet Collaborative is piloting a program to establish alumni peer mentoring groups. With two groups currently running, one online and one located in the Bay Area, we are developing the parameters for a robust peer mentoring fellowship that connects recent graduates to communities of alumni in their respective fields and supports them as they continue their discipleship journeys. Our future mentoring aspirations include connecting alumni to current students and students to faculty.

Engaging the Institute:

While the first two of our pillars are focused on supporting the Christian community of MIT both on and off campus, our third pillar, engaging the institute, is directed towards the university as a whole. MIT is wrestling with the many social and ethical consequences that technological advancements inevitably produce. The MIT Values Statement Committee, the MIT Task Force on Work of the Future, Social and Ethically Responsible Computing, and Task Force 2021 and Beyond are among the initiatives reflecting on the identity and direction of the university and the impact that it hopes to have on society.

On a campus lacking a divinity school or any explicitly theological voice, the Octet Collaborative is engaging with the university and its many initiatives to offer a Christian perspective on these critical conversations. We have been supporting Christian faculty and administrators, including those leading these task forces, helping them to think and pray through what it means to be servants of Christ called to love the institute where God has sent them. Additionally, we are preparing to host a series of open forums to discuss and offer feedback to the Task Force 2021 and Beyond on their list of proposed initiatives.

We Thank Our Charter Givers

The Octet Collaborative depends on the generosity of individuals, churches, and foundations. We are grateful to recognize the following individuals who gave $1,000 or more during our launch phase prior to January 31, 2021:

Ken & Joanne Barczi

Paul Burke

Jay & Myung Kim Chung

Young Chung & June Kwon-Chung

Timothy & Janis Dietz

Dan & Lois Frasier

Ken Grant

Ian & Frances Hutchinson

Phil & Victoria Jackson

Karl & Julie Johnson

Larry & Kay Lee Kim

Kurt & Laura Leafstrand

Joseph & Julie Lee

Travis & Katie Lee

Victor Luchangco

Mithran & Anita Mathew

Bill & Theresa Mock

John & Hee-Jung Moon

Robert & Emily Morrison

Len & Rosalind Picard

Andy & Emily Stuntz

James Taylor

Jason Wong

John Yee & Mia Chung-Yee

…and multiple anonymous donors

octetcollaborative.org

EIN: 84-4881059