Our Story

The Octet Collaborative is the culmination of decades of work and prayer by Christians who have longed to see a Christian study center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Cambridge is a city blessed with a nearly incomparable wealth of intellectual resources; Octet is the outgrowth of Christian commitment to God’s call to seek the welfare of this city, where he has sent us, for the common good and for the growth of His kingdom.

The Octet Collaborative came together as God orchestrated a series of relationships and conversations among local Christians devoted to the vision of Christian learning that animates the study center movement [link to “What is a CSC?”].  Nathan Barczi earned his doctorate in economics at MIT in 2007, and entered full-time pastoral ministry in Cambridge in 2014.  His ministry was rooted in a call to love the city; noting the lack of a study center to serve the academic community at the heart of Cambridge, he began to pray, dream, and seek out like-minded partners.  In early 2015 he met Kelly Madden, the executive director of the Boston Fellows, a program that draws young professionals living in Boston to study a theology of vocation in intentional community with peers and mentors.  In 2016, he worked with Dave Thom, an MIT chaplain and coordinator of the Cambridge Roundtable, to organize a series of faculty dinner conversations around questions of gene editing and bioethics. In June of 2018, the group added to their number Mia Chung-Yee, a concert pianist and professor of music at the Curtis Institute of Philadelphia, whose interest in a study center for Cambridge (where her children were pursuing college) had been piqued after she gave a lecture on theology and music at Chesterton House, the Christian study center at Cornell University.

 
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In January of 2019, the four organized an MIT faculty retreat, sponsored by the Veritas Forum, that provided invaluable insights into the life and needs of the Institute from Christian professors, administrators, and campus ministers.  Over the next year, the vision took definitive form:

  • The study center would be dedicated to human flourishing - both the flourishing of students and scholars within their vocation, and the equipping of students and scholars to promote human flourishing within their vocation.  

  • To that end, the center would seek to re-integrate what modernity has tended to disintegrate:  scholars as human beings (mind, body, and spirit, in community with one another), the academic vocation (teaching, research, and mentoring), and the unity of all fields of learning, pursuing and promoting all through the lens of Christian faith and practice.  Physical presence on campus, community life organized around spiritual disciplines, and interdisciplinary scholarly discourse pursued through the lens of faith would be central.

  • In a city with nearly 100 colleges and universities, the center would focus on MIT, for three reasons.  First, there exists at MIT an energetic and united cohort of Christian faculty; Octet conceives of these faculty and the students of MIT as the primary agents of its mission.  Second, because MIT is an institution that is already asking the big questions, developing task forces on AI and the future of the labor market, the nature of consciousness, and the ethical use of machine learning; the study center would seek to support MIT in its own mission, contributing the resources of Christian wisdom.  Lastly, MIT and its community is well known to Dave Thom as a chaplain, and to Nathan Barczi as a recent alumnus.

Plans coalesced around a public launch in 2020, with Nathan Barczi identified as incoming executive director and Mia Chung-Yee as founder and board chair.  Development was well underway for an initial summit to be held at the MIT’s Samberg Center on October 10, drawing together stakeholders from throughout the MIT community - faculty, alumni, student leaders, campus ministers - to contribute wisdom and insights that would inform the pursuit of Octet’s mission.  But in March 2020, with stunning speed, the spread of the coronavirus across the United States threw plans for the center’s launch, and university life itself, onto a vastly altered and uncertain trajectory.

And still, God’s spirit was at work.  The Octet team quickly pivoted to planning for a virtual event [link to conference page] to stage the same vital conversations that would, sadly, no longer be possible in person.  The Octet name was itself birthed out of conversations that took place under quarantine, over Zoom, as the team reflected on the generative significance of Sabbath rest for the work of MIT.  And Octet added a new team member.  Mia had maintained a relationship with Karl Johnson, the former, and founding, director of Chesterton House, and in late spring of 2020, was led to ask him to join the effort to found the Octet Collaborative.  He took on the role of Chief Strategist, contributing deep wisdom, experience, and insight, out of a commitment to the same love of Christian learning for the sake of the university that has driven all of Octet’s efforts.

The Octet Collaborative launches in July 2020.  It is a time of pandemic, deep social unrest derived from a long history of systemic racism in the United States, a fractious body politic approaching an election cycle, and major uncertainty surrounding the future of our economy and our higher education system.  Simply put, there has never been a greater need for a witness to the wisdom of Jesus Christ to take root at the heart of leading institutions like MIT.  Nor has there ever been a greater need for Christians to serve the human beings who inhabit such institutions with love, working alongside in their vocation, for the common good.  The Octet Collaborative will serve that mission, in service to Christ, for as long as His Spirit leads.