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When Craig Wentland, CLC ‘86, attended Camrose Lutheran College (CLC), he never imagined that 40 years later, he would receive an award named in honour of his friend and mentor, Lois Aspenes.

As a CLC student, Wentland learned the value of community from his peers, faculty and staff like Aspenes. She was the secretary for the director of College and Church Relations, and her door was always open.

“She was like our campus mother,” recalls Wentland. “She modelled what it meant to have an open-door policy and be receptive to students.” Aspenes and her husband even took Wentland into their home for a couple of weeks after he graduated, when he needed a place to stay while finishing a contract at CLC.

Wentland went on to earn a master of divinity at Waterloo Lutheran Seminary and was ordained by the Evangelical Lutheran Church In Canada. In 1994, he moved back to Camrose with his spouse, professor Paula Marentette, and served as a pastor in the area for 11 years.

When Augustana University College (previously named CLC) merged with the ß÷ßäÉçÇø in 2005, Wentland was the perfect fit for the redesigned role of campus chaplain, which also included duties of teaching religious studies and working as a pastoral counsellor. His new position was an ideal place to live out his belief in community and provide a “whole person education.”

“Students look to faculty and staff for models of what it means to be whole people,” explains Wentland. “With wisdom, faculty and staff need to reveal to students who they are — their passions, their struggles and how they’re involved in community and family life.”

Guided by this philosophy, Wentland created many opportunities for students to build community with events such as soup suppers that attracted up to 100 people a week to a common table, student-led local- and fair-made sales or an annual “buy nothing” event where students and community members could take donated items for free, “a sign that there is enough for all.”

Drawing on his own positive experiences as a student, Wentland often invited students into his home, sometimes hosting classes with brunch and an opportunity for students to discuss and present their final projects. With an interest in food and local agriculture, he would invite his classes once or twice a term to experience community building through making pierogies or baking bagels in his backyard wood-fired oven. Recognizing that international students might be missing the tastes of home, he would invite them to cook their favourite dishes for their friends, even offering to buy the groceries.

One of Wentland’s fondest memories is from 2008, when Augustana’s theme was “From Field to Fork.” As part of the theme, he launched a Celebrity Chef Program, pairing culinary-savvy faculty, staff and community members with student groups. The students would go to the chefs’ homes and learn to cook alongside them. “That year we ended up with 26 celebrity chef events,” remembers Wentland. “It was really very successful. It was a way for students, faculty and staff to interact with one another in a way that doesn’t happen in the classroom.”

Wentland’s career has been guided by his philosophy — and Aspenes’s example — that life is about relationships and community. “We are definitely shaped by ideas and relationships with researchers, authors and thinkers of the past and present,” he says. “But it is the real flesh-and-blood human beings that we encounter that I think shape us most deeply. As chaplain, I tried to foster those kinds of relationships with students and encourage them to have those relationships with one another and with faculty and staff.”

Having completed his role at Augustana in 2024, Wentland offers his hopes that “the faculty, staff and administration of Augustana can take some of the best of the past, but do it in their own way. There is a rich heritage of liberal arts and science education, of developing community leaders, of relationship and community that should continue to happen, but in a new way, in the context of today.”

The Lois Aspenes Award is presented to an Augustana alumnus/a in recognition of significant contributions to the Alumni Association or to the life of Augustana.