Jade Hage on Strengthening her Vocation for Teaching

Jade Hage was several years into a promising career teaching high school when she began thinking about seminary. It wasn’t an obvious next step. Hage had already earned a graduate degree in English and wasn’t certain she wanted to become a pastor. “I didn’t understand what seminary was,” she said. “I thought it was for men.”

This spring, however, Hage graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary with a master’s in divinity degree, and a clear sense of calling that took her to Washington, D.C., for a new job shortly after commencement. She will be teaching nine and 10th graders at Georgetown Day School, a prominent private school known for its progressive ethos.

“My experience at the seminary prepared me to be a better teacher and a better citizen of the world,” Hage said. “I have grown in this program—from the academics, but also from living life in this community and living life in this season. I have learned how to love people better.”

She is among a graduating class that began Seminary during the COVID-19 pandemic—a period of general isolation and disorientation that Hage said ultimately strengthened her belief that God is present even in the most difficult circumstances and that God’s loving presence sustains and makes a way forward when the future is unclear.

“I can offer few certain answers theologically, on any front, but the one thing I feel with great certainty is that God is with us no matter what we are experiencing,” she said. “It’s not that I didn’t know that before. But I feel it and I know it differently than I did before Seminary. And that has been really important to me.”

Hage grew up near Monterey, California, studied English at UCLA, and earned her MA at Georgetown University. Drawn to the intersection of literature and theology, she explored C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia in her master’s thesis. She also began attending Presbyterian congregations during graduate school, after having been raised as a Seventh-Day Adventist.

After moving to New Jersey for her first teaching job, Hage found kindred spirits at Nassau Presbyterian Church, and the Princeton Presbyterians organization led by the Revs. Andrew and Len Scales, both graduates of Princeton Seminary. Hage fondly recalls having lively theological discussions with her friends over episodes of “The Bachelor.”

“I loved hearing what people were learning and talking about in Seminary,” Hage said. “I wanted to spend my time learning and thinking about those things too.”

She entered Princeton Seminary in 2020, seeing the move as important for both her professional and personal development. One of the most enriching parts was living and studying with a student community more diverse than any she had previously encountered.

Hage was impressed by how that diversity—in religious tradition, race, socioeconomics, sexual orientation, and gender identity—found expression around the seminary. In chapel, for example, seniors led services informed by the traditions they grew up in, from African Methodist Episcopal to Baptist to Pentecostal to Latinx. And in courses like the one she took on community organizing, Hage got a clear and bracing look at the lives of people struggling under unjust social systems.

Hage grew into an eloquent preacher with a flair for social justice themes. In a sermon she gave at Christ Congregation in Princeton, she drew parallels between the doomed biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and a 21st-century America rife with inequality. She noted how the people of Sodom were described as “having pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and the needy.”

“Are not the sins of Sodom our sins too?” Hage said. “These sins that look so much like the blessings of comfort and abundance come at the expense of the vulnerable who are exploited, excluded or neglected by the systems that provide these so-called blessings.”

She considered pursuing pulpit ministry but decided to remain a teacher, a choice she explains by paraphrasing Frederick Buechner, the Presbyterian theologian and author.

“Your vocation in life is where your greatest joy meets the world's greatest need,'" Hage said. “There is a need for good teachers who can teach students how to love themselves, have dignity, think critically, and care for the world. I believe that is what I am called to do.”