Calling

Ministry has often been defined as categorically different from occupational choice or even vocational pursuit. Rooted not in cultural expectations for productivity but in ancient religious story and metaphor, ministry is entered into as a "calling." This calling is born of the tradition of priest and prophet, of one chosen to speak for God, to protect and administer the moral code of personal and corporate conduct, to define the believer’s relationship to the Holy, and to articulate revealed truth as a way to advance human community.

Our calling is to believe in the revealed truth so deeply that we are fundamentally changed by it and compelled to invite others to live as though this truth is the only reality of consequence in their lives.

We experience this calling so profoundly that we have no choice but to say "yes" to it even when we feel inadequate to the task, even when doing so could jeopardize our security, our peace of mind, and our physical comfort.

With this calling comes a vision so persistent that we feel no alternative but to pursue it full force, convinced of its power to remake the human heart and create a new world. It is a vision we feel we must manifest in deeds of love and mercy, to call for justice and work for peace, to speak for those without a voice, to claim that the lost have been found. Living out this call, pursuing this vision, is likely to place us in the breach between hope and despair, longing and fulfillment, the demonic and the sacred, the partial and the complete.

To engage in the act of claiming this calling and being claimed by it is to experience a profound encounter with the Holy. It is to experience the utter defeat of personal agendas and private aspirations, it is to experience and touch a spiritual dimension of reality that can never be adequately described or explained, not even to one’s closest friend. Our response to this call results in making commitments capable of depleting the very soul that yesterday it caused to soar.

To honor this calling is to be alternately blessed and stretched, affirmed and challenged, nurtured by renewing waters and driven into the desert. It is to live with absolute certainty one moment and complete vulnerability the next. It is to identify oneself with the greatest of all hopes in the face of the greatest of all possible disillusionments. The archetypal story of this kind of calling is found in the story of Jeremiah. His calling, so beautifully and poetically set forth in the book’s first chapter, turns dark by chapter 20. By that point in his career he is not only struggling with his calling ("I have become a laughingstock all day long") but has reached such depths of despair that he curses the day on which he was born. To live out this calling is to journey on the coattails of a promise as illusive as the evening mist.

Such a calling as this possesses a power and a mystery that can dominate the landscape of one’s life and become the filter through which one sees and interprets all else. The very idea of this kind of mystery can be a foreign concept in a cynical world. We tend to be intolerant of the notion of mystery. We think of it as something we just don’t know yet rather than as something fundamentally unknowable. We assume that anything viewed in the cold light of day, subjected to rational thought, will yield up its secrets. After all, in an information age what is there that we cannot know by simply pushing the correct key on the computer?

It is this element of mystery that makes living out our calling an experience in spiritual windsurfing, mastering and balancing ourselves by alternately tensing and yielding to the wind, developing a relationship with the wind that allows responsiveness to its shifting and moving. We skip across living waters with exhilarating freedom and are astounded by our agility, barely earthbound. It is the power and mystery of such profound calling that tethers us for life to this work. Once tethered in this way we should expect to ride the wind, to be both caressed and buffeted by it, to experience times of dead calm and typhoon.

It is not common practice in congregations that they speak the language of call. It is far more common to find congregations who are working to develop vision and mission statements and meeting annually for goal setting. It is the language of call, however, that sets before the faith community a new way of thinking. It allows them to move away from a "business model" and tap into the deep spiritual reservoir of their own faith tradition. It is in the context of call that the congregation is challenged in a new way to find its unique identity and to struggle with its role at a particular time and in a particular place.

This is not to say that there should not be goals for ministry in the congregation. Rather, it is to advocate for a focus on the congregation’s sense of call as primary. It is this focus that moves the leaders of the congregation to explore larger questions of meaning and purpose. Goals then emerge out of this framework. When the congregation’s call is central to its identity, the capacity for risk taking is expanded and the bar for expectations is raised.