Watch Your Language: Part Five

Nora Watson nailed it in her remark about calling. While she was serving as a magazine writer/editor, Studs Terkel interviewed her for his book, Working. She told him: “I think most of us are looking for a calling, not a job. Most of us . . . have jobs that are too small for our spirit.” She is right. Far too many—even among Christians—go to work with no awareness of calling.

What Camouflages Calling?

But why? What prevents us from seeing our work as part of God’s mission in the world? In The Other Six Days, Paul Stevens says, “almost the only people who speak of being ‘called of God’ are ‘full-time’ missionaries and pastors.” It’s easy to find examples online that illustrate Stevens’ point:

• “It was during my time in college that I received my calling into pastoral ministry.”  
• “I am often asked how I received my calling from God to be a full-time pastor.”
• “I never once doubted my calling to the mission field.”

Yet in his book, The Call, Os Guinness says: “There is not a single instance in the New Testament of God’s special call to anyone into a paid occupation or into the role of a religious professional.” 

The Multiple Meanings of Call

Calling is a useful word—and a biblical one. At the same time, I think another biblical word offers a clearer way to describe how God directs us into this or that role or job or task. I’ll get to that word shortly. But first, let’s zero in on this word calling. The words call, called, and calling appear in the Bible hundreds of times. Those words in Scripture refer to the same things we mean when we speak them:

1. Call can mean to name something. If you call your daughter Stacy, that is her name. Many English translations of Rom. 1:1 and I Cor. 1:1 say Paul was “called to be an apostle.” But the Greek text has no “to be.” It simply says, “Paul, called an apostle.” God named Paul as an apostle.

2. Call can mean to initiate communication. I dial your cell phone to call you. While the boy was still in bed, “The Lord called Samuel,” because he wanted to talk to him.

3. Call can mean to summon. If illness leaves a restaurant short-staffed, employees may be called to fill in. Rom. 1:6 speaks of those “who are called to belonged to Jesus Christ.” Here called speaks of God’s invitation to come to him.   

Primary and Secondary Callings

Os Guinness distinguishes between our primary and our secondary callings. He says: “Our primary calling as followers of Christ is by him, to him, and for him. First and foremost, we are called to Someone (God), not to something (such as motherhood, politics, or teaching) or to somewhere (such as the inner city or Outer Mongolia).”

Guinness continues: “Our secondary calling, considering God who is as sovereign, is that everyone, everywhere, and in everything should think, speak, live, and act entirely for him. We can therefore properly say as a matter of secondary calling that we are called to homemaking or to the practice of law or to art history. . . . Secondary callings matter, but only because the primary calling matters most.”

Another Word for God’s Work Assignments

So Guinness uses the same word, “calling,” both for God’s (primary) summons to come to him and for his (secondary) assignments regarding what he wants us to do. Using the identical word to refer to two different things can be confusing. So let me suggest another term I find useful in describing what Guinness refers to as God’s secondary call. When Jesus and the Bible writers wanted to speak of God or others assigning someone to do some kind of work or task, they usually used some form of the word “send.” For example:

• God to Moses: "Say to the Israelites, 'The Lord, the God of your fathers . . . has sent me to you’” (Ex. 3:15).
• Jesus to his disciples: “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you." (Jn. 20:21).
• Paul to Timothy: “I sent Tychicus to Ephesus.” (II Tim. 4:12).

Mark 3:13 and 14 use two separate words for the primary and secondary meanings. “Jesus . . . called [them] . . . that he might send them.” That fits in with the way we speak, doesn’t it? If you want me to come to you, you call me. If, after I come, you want me to go and do something, you send me.

Call Means Come; Send Means Go

Jesus called you to himself—not simply so you can go to heaven someday when you die—but that he might send you in the here and now to work in his world.

• Calling—being summoned to come to God—provides you with a new identity. So calling relates especially to who you are.
• Sending—being assigned by God to do something—relates to roles and tasks. So sending relates to what you do.

God called Paul, naming or identifying him, as an apostle. God then sent Paul to represent him before Gentiles. This involved Paul in such roles as church planter, tent manufacturer, and prison inmate. 

God Sends in Various Ways

When God sends someone to do something, he may use words—or he may use the outworking of circumstances. In Paul’s case, God used words: “Go; I will send you far away to the Gentiles.” (Acts 22:21). But in Joseph’s case, God used circumstances. He worked in Egypt because his brothers bullied and sold him out. But much later he explained to them, “God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance.” (Gen. 45:7). God works in all things--even in the world of work--for the good of those who love him, those called according to his purpose (Rom. 8:28). 

Many Christians toil day after day with no sense of how their work connects with God's purpose. What do they need?

• First, we need to hear clear and frequent teaching that all of God’s children have been called, summoned, to come to him and into his Kingdom through faith in Christ.
• Second, we all need to hear clear and frequent teaching that everyone God calls to himself he then sends back out into the world to serve him in some way. God sends some of his children to work as teachers, shepherds, and equippers in the gathered church. He sends others to demonstrate Kingdom-of-God living as they work in paid and unpaid roles in the scattered church.

God sends all of us into full-time service for him. See your work as your current Kingdom post. Your assignment may change. Stay tuned!

Clarifying Our Calling to Ministry

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never harm me.” If only that old proverb were true. But words can harm us, especially when distorted. Our religious vocabulary can barricade us from moving toward shared church. Take the words calling and ministry. As Paul Stevens says in The Other Six Days, “almost the only people who speak of being ‘called of God’ are ‘full-time’ missionaries and pastors.” It seems God calls just a few special people to serve in official church roles. The rest don’t see themselves as having any calling. Why not, then, just sit back, watch, and enjoy listening to those God has called?

So, preparing Christians for participatory church gatherings will require teaching on God’s calling. “Calling,” writes Os Guinness in The Call, “is not what it is commonly thought to be. It has to be dug out from under the rubble of ignorance and confusion.” The word ministry, too, has gotten buried under centuries of debris. Part of the muddled thinking comes about because calling and ministry often show up as conjoined twins: “I was an engineer before God called me into ministry.” Are Christian engineers uncalled? Are they not called into ministry?

Paul and Peter repeatedly use the phrase “you were called” when writing to Christians in general. We become Christ-followers only in response to God’s summons, his invitation, his “Come to me.” God’s calling initiates our life of faith. So, every believer is called. Wrapped inside that calling is a second calling—to a life of ministry. To minister, in New Testament Greek, means to serve. Paul wrote that God gave the church its leaders “to prepare all God's people for the work of Christian service [ministry]” (Eph. 4:12, TEV). 

If, week in and week out, the ecclesiastical professional shoulders most if not all of the spiritual workload during a Sunday gathering, the New Testament concept of a shared ministry gets blurred and even blocked. The Message paraphrase paints the participatory church vividly: “When you gather for worship, each one of you be prepared with something that will be useful for all: Sing a hymn, teach a lesson, tell a story, lead a prayer, provide an insight” (I Cor. 14:26). Paul wrote this letter to the whole church in Corinth. So, “each one of you” means everyone in the meeting was to come prepared to minister to—to serve—all the others.

Our church traditions, though, have conditioned us to think that only the ordained or those on a church payroll are called into ministry. Os Guinness says “there is not a single instance in the New Testament of God’s special call to anyone into a paid occupation or into the role of a religious professional.” Check his statement out for yourself. Guinness adds: “Our primary calling as followers of Christ is by him, to him, and for him. . . . Our secondary calling . . . is that everyone, everywhere, and in everything should think, speak, live and act entirely for him.”

As I say in Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, “. . . getting our vocabulary right is critically important, because the terms we use become the tools we think with. Just as a hammer is the wrong tool for fixing a leaky pipe, the wrong word can never repair a damaging idea. Does this mean we should expunge the word ministry from our lexicon? Not at all. Instead we need to extend ministry (service) so that it applies to all forms of God-honoring work. In addition to the ministry of the Word, there is the ministry of education, the ministry of construction, the ministry of automotive repair, and on it goes.”

What, then, is the work—secondary calling—of pastors and teachers? It is to serve fellow believers by helping them discover and develop their own secondary callings, their own unique works of ministry. We can see this pattern in Paul’s instructions to Timothy: teach others who will teach others who will teach others (II Tim. 2:2). If we actually practiced this, think of the spiritual workforce it would unleash in and from the church!

Recently I was asked to bring the sermon in a church meeting. My text came from Romans 6 on the truth of our having been set free in Christ. To illustrate how God liberates us from sin’s rule in our lives, I invited a young woman (I’ll call her “Joan”) to share in the message by telling her story. She related how she had gone virtually blind by the age of four. Starting out from an abusive home life, she descended into a life of addiction. Along the way, Joan gave birth to five children, losing custody of them all. Although initially resisting God’s call to faith in Christ, she finally yielded. She began devouring Scripture and experienced God’s deliverance from her former prison. Joan told that she now has a job and for the first time is able to pay child support to those caring for her children.

After the benediction, many from the congregation rushed to surround and thank Joan for her testimony. For weeks afterward, I kept hearing church people talk about what she had shared. Just the other day I learned she will soon give her testimony in another church. In the traditional, distorted sense of being “called into ministry,” Joan never was. Yet there is no doubt that God has called her. And he has clearly given her a ministry.

Church congregations everywhere are filled with Christians who are experiencing God at work in their families, their neighborhoods, and workplaces. Some will need coaching to learn how to tell their stories effectively to their church families. But, like Joan, when they are given opportunities to share what God is doing, believers are built up and God is glorified.