THE CALL: IS MINISTRY A CAREER? - Christianity Today

I was kneeling on the steps of the chancel with several hands laid on my shoulder. The occasion was my ordination into the ministry, and the pastor was praying a seemingly interminable prayer for God’s blessings and power to be upon me. My legs had started to cramp. Sweat was soaking through my black robe, a garment whose origins were in Northern Europe, and whose wearer was in Southern California on a balmy May evening. And my knees felt like they were piercing the scarlet carpet.

Does he think I need more prayer than usual? I thought. Then, as if in answer to my question, he prayed, “Lord, as Ben feels the weight of these hands upon his shoulders, may he feel the weight of what he has been called to do.”

Amen.

“But may he feel also the strength of your everlasting arms bearing him up.”

Amen and amen!

That is what ministry has been like ever since: an impossible, unbearable job accompanied by an improbable, inexplicable strength.

The apostle Paul took inventory of his vocation and asked, “Who is equal to such a task?” My version of that question comes several times a year as I step into the pulpit: Patterson, I wonder, just what do you think you are doing here? Who are you, of all people, to tell several hundred people what God thinks?

The question has struck me on other occasions, too. One Sunday a man from my checkered past came to see if the preacher was indeed the same Ben Patterson he had known years earlier. I’m sure he wondered what I was doing leading a service of worship. Seeing him and remembering my past, I wondered myself.

Countless hours I have sat with people crushed by life’s weight. I have tried to convey something of the mercy and hope of Jesus. Verily, Patterson, just what do you think you are doing here?

I would have no right, no reason, no hope in ministry were it not for one thing: Almighty God, in his inscrutable wisdom, called me to it. That is all. He has willed it, not I.

Sovereignly, the Spirit blows where he wants, and he has blown me into the ordained ministry. Like the new birth, I was born into this thing not by the will of a man or an institution, but by the will of my Father in heaven.

Hearing a Call Is No Career Move

I often have puzzled over this thing we designate a “call.” What is it? How does it come? How do you know when it does?

Much I do not understand, but there is one thing I am solidly convinced of: a call is not a career. The pivotal distinction between the two may be the most important thing we ever understand about the call of God, especially in these times.

The words themselves immediately suggest one difference. Our English word career comes from the French carriere, meaning “a road,” or “a highway.” The image suggests a course one sets out on, road map in hand, goal in sight, stops marked along the way for food, lodging, and fuel.

Looking back, we can speak of one’s career as the road one took in life. But more often we speak of it looking forward, as the path one chooses and plans to travel professionally, an itinerary charted and scheduled. The destination is primary. The roads are well-marked. The rest is up to the traveler.

A call, on the other hand, has no maps, no itinerary to follow, no destination to envision. Rather, a call depends upon hearing a Voice. The organ of faith is the ear, not the eye. First and last, it is something one listens for. Everything depends upon the relationship of the listener to One who calls.

Careers lend themselves to formulae and blueprints, a call only to a relationship. A career can be pursued with a certain amount of personal detachment, a call never.

When Moses heard God call him to free the slaves in Egypt, he first responded as though he were presented with a career decision. Was he qualified? Did he have the proper experience and unique skills required by such an undertaking? He talked to God as though he were in a job interview: Who am I to do such a thing? What if the people don’t follow? And did God know that he was a poor public speaker?

All of this was irrelevant to God. All that mattered was that Moses believe God could be trusted when he said, “I will be with you.”

In short, all that mattered was the call-and that Moses bind himself to the One who issued the call. There were no road maps, only the Voice.

The Peril of a Professional

If we view our calling as a career, we reduce the servant of Christ to a vapid creature called “the professional.” Well dressed and well spoken, armed with degrees, leadership savvy, management manuals, and marketing studies-all to be used for the good of the Kingdom, of course-we intend to make a mark on the world, gain a little respect for the profession, and shed forever the pastor’s Rodney Dangerfield image.

Sensible and realistic, professionals expect the church to treat them like professionals and negotiate salary and benefits to match.

It is terrifying to realize that professional clergy can apply the skills and sophistication of their trade to build large, exciting, growing churches-and to do it all without believing anything.

“God deliver us from the professionalizers says Minneapolis pastor John Piper. Echoing St. Paul, he asks, “Hasn’t God made pastors the last in all the world? We are fools for Christ’s sake-professionals are wise. We are weak-professionals are held in honor. … Professionalism has nothing to do with the essence and heart of the Christian ministry. … For there is no professional childlikeness, no professional tenderheartedness, no professional panting after God. … How do you carry a cross professionally? . . . What is professional faith?”

Worst of all, careerism drives a wedge between the God who calls and the person who answers. It leads us to believe that our performance is more important than our person, that how we do in the ecclesiastical marketplace (and it is a marketplace) is more important than how we stand before God.

Careerism would give us confidence in ourselves where we ought to tremble and cry out for mercy. It has no place in the professional syllabus for a Paul who came to Corinth in weakness and foolishness, or for a Jeremiah who ate the Word of God only to get a terrible case of indigestion, or for a Jesus who ended his public life on a cross.

A Call Is Something You Hear

The essential nature of the call is illustrated in a folk tale about a father and a son. They were traveling together to a distant city. There were no maps. The journey was to be long and rough, fraught with dangers. The roads were unmarked and mostly nonexistent. Only the wisdom and experience of the father would get him and his son to their destination.

Along the way, the boy grew curious. He wanted to know what was on the other side of the forest, beyond that distant ridge? Could he run over and look? His father said yes.

“But Father, how will I know whether I have wandered too far from you? What will keep me from getting lost?”

“Every few minutes,” the father said, “I will call your name and wait for you to answer. Listen for my voice, my son. When you can no longer hear me, you will know that you have gone too far.”

Ministry is not an occupation but a vocation. It primarily demands not professional credentials but the ability to hear and heed the call of God. And that simply requires that we stay quiet enough and close enough to hear his voice and be held firm in our impossible task by his everlasting arms.

The Untamed Call

Inherent in God’s call is something fierce and unmanageable. He summons, but he will not be summoned. He does the calling; we do the answering.

“You did not choose me; I chose you,” Jesus told his disciples. There is always a sense of compulsion-at times even violence-about God’s call.

Struck blind on the road to Damascus, Paul said later, “Woe is me if I preach not the gospel.”

Jeremiah complained that God had seduced him into his vocation, and wouldn’t let him out, no matter how much it hurt: “If I say, ‘I will not mention him or speak anymore in his name,’ his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.”

Spurgeon saw the divine constraint as such a sure sign of a call that he advised young men considering the ministry not to do it if, in any way, they could see themselves doing something else.

At times we try to tame the call by equating a staff position in a church or religious organization with the call itself. But the call always transcends the things we may be forced to do to earn money, even if those things are done in the church. The same distinction we urge our people to note applies to us: our vocation in Christ is one thing, our occupations quite another.

Our vocation is our calling to serve Christ; our occupations are the jobs we do to earn our way in the world. While it is our calling to press our occupations into the service of our vocation, it is idolatrous to equate the two. Happy is the man or woman whose vocation and occupations come close. But it is no disaster if they do not.

If tomorrow I am fired from my job as pastor of New Providence Presbyterian Church and am forced to find employment in the Sunoco station down the street, my vocation would remain intact. I still would be called to preach. Nothing would have changed my call substantially, just the situation in which I obey it. As Ralph Turnbull points out, I may preach as the paid pastor of a church, but I am not being paid to preach. I am given an allowance so that I can be more free to preach.

At times we try to tame the call by clericalizing it. Seminary education does not qualify a person for the ordained ministry, nor does additional psychological testing and field experience. Naturally, these may be valuable and even necessary for the ministry, but none of them alone or in combination is sufficient.

No office or position can be equated with the call. No credential, degree, or test should be confused with it. No professional jargon or psychobabble can tame it. No training or experience or ecclesiastical success can replace it.

Patterson, just what do you think you’re doing? My answer: Trying to follow the Voice.

Only the call suffices. Everything else is footnote and commentary.