How to Stifle a Culture of Call

Here’s an obvious thing: those who discern a call to ministry, do so in a variety of ways. The shape that a calling may take is unique to the gifts, life experience, and interests of the particular person discerning it.

For as long as most church structures have existed, the primary form that such a calling has taken has been to become a settled pastor in a congregation. Sure, people also had the option of chaplaincy in hospitals or the military, but most went this route, considered to be tried-and-true.

For decades, these positions were not only the norm, but those who followed this call could enjoy a stable life and career. However, in more recent times, several movements have converged at once to disrupt this model of normalcy:

• The rise of non-institutional forms of faith exploration and community-building, and a subsequent greater need for ministers willing to engage them, whatever that looks like
• The increase of specialized ministry possibilities, including chaplaincy but also others
• Changes in ministry formation, including non-seminary education options but also fewer new M.Div graduates seeking to serve congregations
• Fewer mainline congregations with the ability to support a full time pastor, resulting in a rise in pastors who are multi-vocational

Thanks to these and many other factors, the “norm” is becoming less so. And denominations have been scrambling for some time to envision how to respond to this new reality.

And yet even as we’ve been doing that important visioning work, the anxiety in the system can end up stifling the possibilities rather than bravely exploring and affirming them:

• A church in Search immediately rejects profiles from candidates who aren’t straight white males and then complains that it has so few profiles to consider
• A Conference sends a minister in to close a church and instead the church experiences a new sense of vitality, and then the Conference gets mad about it
• A Committee on Ministry keeps stalling an ordination candidate’s process because the candidate feels called to serve in a non-congregational setting
• Ministers treat colleagues as inferior because their path to ordination didn’t include seminary

A phrase that is used often in my work is “culture of call.” My team and I spend a fair amount of time encouraging our ministry partners to build the type of culture that allows individuals to explore their sense of call to ministry.

A healthy culture of call will allow space for the Holy Spirit to surprise us by the ways one may hear Her voice and respond. It may look different from what the institution wants or expects. It may be to a non-traditional setting, or to a traditional setting in a non-traditional way.

There is important communal discernment to be done as part of this process, of course. Entities within a church structure entrusted with ministry formation and stewardship of the call process should uphold their duty rather than cut corners out of desperation.

But here’s another (hopefully) obvious thing: the church at both the local and wider level can also get in its own way, the above list being a handful of examples.

A path to following one’s call may defy what an anxious system prefers. And that system is likely to attempt to stifle it accordingly. Cultivating a healthy and thriving culture of call will help fend that off.