Being a seminarian gets you introduced to lots of buzz words. Some of these are distinctly Reformed, but some are buzz words across the denominational lines, and most of them bug me like heck. Having attended two Lilly-funded institutions and having a mom who works for a third, I've certainly gotten my share of rhetoric about "discovering your calling". I used to think this idea of calling was pretty profound, maybe even Biblical. After all, Lilly sent me to Turkey for a sight-seeing trip to "discover my calling". However, after sitting through a nauseating presentation today where three people were put in front of a group for a mass group counselling session, I have to ask myself: do we have any idea what we're talking about when it comes to calling?
My initial thought is no. Let's start with something simple. Is "my call" something I get because I'm in ministry, but that my friend Jon doesn't get because he's in architecture? Absolutely not, chime in Dordt & Calvin, but why are seminarians pigeon-holed for this type of self-discovery? No one asks my friend Mick if he's really "called" to be an insurance salesman, but God help my soul if I'm not really called to be a pastor. Now sure, I've been taught to tell my calling story, and its pretty impressive how God has worked in my life and made me fit to be a minister in the church. What I've been taught to do is tell about things that have any hint of pastor-like situational benefit and anoint each one to be one of those big lighted signs with the arrows on top that led me into the ministry. To be left out: being a pastor is a legitamite career, pastors make more money than their average congregant, pastors get to count coffee and golf as ministry expenses, working at a particular church because it was situationally helpful.
Conveniently, the CRC believes its every pastor's calling to go to seminary for three (cough, four) years, or at least Calvin for a quarter. Well, senior pastors at least. That's not how evangelists or youth pastors are called, apparently. Kudos to God for consulting with our denomination about that first, when He sees perfectly fit to "call" other people to ministry through monestaries, one year of seminary, or no seminary at all. That's cool, though, because God has a different set of standards for calling Methodists and Catholics.
After all, becoming a pastor is contingent on "getting called" by a church. Notice, though, how if a church needs a secretary, custodian, youth pastor, or organist, they don't "call" one of those. Those jobs only warrant a newspaper ad and the submission of a resume. See those people running towards the janitor? Yeah, they're the Christian scholars coming to baptize his hiring as "discovering his calling". However, it'll be those same people at the council meeting two years from now deciding that janitoring is, in fact, not his calling because he doesn't know how to make toilets shine.
Now, theoretically, if three faithful churches call you as a senior pastor, what the heck are you supposed to think? Obviously 2, or maybe 3 of those churches are just crappy at "discovering God's call" for them, just like they were 2 years ago when they hired the "man of God's leading" and had him leave over allegations of sexual misconduct. Kind of sounds like a stereotype of election, doesn't it? People in the Church are elect forever and ever....that is, until they leave the Church and then they never were elect to start with or they're still somehow elect and in denial.
What this really all reminds me of is my high school relationships. Since I hung out with a good group of Christian youth-group-attending girls, my dating life had great overtones of providence. Those of us who were most pious would say things like "I think its God's will that you date me" or "I need to break up with you because its not what God wills". Possible. Maybe. Laughable? Absolutely. The truth is that while we can sometimes hear that "still small voice" in our heads, its often our own subconscious. We are also adept at getting "confirmation" from our like-minded friends.
Oh brother.
Here's what I think. Somehow the pundits have found a mystical union between the idea of calling as both prescriptive and descriptive. We know how the prescriptive extreme works: God decides before we're born what our calling is and we just live that out. Yay for fatalism! On the other hand, descriptive calling seems only like subjective nostalgic interpretation: God did this in my life, and this, and this and it was because he wanted me to be a pastor (oh, and I recently graduated from a Christian liberal arts school with no direction plus the pastors have uber job security).
Maybe I'm off my rocker here, and its not to say that I think retelling the action of God in our lives is a bad thing. But lets stop telling high school and college kids to wait for some mystical "calling" that is just as much descriptive as it is prescriptive. One of the major problems that our seminary's high school calling discernment program has had is that kids who get rejected from participation feel that they might not be called to ministry. The year after I participated, they opened the field up to 50 participants from 35 for particularly that reason. What kind of monster have we created this "calling" to be? Can't we just focus on grateful, faithful Christian living instead of passing around ideas about a non-graspable, individualistic buzz word?
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Monday, March 05, 2007
The Opportunity Cost of Service
There's been two growing strains within the North American Church within the last couple of years regarding service trips. If you've ever been on one, then you've undoubtedly come into contact with this debate in an implicit or explicit way. The reality of this situation is that we have litereally thousands of churches in the US who are sending kids and adults away on service trips around the corner and around the world to do service for people around them.
There are a lot of people who are very quick to jump up and say "Amen" at this proposition. Most of these are the "nodders" from the congregation who think sending as many of our own congregants to do service projects is the definition of what Jesus commands us to do. Another group who has a similar reaction to service trips are those who have gone on a trip that they really enjoyed because they liked what they did, liked the people they went with and liked how they felt about themselves when they came back.
Modern liberal Christian thought has told us this is wrong. In many ways, they've hit a good nerve. Many churches and schools spend literally thousands of dollars per person to send laity overseas for a week at a time. They come back with the impression that they've changed the world, ebbed closer to their salvation and gained the right to tell every person within five feet of them about every aspect of the trip. The reality, as the pundits point out, is that often times these people do little to no good, sometimes even hurting the ministry that they go to help because of something an immature Christian says, displaying an inconsistent lifestyle and simply acting on general bias with an imperialistic notion. Hey! We're the cocky Americans here to help you because you're mostly worthless, on our own terms. People generally get indignant or repentant when shown the errors of their ways here. Okay, we're the bad guys, we get it.
Lets consider the other side of this for just a minute. On the one hand, yes, ministry would be FAR more effective if we took all the money we spent on our own lavish service/vacation projects as North Americans and gave it to indigenous missionaries/aid workers who are culturally sensitive and work for lasting change without bigot abrasiveness we often bring. However, if you think that indigenous missionaries would automatically get the same amount of cash as teenagers doing a carwash to go themselves, you're wrong. People give for various reasons. Among them are good things like a heart for missions, a care for others and a servant spirit, but also among them are things like reactions to a real and present service team, emotional first-person reports afterwards, and a general guilt about not helping out the service trip as much as everyone else in the pew around you.
But, there are also ministry opportunities where outsiders can do the work more effectively and more efficiently than the local staff. Take the current situation in the Gulf Coast region. There are many, many opportunities for work, and nearly no one who is willing to put their hands to work. Those who are there are overwhelmed, untrained, and hopeless about their situation. The cost of labor for bringing in a contractor paid for by a church in Kansas IS less effective than bringing in a team that can and will do the work of drywalling, stilt-setting, roofing and painting (granted, this does not refer to the inevitable tendency of high schoolers to paint eachother during service trips...ugh). The fact is that you can put a team down there, including travel costs, for cheaper than the cost of bringing in a contractor, plumber, painter, roofer, drywaller, etc.
This is a basic economics concept known as opportunity cost. It refers to what one has to give up in order to accomplish a goal. This could be money, but it could also refer to time and other resources.
A month ago at a fundraiser, a random homeless guy showed up at our church who had been hitchhiking around the country and read about our fundraiser in the paper. He came just to encourage in what we were doing because "kids need to see what is out there". I can stomache that. What's harder for me to stomache is everyone who says that we need to give people a "heart for missions", which means that we turn them in to mission trip addicts, often ones that need to get bigger and better every year to feed this "heart". What would the church's mission program concept look like if we considered the opportunity cost of what we do before going in on a trip rather than going "because it sounds fun" or "because we can help other people (as if they're the main beneficiaries of our trips". And when we realize that cost, are we willing to be efficient, responsible servants in our mission trip planning?
There are a lot of people who are very quick to jump up and say "Amen" at this proposition. Most of these are the "nodders" from the congregation who think sending as many of our own congregants to do service projects is the definition of what Jesus commands us to do. Another group who has a similar reaction to service trips are those who have gone on a trip that they really enjoyed because they liked what they did, liked the people they went with and liked how they felt about themselves when they came back.
Modern liberal Christian thought has told us this is wrong. In many ways, they've hit a good nerve. Many churches and schools spend literally thousands of dollars per person to send laity overseas for a week at a time. They come back with the impression that they've changed the world, ebbed closer to their salvation and gained the right to tell every person within five feet of them about every aspect of the trip. The reality, as the pundits point out, is that often times these people do little to no good, sometimes even hurting the ministry that they go to help because of something an immature Christian says, displaying an inconsistent lifestyle and simply acting on general bias with an imperialistic notion. Hey! We're the cocky Americans here to help you because you're mostly worthless, on our own terms. People generally get indignant or repentant when shown the errors of their ways here. Okay, we're the bad guys, we get it.
Lets consider the other side of this for just a minute. On the one hand, yes, ministry would be FAR more effective if we took all the money we spent on our own lavish service/vacation projects as North Americans and gave it to indigenous missionaries/aid workers who are culturally sensitive and work for lasting change without bigot abrasiveness we often bring. However, if you think that indigenous missionaries would automatically get the same amount of cash as teenagers doing a carwash to go themselves, you're wrong. People give for various reasons. Among them are good things like a heart for missions, a care for others and a servant spirit, but also among them are things like reactions to a real and present service team, emotional first-person reports afterwards, and a general guilt about not helping out the service trip as much as everyone else in the pew around you.
But, there are also ministry opportunities where outsiders can do the work more effectively and more efficiently than the local staff. Take the current situation in the Gulf Coast region. There are many, many opportunities for work, and nearly no one who is willing to put their hands to work. Those who are there are overwhelmed, untrained, and hopeless about their situation. The cost of labor for bringing in a contractor paid for by a church in Kansas IS less effective than bringing in a team that can and will do the work of drywalling, stilt-setting, roofing and painting (granted, this does not refer to the inevitable tendency of high schoolers to paint eachother during service trips...ugh). The fact is that you can put a team down there, including travel costs, for cheaper than the cost of bringing in a contractor, plumber, painter, roofer, drywaller, etc.
This is a basic economics concept known as opportunity cost. It refers to what one has to give up in order to accomplish a goal. This could be money, but it could also refer to time and other resources.
A month ago at a fundraiser, a random homeless guy showed up at our church who had been hitchhiking around the country and read about our fundraiser in the paper. He came just to encourage in what we were doing because "kids need to see what is out there". I can stomache that. What's harder for me to stomache is everyone who says that we need to give people a "heart for missions", which means that we turn them in to mission trip addicts, often ones that need to get bigger and better every year to feed this "heart". What would the church's mission program concept look like if we considered the opportunity cost of what we do before going in on a trip rather than going "because it sounds fun" or "because we can help other people (as if they're the main beneficiaries of our trips". And when we realize that cost, are we willing to be efficient, responsible servants in our mission trip planning?
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