Prank Calls

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?