Limitations of Call

Recently I attended an ordination service. The service was powerful, the music moving, we sent the minister off to do good work in the community surrounded with the loving support of people of faith that heard and responded to her calling.

Yet there was a note in the service that caught me off guard and has gotten me thinking about the problems with the way many liberal pastors are using the language of call.

The minister who gave the sermon spoke about how God called him to ministry to do more with his life than to be a salesperson--God had called him for higher things. And, when speaking about the woman who was being ordained he warned her that her new calling would be so much more than “mere” social work.

Something about this way of thinking troubled me. Ministers are indeed called, but that doesn’t place ministerial service in an elevated position next to other professions. When the ministerial call is privileged it diminishes creative and generative thinking about the multiple ways God calls each of us—not just ministers.

The two types of work this minister contrasted to his profession—sales and social work—serve as a case in point. Ministers, more than most, are required to be salespeople—they have to sell their church, their faith, their programs, their preaching. Is it possible that rather than seeing ministers as more lofty than salespeople, we try to see how God might also call us through sales? Wouldn’t it be a soulful thing if we were collectively engaged in rethinking models of selling that didn’t reduce people to commodities, but honoring all of our humanity? And, might people that have experience in sales be able to minister to those of us who find asking for money so unpleasant that we push it on others to do?

Similarly, rather than seeing social workers as paper pushing robots moving from case-to-case without spiritual direction, wouldn’t it be better to look for the moments when social workers also serve as community ministers? Wouldn’t it make more sense to encourage what is noble and even prophetic in social work and to advocate along side them, rather than distinguishing the calling of ministers as separate and somehow more spiritual?

One of the cornerstones of the liberal church is the concept of inclusivity—we are all invited to the table; we all have worth and dignity. We use the language of class, race, sexual orientation, gender and gender identity, and ability as ways to judge our movement toward building more inclusive spaces. But we need to push these concepts further to examine the ways that we may inadvertently create barriers to being fully welcoming. It’s one thing to say that we welcome everyone but if we don’t really respect the work people do, are we really being welcoming in the end?

We need a much more expansive understanding of call—and not just extended to include other professions but also to include how we approach work. For all its hierarchical and patriarchal structure, social doctrine teaching in the Catholic Church is years ahead of liberal Protestant Churches on this score. There is in this teaching a reverence for the sacredness of work. Pope John Paul II said that when properly directed, work is an occasion for “contemplation and prayer that enlivens and redeems our spirituality.” All work so the teaching goes is a responsibility and a right given by God.

Whether cleaning houses, running for congress, or preaching sermons, we need to start thinking about all of our work lives as sacred, or potentially sacred. By doing this we’ll do more to create welcoming and radically alternative spaces in our congregations and communities than if we use the language of call as a way to establish a hierarchy distinguishing one form of labor from another.