©  2010  by  The  Fund  for  Theological  Education  (FTE)  All  rights  reserved.  

VocationCARE: Congregational Practices to Notice, Name and Nurture Call with Young People

Why Us, Why Now

The Fund for Theological Education (FTE) supports the development of the next

generation of leaders for the church. FTE has, from its inception, made financial awards and

provided a network of support to young people who sense a call to pastoral ministry. Since

1999, more than 1,700 young adults have received support for their own exploration of and

preparation for ministry; nearly 70% are serving as pastors in congregations, missionaries,

religion and theology professors, and leaders in church-related and non-profit organizations.

FTE was founded in 1954 by a group of leaders who wanted to encourage bright and

gifted young leaders to pursue ministry. They developed the Rockefeller Brothers Trial Year

program—a project in which college students were nominated, primarily by religion professors,

and selected through a competitive process to spend an all expense paid year in seminary to

discern whether they might be called to ministry.

Since then, the Fund has implemented many different programs to encourage and

support young people for church leadership but our core mission remains the same: to identify,

nurture and support the next generation of gifted leaders. Our means and methods are different

today and appropriately so. Every generation needs be met in the particularity of their time and

place. And the world now is not quite exactly like it was in 1954

For instance, in 1998 when we began the current iteration of FTE Fellowships, we sent

our notices to lots of religion professors, but very few of them nominated students to explore

ministry through our fellowships. Religion Departments have become Religious Studies

Departments, intentionally, self-consciously committed to the scientific study of religion rather

than a confessional approach. We also sent thousands of brochures to campus ministers, but

very few nominated students. Now, more students participate in evangelical parachurch

organizations, which often do not encourage theological education, than in traditional mainline

campus ministries.

In 2002, the Fund broadened its focus beyond the campus to include communities of

faith in which young people form Christian identity and learn to listen for God’s call, particularly

asking how to put the question of calling the next generation of leaders before congregations.

FTE’s mission now includes serving as a creative, informed catalyst for communities of faith in

developing their own capacities to nurture men and women for vocations in ministry.

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For the past five years, FTE’s Calling Congregations initiative has looked for—and

looked carefully at—congregations that notice, name and nurture vocation with young people. In

finding the habits and practices of “cultures of call,” FTE has learned that young people grow

into strong Christian identity, vocations, and the call to ministry in congregations that care for

vocation—the vocation of every Christian. While it is certainly God who calls us, there is a role

for congregations in God’s call.

What do we mean by call and vocation?

The words “call” and “vocation” have become so familiar to us at FTE that we sometimes

neglect to clarify them in conversation with people outside the office. We offer here only a brief

commentary to put vocation in context and to specify our approach to it. Good literature about

vocation—from the practical everyday to the deeply theological—abounds.1

Stepping back to look at the span of Scripture, we can see a pattern of God’s call: first,

God calls a people—Israel, the church—and then God calls individuals. God’s call is first

general and then specific; first to the life of faith and then to its expression in the particularity of

our individual gifts and the needs of the people and places where we find ourselves. And, God’s

call in all of its forms is effectual; that is, it has an effect on the hearer. From Scripture, we know

that when we hear God’s call, we are moved to do something—to put down our nets, quit the

job as tax collector, pray for those who persecute us—in obedience to the command to love

God and neighbor across every realm of our lives. Our call then is to participate in God’s dream

of Shalom, in which all will be healed and reconciled, where the child shall play over the hole of

the asp and the lion lay down with the lamb, the blind see and the lame walk.

We have Martin Luther and John Calvin, leaders of the Christian Reformation, largely to

thank for our understanding of the priesthood of all believers. They broke open the Roman

Catholic teaching about, and practice of, vocation, rejecting the notion that priests and nuns

were the only Christians with vocations. Rather, the Reformers argued, by virtue of our

baptisms, we are each charged and equipped to live as ministers of God’s love. They extended

vocation outside the walls of the church by claiming that the sacred and the mundane, the holy

and the human, are not two separate realms. We do not find God in one and not the other.

Instead, God’s Shalom is manifest in all parts of our life and work.

Therefore, we hold the assumption that the call to pastoral leadership, the particular

ministry to which some are called, is embedded in the call of vocation issued to all the baptized.

1 For a very good summary of the history and Christian approaches to vocation, see Chapter 2, “The Bible on Vocation” and Chapter 3, “Theology for Vocation—Religious Affections and Vocation” in Douglas J. Schuurman, Vocation: Discerning Our Callings on Life, Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004.

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If young people were formed to ask “What am I to do with my life—my whole life—in light of my

faith?” or “What is my part in God’s dream of Shalom?” the question of whether he or she is

called to ministry might more easily be heard. We think of our work—your work—as creating

space for hearing, learning the practices of listening, and opening up pathways for responding.

This is necessary work because it is not easy to hear and listen, much less respond, to God

calling.

How do congregations care for vocation?

Most Christians can cite the extraordinary call stories of Abraham, Moses, Samuel, Paul.

But those unmediated experiences of God are actually the exceptions. Think about the disciples

called by a man by the name of Jesus; Nathaniel called by his cousin; Timothy called through

family upbringing. Indeed, God’s presence mediated through the webs of our relationships,

strings of experiences, epiphanies and emptiness, failures and successes, and lessons in

Christian faith and practice leads us into and sustains us in our vocations.

Congregations, then, are the primary locus of revelation and interpretation of God’s

calling voice. Congregations are the caretakers of vocational formation and discernment; the

particular places where people hear and respond to a call to pastoral ministry. The ways in

which congregations embody this responsibility are unique to every church, its traditions and

particular context. And yet, there are observable patterns in this extraordinary diversity that can

be named in four core congregational practices of vocational care—four VoCARE practices:

1. C - Create space for exploring vocation;

2. A - Ask questions for self-awakening;

3. R – Reflect theologically; and

4. E - Enact ministry opportunities.

Create space for exploring vocation More and more, youth ministers talk about the challenge of finding time when teenagers

can be together. Their lives are scheduled with school, extracurricular activities, music lessons,

traveling sports teams, leadership retreats, community service, group projects and more. Adults

themselves negotiate multiple commitments between

work, family and friends. Creating space for seems

daunting; at least, we know it takes intentionality.

The kind of space we imagine for exploring

vocation is both inner space and outer space—it is not

an additional program. It is like the space Jesus made

for himself to pray all those times he went to the river,

We need space in our inner lives and in activities of congregational life for t the question: How are our lives are being caught up in the life of God?

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the boat, the hillside, the desert, the mountaintop, the other side, the garden. It is like the space

of all those upper rooms in the Bible where amazing things happened with widows and their

sons, with harlots and their ropes, with 12-year-old daughters coming back to life, with roofs

being taking off so friends can get close to Jesus, with tongues of fire igniting the church itself.

But we want to play with a more familiar-to-you metaphor. Most of us have had the

experience of making room in our homes for something new –a new baby, a relative come to

stay, a new piece of furniture. When that happens have to create a new kind of space within

what already exists: taking out some of what is already there, rearranging some of what

remains, bringing in the new things and leaving some empty places for what we will need as this

reality develops. Creating space for exploring Christian vocation is kind of like that. Here are

some questions to ask in preparing to create space for exploring vocation.

1. What needs to be moved?

Sometimes, making room for engaging vocation requires shifting around other priorities,

commitments and activities.

What needs to be moved will be different in each congregation, but overall, we suspect

that there are some common, perhaps unexamined, inhibitions to attending to vocation. A young

pastor recently told us about her twelve-year-old fascination with her United Methodist bishop

which developed during the Bishop’s Confirmation Retreat. She says, “I was so captivated that

day by the Bishop’s leadership and abundant joy that I asked the bishop how much money he

made. You see, I had been taught all my life that money was important, and I wanted to see if

his salary fit in with the expectations that had been placed before me. While my call to ministry

might have been started at that moment, no one said anything to me.”2

We invite you to consider our observations of the norms that get in the way of vocation

and then make a list of your own: (a) We do not have patterns for talking with specificity about

our material lives (work, role, money); (b) It can be difficult to bring faith into decisions about

work, marriage, children; and (c) We often unreflectively adopt the notion of the good life

presented by American media and culture as the Christian ideal of the good life.

2. How can we use what we already have?

While we sometimes think “wide open spaces” as we imagines creating room to explore;

in fact, what makes defines space and often what makes them beautiful, are their boundaries.

For Christians, we come to know the spaciousness of Gods’ grace through boundaries such as

Scripture, reason, experience and tradition. Perhaps a fuller knowing of the boundaries actually

2 http://wordsfromwashington.blogspot.com

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makes a space for healthy growth rather than one in which there is no “yes” because there is no

“no.” Do we know the defining lines of vocational exploration for a Christian?

What we already have includes not only the wisdom of Scripture and tradition, but also

the activities of the life of the church—worship, mission, formation, congregational care,

administration. Can space be made within each activity of congregational life for the presence of

the question: How are our lives are being caught up in the life of God through the work at hand?

3. What new is needed?

From our observation, the actual word “vocation” and the explicit phrase “call to ministry”

come awkwardly in most congregations. We need to learn the language of vocation and use it to

open up exploration space in every part of our life together. But more poignantly, Christians

need to live into their vocations and to claim that journey as one of the walk of discipleship of

Jesus Christ, and one done alongside each other.

Each congregation will hear the questions most important for them to address amidst all

these suggestions, and each will be accountable to themselves for the ones which follow as the

new realities unfold. Yet, to really create space to explore, it cannot only be discussed.

Someone has to move some furniture. We suggest the following variety of activities whose

leading edge is to create space for exploring vocation and we imagine that many more will

emerge as congregations begin to open up a new kind of space:

♦ Use a robust vocabulary of vocation and call in worship, in public prayer, in all parts of congregational life.

♦ Eat meals together, sitting and talking with other generations, taking one another

seriously.

♦ Create soul-safe spaces: Circles of Trust, clearness committees, periods of silence (communal and individual), tech-free zones.

♦ Learn and practice Holy Listening, including asking open and honest questions.

♦ Learn and engage contemplative practices – centering prayer, labyrinth walking, Ignatian examen.3

Ask questions for self-awakening Vocation is a journey, not a destination. That phrase sounds like something on a lame

poster a well-meaning adult would post in the youth room, but it is actually theologically sound.

Jesus’ living of his own vocation serves as the prime example; he was nothing if not on the

3 For an accessible resource on this practice, see Sleeping with Bread: Holding What Gives You Life, by Dennis Linn, Sheila Fabricant Linn, and Matthew Linn.

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move. And the call he issued over and over again demanded people to get up and move: Put

down your nets and follow me. Take up your bed and walk. Get down out of that tree.

Jesus also asked people an important question: What do you want me to do for you?

Sometimes he would do what they asked—like restore sight or life to a child, and sometimes he

would not—like award seats at his right and left in heaven. But the question always invites

Jesus’ friends and followers to interrogate their lives and their deepest desires. It is not a

question in the abstract. It comes to a person in a particular community and the response is

lived out in community. It is a question that says pay attention—to who you are and who you are

becoming, to where you are and what is needful, to the

presence of Jesus and the promises of God.

The spaces we create for exploring vocation

give us room to ask questions that will wake us up to

our own lives, the life around us and the life of God. This

may not be as easy it sounds. Consider the young

people among us: parents tell them what they should do

with their lives. Teachers at school specify what they

learn, in what order and how they will learn it. They belong to groups of friends with potent

stated and unstated norms for life together. They are at the mercy of powerful forces telling

them that they are what they buy. Change some of the roles named here and we are describing

the world of adults. How do we even know what we would ask of Jesus?

If we had a vocational GPS to use in navigating our paths through these competing

scripts, it would have to ask us questions—over and over as we make our way, helping us

adjust our path—that are vital to discovering vocation:

1. Where are you now?

For Christians, this question demands response from one’s heart, soul, mind and

strength grounded in the particularity of this time and place. This question probes our gifts and

strengths, our wounds and our burdens, our opportunities and our limitations, our passions and

our fears.

The question here goes to the self but also to the self-in-relationship with other people

and all creation. While we must emphasize the importance of awakening to self, given the

strength of current culturally embedded temptations of narcissism and entitlement, we cannot

risk asking only about self. We need to know where we are in a family, a tradition, a community,

a global commons and a planet in trouble.

Jesus’ friends and followers are asked to pay attention—to who they are and who they are becoming, to where they are and what is needful.

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2. Where do you want to go?

As Christians, we know our destination is God’s Shalom, and that we get there by

increasing in love of God and neighbor. But we need to discover what particular shape that

takes in each of our own lives: What do you dream of for your life and for the life of the world?

What of God’s life is waiting to be born in the places where you work, play and worship? What

would it look like for you to become fully alive? What would a day be like? Who are your close

neighbors—parents, siblings, partners, friends—and how do you hope to love them? Who are

your far away neighbors and how do you love them from here?

3. What is important about how you get there?

The journey itself forms who we become. We can say without fear of successful

contradiction that we all need to slow down. Sit with one scripture passage for a week. Soak up

what is around you rather than gulping it down. Ask what do I usually miss during my travels?

What don’t I see? To what do I want to attend along the way?

4. Who is traveling with you?

Jesus never sent anyone out alone. Who is with you now? Who do you need to leave

behind? Who do you need to join you on the journey? What voices do you long to hear? Whose

scripts have you taken as guides and where are they leading you, your community, the world?

We know that congregations will experiment with ways in which to ask these questions

that awaken self in the world as fits their own language and context. We offer here a few

suggestions about asking self-awakening questions:

♦ Have the courage to let the questions not be answered right now.

♦ Use songs, hymns, poems that ask self- awakening questions.

♦ Learn to ask critical questions that probe beneath the surface of what is seen or experienced and practice this in worship, in committee meetings, in coffee hour, in the bulletin and newsletter.

♦ Invite the congregation to journal using guiding questions and ask for offerings to share

in a booklet or email series.

♦ Invite people to blog the critical questions on the church Web site.

♦ Map the environment by drawing home, school, congregation, city and depicting who you are in each.

♦ Use self-discovery tools from the Meyers-Briggs, the DISC inventory, or the

Enneagram.4

4 Many of these tools are available through on the Web and can be found using your favorite search engine.

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Reflect together theologically

We recently asked a group of pastors and church staff members what came to mind when they

heard the phrase “theological reflection.” Their responses were muted: few of us generally have

confidence about theological reflection as a robust, revelatory practice. We are Christians so we

know it must be done – we must ask some version of

“Where is God in all this?”—but good theological

reflection does not come easy. Too often, what passes

for theological reflection are comments meant to

interpret a difficult situation such as “It is God’s will” or

“When God closes a door, God opens a window” or

“We cannot know the ways of the Lord.” Our need for

theological reflection as part of vocational care requires

something more than platitudes stuck over human

experience like bumper stickers.

Vocation at its core is the call to participate in God’s healing of the world. Therefore, we

need to know something about God’s dream for the flourishing of creation—about the life of

God—to even glimpse what we are being called into. Theological reflection doesn’t come easy

in part because many Christians—as revealed through the faith lives of teenagers—have an

impoverished knowledge of God’s Shalom. Christian Smith and Melinda Denton, in their book

Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, report findings of the

National Study on Youth and Religion5: Smith describes the functional faith of teenagers as

“moralistic therapeutic deism” in which God is the Cosmic Butler waiting to fulfill our needs on

request; in which everything I do is okay as long as I don’t hurt anyone; and in which God really

does not ask anything of me. Where do they get these ideas? Smith says teenagers have

inherited this faith from their parents. This de facto theology does not provide a foundation for

discerning Christian vocation.

Yet, we know that people in congregations long for lives of meaning and purpose and

they posit their hope in the life and love of God as revealed through the Christian story and lived

through the Christian community. If they can connect their stories with the stories of Jesus and

his friends and those of the believers who have shaped our traditions, they can begin to detect

patterns that reveal God’s life in the world –patterns that display God not as Cosmic Butler but

as the one who liberates us from our malformed selves and transforms us toward whole selves, 5 http://www.youthandreligion.org

While we must create space for exploring vocation and ask questions that awaken us to self and world, we cannot find our Christian vocations without paying attention to our lives as participants, with many others, in the life of God.

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free to love and serve with extravagance. While we must create space for exploring vocation

and ask questions that awaken us to self and world, we cannot find our Christian vocations

without paying attention to our lives as participants, with many others, in the life of God.

Consider Peter, John, James, Andrew and the rest of the believers in the days before

Pentecost. In Acts, we see them together in a safe space they had created, devoting them-

selves to prayer, waiting for the promise of God. As human beings, we can only imagine that

they were asking each other all kinds of questions: Did you have any idea Judas would turn on

Jesus like he did? What will happen to Judas’s family now that he’s dead? Who can we trust? Is

it safe for us politically? When is Jesus coming back? Is that the promise of God he was talking

about? How long should we wait? This is the trajectory of theological reflection: Something

happens in our lives. As we sit with it, we begin to ask questions to make meaning of what has

happened to us and our loved ones and to anticipate what will happen next in light of emerging

meanings. But this is not where it ends.

Peter, as a leader of the community, stood in their midst and offered interpretation of

these events based in scripture. Drawing from psalms that expressed ancient betrayals, he

argued that Judas’s betrayal and death occurred to fulfill “what the Holy Spirit foretold through

David”6—that was its meaning. Theological reflection moved into the public discourse of the

community and held the events alongside the authoritative texts of the religion in which they

were formed.

Further, Peter addressed the present needs of the community—to fill the role in the

community left vacant by Judas’s death—as a forward-moving thrust of this theological

reflection on the events. Again he turned to scripture to validate the need (“Let another take his

position as overseer”7), and he proposed a plan that honored the community of witnesses but

also put them before God in prayer, holding them to trust in the providence of God. And so,

Matthias was called to his vocation in service to the gathered believers and the congregation

remained faithful to its call to wait for the promise of God.

The practice led by Peter in the pre-Pentecost community takes the community from

experience to question to scripture to prayer to action. It is, however, only one way of doing

theological reflection among many very good models and methods developed over the history of

the church. For the care of vocation, we do believe theological reflection is a critical pathway

best done in the company of other travelers. Each of us brings different questions to even a

shared experience. None of us know all the stories that need to be told, from scripture, from

6 Acts 1:16 7 Acts 1:20

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tradition and from the lives of saints, both living and dead. Each of us see needs within and

without the community that may be hidden to others and the gifts and possibilities that lie in our

midst. The call of God often comes through many voices.

Knowing that each community will find its way, we nevertheless recommend that

congregations focus on certain key practices for theological reflection:

♦ Tell stories from the Bible, the traditions and the life of the congregation as part of all kinds of communal gatherings; include references to biblical stories in articles and announcements on the congregational web site or in the electronic newsletters and embed links to places on the internet where biblical stories are well told.

♦ Offer testimony from church members that rehearses and models theological reflection grounded in events of their own lives.

♦ Add intentional theological reflection to all service, outreach or mission events.

♦ Establish a book group to read of Christians who found vocation through action and reflection, i.e. Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, etc.

♦ Learn and practice together a theological reflection method, using it frequently in education, meetings, small groups.

Enact ministry opportunities Early in Jesus’ ministry, he gathered his friends and sent them out in pairs to DO

something. They had heard Jesus teaching, and while they remained confused about who he

was and what exactly he was up to, they were nevertheless given responsibility in a larger

arena. Not only did Jesus instruct them to spread the message, but he gave them authority over

unclean spirits and the power to heal people, to raise the dead, to restore sight to the blind and

to do all manner of miraculous signs. 8 The disciples no doubt came back with adventures to

share and stories to tell—back together to unpack what had happened and discover who they

were becoming.

In a similar way, we believe it is important to send younger people among us into action,

to try some ways of following the call of Christ even as they are growing in knowledge they

cannot fully articulate. All the experts tell us that younger generations learn by doing, that they

value experience over abstract information, that it is the authentic tale which holds authoritative

force. To care for vocation, our ministries have to include purposeful and meaningful ways to try

out a vocational impulse, especially in the areas of ministry and church leadership, and to reflect

on the experience alone and together.

8 Mark 3, Matthew 10

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Each congregation’s life and situation holds unique promise for ministry opportunities

and for experiences in which young people might hear a call to their own vocations. We suggest

that you conduct an environmental scan in preparation

for structuring particular activities. Look across your

congregational and community landscape using these

questions as survey tools:

1. Where are the arts? From Spoken Word in

coffee shops to the Chancel Choir, where are the

places for the wonders of creativity, self-expression

and collaborative that open us to God in unexpected

ways?

2. Where is community life shaped? Where

can young people become active agents in crafting

who the church will be together? Where can leadership be formed and practiced?

3. Where is the church beyond our walls? How can young people’s view of the vastness

of God’s church and the particularity of its work become fuller? Where are places for global and

local missions, collective action, worship and prayer—both inside your denomination and

ecumenically?

4. Where are the needs of people and planet in our neighborhood? Where might young

people identify what is needful and establish and serve in new ministries to respond? What

would they need to know, to learn and to do?

Some particular ways to approach vocationally-enriched experiences include:

♦ Invest in mentoring and apprenticing people in Christian ministries of education, pastoral care, preaching and leading worship, administration.

♦ Design a process for discerning calls to new kinds of ministries in the congregations.

♦ Build in time for play, drama, singing during congregational gatherings.

♦ Connect young people with service opportunities beyond the local congregation, through interfaith youth corps, volunteer summer of year of service, and similar activities and provide venues for tale-telling and interpretation within congregational life and among congregational members of multiple generations.

♦ Ask vocational questions as part of mission and service activities.

To care for vocation, our ministries have to include purposeful and meaningful ways to try out a vocational impulse, especially in the areas of ministry and church leadership, and to reflect on the experience alone and together.