No Call – No Connection
There are many good reasons we plant new churches and develop new ministry efforts, such as:
- To serve marginalized and under-noticed folks in our community.
- To catch a wave of change moving into or out of our neighborhood.
- To respond to new generations with new priorities and needs.
- To pay attention to something we haven’t paid attention to before.
- To take advantage of geographic proximity to a social and cultural
hub, like a college campus, a growing apartment complex, a shopping
center, etc.
And many more.
These are the types of reasons that well meaning leaders use to
motivate their ministries to move out missionally into new territory.
But we cannot forget: where there is no call – there is no connection.
While we all would hope for an expression of the Body of Christ in each
of these intersections of community and cultural life, before we plant
we have to ask, are we called?
Recently I learned a helpful lesson from a friend who is a minister
and community organizer. He shared that, in ministry and non-profit
terms, there is a significant difference between a partner and a service
provider. Partners know one another, love one another and share their
mission together. Service providers furnish what the other doesn’t have
or can’t do. In the former, the relationship is mutual and the field is
level. In the latter, there is an inescapable power dynamic of giver and
receiver which always inhibits meaningful relationships.
Moving missionally into new places and new relationships has to be in response to a call.
Call
A Simple definition of Call:
- Profoundly loving someone you haven’t yet met
- Profoundly loving work you haven’t yet done
- Profoundly loving places you haven’t yet been
A call is the pull in our souls that draws us to people we wouldn’t
otherwise know and to places we wouldn’t otherwise go. How do we know we
love people we’ve never met and places we’ve never been? Because we
know that we are fundamentally incomplete without them. Simply put: we
need them. Not in a superficial, self-serving way. We need them in a
deeply personal and spiritual way. We recognize that there is something
about how we have been knit together that longs for their friendship.
In the Gospels, Jesus reaffirms the two most important commandments are
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” 38This is the greatest and first commandment. 39And…“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22:37-39, NRSV)
We often communicate our love for our neighbor as an expression of
loving God with our heart. This is easy to do since heart and love are
so naturally associated. We say we have a “heart” for this group of
people, a “heart” for this particular place, a “heart” for this
particular injustice or suffering.
What if we followed the second commandment, to love our neighbor as
ourselves, as an expression of our desire to love God with our
souls? Perhaps, one might argue, this is merely semantics, but I don’t think so.
Connection
As contemplative theologians have taught, not only do our souls long
for communion with God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but our souls are
not complete until we experience communion with our neighbor. Answering a
call to love our neighbor is an expression of our desire to love God
with our soul.
Consider how that would change how you communicate within your
ministry. For example, a church that sits across the street from a major
university might begin a college Sunday school class and ask for
volunteers who have a heart for college students. What if the leadership
instead asked “Does anyone experience a unique joy and sense of purpose
when spending time with college students?” By moving the attention to
our soul, we can help one another better understand how God is calling
us.
Answering a call is not going and giving to another who receives what
they did not have before. When we answer a call, we are searching for a
missing part of our soul that only the other can fill. We mutually
receive one another in the wholeness of life and spirit that is mediated
by the Spirit of Christ.
Community
This begins not by trying to identify the missing part of our soul, but by identifying others who will journey with us.
Henri Nouwen challenges an egocentric, overly-individualistic
discernment of call by reminding us that we are being sent out
two-by-two. Referencing Mark 6:7, when Jesus sends the twelve out in
pairs, and Matthew 18:19-20 when Jesus promises his presence with two or
three who are gathered in his name, Nouwen’s point is that no one of us
can bring good news on our own. The good news is Jesus and Jesus is
proclaimed through community.
Nouwen writes “it is Jesus who heals, not I; Jesus who speaks words
of truth, not I; Jesus who is Lord, not I. This is very clearly made
visible when we proclaim the redeeming power of God together. Indeed,
whenever we minister together, it is easier for people to recognize that
we do not come in our own name, but in the name of the Lord Jesus who
sent us.” (from
In the Name of Jesus, pp 58-59).
Practicing discernment with the people you love and trust is the
precursor to exploring the people and places in the world you need to
meet in order to complete your soul.
True Selves
Discovering our call is difficult spiritual work. The normal state of
our existence is disintegrated and dismembered. The world dismembers
communities and fragments individual lives. We know the culprits all too
well: entertainment, money, power, security, comfort… on and on. Each
pulls apart, bit by bit, the pieces of our mind, soul and heart.
Wholeness is a foreign concept to most of our neighbors who are
alienated from one another and from their true selves.
In
No Man is an Island Thomas
Merton teaches that a result of this fragmented self is that we are
constantly changing our minds to conform to the shadow of what others
expect of us. In response to this he writes, “Others have no right to
demand that I be anything else than what I ought to be in the sight of
God.”
This begs the question, if I pursue my call in order to become who I
ought to be in the sight of God, shouldn’t my neighbor be free to do the
same? To put it another way, in pursuing my own call, do I enable or
inhibit my neighbor from discovering themselves in God’s mission in
Christ in the world?
Love that demands conformity of the other is no love at all, but an
insidious form of control. However, love that frees and empowers the
other to be fully themselves, as God desires for them to be, is the
greatest form of love.
As Bonhoeffer puts it in
Life Together, we must meet the other “only as the person that [he/she] already is in Christ’s eyes.”
And so we find the counter-intuitive, almost paradoxical, nature of calling. Discerning call is less discovering who
I am and what
I ought
to do. It is about loving and encouraging my neighbor, honoring their
freedom, that they might discover who they are in Christ. Their
wholeness will become our wholeness as we share more completely together
communion with God and neighbor, loving each other with all of our
mind, heart and soul.
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