27 minute read
CALLED TO GO
Julie Smith
When I went to seminary, the system was very clear and mostly unmoving. You moved to a residential campus where you spent two years taking full-time classes. Then you moved to an internship site. Then you moved back for one more year of classes. In the middle of that final year, you were assigned to a synod for your first call. At that time, you were paid about $10,000 a year for that. Adjusted for inflation that would be just under $20,000 a year today.
There were two moments over the course of those four years when a student got to state some preferences. You could make some requests concerning about internship – what type of church you were interested in, and in what part of the country. Every year a number of Luther Seminary students would restrict themselves to the Twin Cities for internship. But they had to be able to demonstrate that moving again was an insurmountable hardship for their families. At least that was the stated requirement. The reality was that if there were a pastor in the Twin Cities who wanted that student as his intern, he could flex his muscles and make it happen.
Students were also allowed to list their top three choices for synodical assignment. Again, there was some opportunity to restrict oneself to certain synods, but this was a little more difficult to pull off in the call draft than it was for an internship assignment.
In both of these moments when students got to express some preferences, it was understood that no internship sites and no bishops were obligated to honor their preferences. In the end, you would go where the church sent you, or you would be looking for some other type of work while you waited for a call to open up and a bishop who was willing to submit your name for it. It was clear who held the cards in this process.
This was, by no means, a perfect system. It was primed for all sorts of abuse and cronyism. But there was one thing that this system did very, very well. It taught you, from the moment you began your theological education, that you should expect to move. You should not expect that you were going to settle in somewhere and stay there. You should not expect that your children would graduate from the same school district in which they went to kindergarten. You should expect that you might never buy a house, moving from parsonage to parsonage, or that you might buy many houses in markets where it might be difficult to sell them very quickly when it was time to move.
There were always pastors whose lives were exceptions to this general rule. But they were exceptions. There was an understanding that no one was entitled to these exceptions. There was an understanding that pastoral ministry was a calling of the church, and the church exercised authority over it.
But there was one thing that this system did very, very well. It taught you, from the moment you began your theological education, that you should expect to move.
I've been involved with online theological education for many years now. One of the things I have worried about in relation to this form of education is that it can instill a sense that theological education and the pastoral vocation are matters of personal convenience. Apart from the classwork itself there shouldn't be any hardship involved with becoming a pastor. All impediments or barriers to entry should be removed, if possible, so that anyone who feels called to be a pastor can become one. The danger with this is that we end up with people who are trained to be pastors but cannot or will not move from their current location. Rather than this being the exception because of unusual circumstances, it has become the rule. Many pastoral candidates simply do not consider this to be an itinerant vocation.
Somewhere between a system that seeks to exert ownership over pastoral candidates and one in which pastoral candidates feel little to no sense of obligation to their church body there lives a third way. A way in which candidates understand what's involved in this calling while congregations and church bodies respect the challenges that pastoral candidates face. This is especially necessary as many seminary students are second and third career students. Their spouses might be established in a career that makes it difficult for them to relocate. They may have children and grandchildren that need them to stay in a particular location.
Today we're going to return to the call stories that we looked at yesterday. While yesterday we focused on how this was first and foremost a call to faith and trust in the living God and his mission in the world, today we will focus on how each of these callings included the need to go. Every one of the people God called in these ways was sent somewhere by this calling. We will begin with Abraham.
Abraham – Away from Home
Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” The Lord's very first word to Abraham was “go.” With no prior introduction, Abraham was called away from his father and his family and everyone he knew. The mission and the promise God had in store for him were going to take place somewhere new. And not only somewhere new but in a place that hadn't even been identified yet. Abraham was just told to go with the promise that he would find out the destination along the way.
Despite the tremendous promise attached to Abraham's call―that he would be the father of a great nation, that his name would be great, and that through him all the nations of the earth would be blessed—it's not that difficult to imagine Abraham objecting to this call. Why did it require leaving everything he knew? Why couldn't God give his family the land of Haran as their promised land? Didn’t the Lord understand how important Abraham’s country, kindred, and father’s house were to him?
But Abraham doesn’t object at all. The Lord says go, and without a single question or comment, Abraham goes. The questions and comments will certainly come later. But in this moment, when he receives this call, he goes. He leaves behind everything that defined him―country, kindred, father—in favor of something new that will define him and will define him more deeply than anything else ever had or could.
Can we imagine such a thing? Can we imagine such openness to getting up and going, leaving behind everything that is familiar? I know there are some people in this room who have made big moves, away from family and friends, away from support networks, away from the known. That came with sacrifice, perhaps with some arguments at the dining room table and some tears shed. But that also seems to be increasingly rare.
The question I am most likely to get when I’m out on the road is whether we have enough pastors and what we’re doing to solve the problem. For a while I flipped that question back around to congregations, asking them when the last time was that they sent someone to seminary. Then I decided even that was a bit too abstract, a bit too easily dismissed as someone else’s responsibility. So now I ask if they would encourage their children or grandchildren to become a pastor. Folks are pretty quick to change the subject at that point.
But one day the guy who had asked the question had an answer for me. He would not encourage his children or grandchildren to become a pastor because he didn’t want them to move away, and he didn’t want them to miss family holidays. On the one hand, there is something refreshingly honest about that. On the other hand, it is truly appalling.
On the one hand, there is something refreshingly honest about that. On the other hand, it is truly appalling.
Here's someone who’s engaged enough in the life of his congregation that he has stuck around after worship for a forum on denominational affiliation: someone who has some sense of the difference a faithful pastor can make in the life of a congregation. But this person is also crystal clear that it is more important that the family all be gathered around the tree to open Christmas presents.
I wish I had another crack at him and could let him know what, perhaps, most of the people in this room know. That Christmas dinner tastes just as good on New Year’s Eve or the Saturday between Christmas and New Year’s, or sometime in January. That the gift buying is actually cheaper if it happens after December 25. That family traditions can be changed, trips can be made. That working weekends can get you out of a lot of things you’d like to say no to anyway. That it is possible to adjust.
The pressure to stay put is no small thing. It’s part of what makes online theological education so appealing to people. But we may need to at least consider the possibility that this isn’t about our convenience. Last night, we were having a discussion about how we could facilitate getting more of our students to this event, which I think would be great. So, we were talking about finding ways to subsidize their travel, in addition to subsidizing their registration and housing costs.
The seminary administrator in me loves that idea. I’m pretty much a pushover when it comes to students and I want us to do what we can to provide them with learning opportunities and a deeper sense of community. The church bureaucrat, on the other hand, wants to say, “Just make it a graduation requirement. Make them get some skin in the game. A three-day trip is nothing compared to being required to move three or four times to get through seminary!” But we also know from the long history of the church that just adding requirements does not automatically weed out those who aren’t sufficiently committed to the pastoral vocation. It does, however, weed out those who have unusual circumstances to deal with. The challenge of the moment, it seems to me in my entirely unscientific survey of the landscape, is that almost everyone thinks that their circumstances are unusual and ought to be given special consideration. Almost everyone can give a compelling and heartfelt reason for why their call to pastoral ministry does not include a call to “go.”
Moses certainly wasn’t looking for a call to “go.” But he ended up being on the move for the rest of his life, without ever actually arriving.
Moses – Back to Where You Came From
When Moses fled from Egypt it seems likely that he never planned to go back there. He had severed the connection with his Egyptian family, and it was his fellow Hebrews who had accused him of murder when he rose to their defense. Moses left and started a new life in Midian. He got married and settled down and went to work for his father-in-law. His life was finally starting to look somewhat ordinary. Egypt was becoming a memory – a vivid and complicated memory, but still a memory.
And then he stumbled upon the burning bush, and he heard the voice of the Lord. While Moses had been trying to forget and move on from his life in Egypt, the Lord had remembered his people in Egypt. The Lord was about to do a new thing for the Israelites. He was about to rescue a people who thought he had forgotten about them entirely. And he was going to use Moses to carry out his plan. Moses would have to go back to Egypt. Sometimes the call of the Lord sends you back to where you came from.
I grew up in a town of 1400 people in southwestern Minnesota. Like most of the rural areas in the United States it has experienced what is referred to as “brain drain.” Basically, if you leave town to go to college you don't come back again. The assumption often built into that is that these places are uninteresting and not suitable for people who have pursued higher education. They are not places you'd want to live if you could live somewhere else. In fact, my college advisor called me into his office my senior year to let me know that his biggest concern was that I didn't have a plan and I might end up back in my small hometown. As far as he could tell this would be a total waste of a good education.
I did my seminary internship in a town of 150 people. It was a rough town with rough people. But I was a small-town person, so I knew how to live there. For my first call I moved to a town of 1000 people. It was exactly the kind of town I had moved away from to go to college. In fact, it was in the same high school sports conference as my hometown. And for the rest of my working life, I have been in towns of fewer than 2500 people.
There are times when the small town thinking that says “if you can move away you do,” creeps into my mind. And I wonder about the places I have served. Are they the places I should have served? Or was there something bigger and better out there that I just didn't pursue? When that thinking creeps in it undermines the work I’ve done in those communities and those congregations. It suggests that my time there was of no value or at least not much value.
I suspect if you were to look at the call histories of most pastors, the movement is from small town to large town. And why wouldn't it be? As you gain more experience you move up the ladder. And every assumption in our culture is that moving up the ladder means moving to bigger and better things: better pay, in better towns, in better churches. The idea that you might ever be called to go backwards hardly makes sense to us. That is surely a sign of failure.
But the people in that town of 150 people had no less need for the gospel of Jesus Christ than the people in the largest church in our association. And while the work done there might look different, it's no less challenging than the work done somewhere bigger and allegedly better. When God calls us, he calls us to go where he needs us to be. He calls us to go where there are people who need his word. And sometimes that means going to exactly the kind of place we've just left— the kind of place we never thought we would return to.
That was my call. That’s certainly not everyone’s call. It may not be your call. But if it is your call, drive out those voices that would tell you that’s failure. Drive out the voices that would claim you’re going the wrong direction if you’re not constantly going up. And rejoice in the fact that when you are called back to the sort of place you thought you had left forever, you have an advantage. You understand the culture as only an insider can. You know where the landmines are.
Drive out the voices that would claim you’re going the wrong direction if you’re not constantly going up.
Just as a silly little example of that, I have now moved to a metropolis of 12,000 people and I no longer have a parish. In fact, I only know a couple of people in town. And when it came time to replace my car, for the first time in my life, I bought a foreign car. Because somewhere deep in my memory was my father’s observation that only teachers and pastors drove foreign cars. In a small town, a foreign car was a sure sign that you were an outsider: a completely unnecessary wedge between you and the people you serve. With so many other wedges between pastors and parishioners it was no sacrifice to never let the car I drove be one of them.
To serve in a place that doesn’t require a lot of cultural translation can be a real joy. As long as those voices that tell you “I’ve moved on from all of that,” don’t overtake you.
Of course, sometimes there’s another reason not to go where the Lord is calling you. It’s not that you’ve left a place behind with no plans to return. It’s that, like Jonah, you just can’t stand the people living there.
Jonah – Where You Don’t Want to Go
Why on earth would the Lord want one of his prophets to go to Nineveh?! There were plenty of issues to deal with right at home. There were plenty of the Lord’s own people who needed to hear his word. Why would energy need to be wasted on enemies, foreigners?
Jonah was not even a little bit subtle about his objection to the Lord’s plans for Nineveh and the part he was expected to play in those plans. In Jonah’s mind, the Lord had no business saving Nineveh and it was completely unreasonable to expect Jonah to be part of that effort. His attempts to thwart God’s plans are comical. And God’s intervention is a clear reminder of just who was (and is) in charge here.
We’re a little loose these days with terms like “enemies.” We don’t bat an eye at calling members of an opposing political party “enemies.” We imagine people lined up against us, trying to destroy us and everything we hold dear. And they imagine the same about us. Neither of us usually stops to consider that the others are just people going about their business, trying to live their lives, just like we are.
The Ninevites were political enemies of Israel to be sure. But the people of Nineveh weren’t sitting around trying to figure out how to destroy God’s people. They were living their lives. But even if they didn’t belong to the nation of Israel, they belonged to God, as the whole creation belongs to God. Their well-being was of concern to him.
In our current culture wars, it is all too easy to imagine that God is on my side and is against anyone I’m against. God cares about who I care about. God wants to redeem those I think worthy of redemption. God loves those I love. But our God is the God of the universe. The Creator of all that is. All of this belongs to him. And he seeks to know and be known by all those he has made.
All this means that you may be called to go to places you would just rather not go―to live and serve among people who are not your people. These are people whose values do not match your own, people whose voting record appalls you, people you have nothing in common with. You might think that these people aren’t worth your time and effort. And yet, there you are, sent to deliver a word to them.
All this means that you may be called to go to places you would just rather not go―to live and serve among people who are not your people.
A pastor friend of mine in India tells the story of going to a remote village on an evangelism trip. They were met by the local medicine man who wanted nothing to do with them and would not let them enter the village. As they turned to leave, Pr. Duggi felt something nip at his ankle. He woke up days later in the hospital, having been shot with a poisoned dart by the medicine man.
Most of us do not experience quite that level of resistance to our proclamation of the gospel. People who don’t like the changes we’ve made to the worship service or the confirmation program might feel like poison darts from time to time, but we will probably survive that opposition. On the other hand, our call to a particular congregation might not survive that opposition if we insist on dying on every hill.
But wherever we are sent, there is one thing that is certain. The people in front of us are people for whom Christ died, even if we can’t figure out why. We don’t have to figure that out. And we don’t have to like it. But like Jonah, we have to deliver the message, even if we’re secretly hoping they’re not listening. Luckily for us, the Holy Spirit takes over from there.
Peter – Back and Forth
In some ways, Peter had the trickiest of all the calls we’ve been talking about. Because he was called to go back and forth between two communities. On the one hand, there were the Jews, his people, the people he knew and loved, the people he understood and could relate to. And on the other hand, there were the Gentiles, people who had always been seen as “other,” but whom Christ had now brought into the fold.
Peter had to find ways to speak to both of these groups. And he wasn’t always very good at it. The temptation he had was to preach a different gospel to these two different groups, to tell each what they wanted to hear. This was different than what Paul meant when he talked about being all things to all people. It seems that Peter waffled a bit on how Christians were expected to relate to the law. Or maybe, and perhaps more accurately, Peter worried about offending either of the two groups he ministered to. And this fear of offending, which may have reflected a fear of being cast out by either group, started to control Peter’s witness―at least that’s what it looked like from Paul’s perspective.
So rather than being laser focused on what lies at the heart of the gospel and then finding ways to speak that truth into the experiences of Jews and Gentiles, he offered a slightly different gospel to each, which, in the end, meant no gospel at all. In the end, a compromised gospel can only undermine faith. It can never grant or feed true faith.
To be called to go back and forth between diverse communities, with different expectations and different assumptions, can easily cause us to get tripped up and forget what the main thing is. We can get so focused on what they want that we forget that we all need the same thing. We all need the unconditional promise of the gospel, uncompromised by our cultural assumptions, and unedited by our preferences or traditions.
We are called to be all things to all people, to go back and forth between all sorts of different cultures. And that requires knowing different languages, different preferences, different styles. It requires using different examples, even behaving in different ways. But it cannot, it must not, mean changing the message to suit the tastes of those before us, no matter how deeply held their convictions may be.
It is one thing to wear vestments because that is the expectation of the people in front of you. It is something else entirely to affirm a conviction that there can be no proper worship without vested clergy. It is one thing to do all the communion visits because that is the tradition of the congregation. It is something else entirely to agree that the sacrament is only valid if it comes from your hand.
It is one thing to wear vestments because that is the expectation of the people in front of you. It is something else entirely to affirm a conviction that there can be no proper worship without vested clergy.
Understanding the needs and expectations of your congregation when they don’t match your own requires constant discernment. It means constantly asking, “now why am I doing this? Why am I saying this?” And it’s quite easy to get it wrong. But that doesn’t relieve us of the call to go to those whose traditions, whose expectations, and whose fiercely held beliefs, have to be challenged from time to time.
Paul – Wherever the Holy Spirit Sends You, Even to Death
Abraham’s call was to a specific, but not yet revealed, destination. Paul’s was a little different. He was called to go wherever the Spirit sent him. There was not a specific destination in mind. He might have had a rough outline of his missionary journeys, but they were pretty open-ended. He would go wherever the Spirit drove him. There was only one thing about Paul’s journey that was clear. He was headed toward his death. He would not be retiring. He would not someday land at his permanent call where he would live out his days in peace. He was going to be preaching this gospel, without apology or compromise, until he finally ran into someone who had the authority to respond to the offense of the gospel with the power of the sword.
Some of us may indeed run into the power of the sword in opposition to the gospel. But that is not likely to be the story for most of us. But we will run into opposition―that is guaranteed. The gospel does offend people, and sinners do all kinds of sneaky things to undermine this word, and replace it with something else.
I hope you will consider the possibility that your call to ministry might take you to places you have not yet thought of. I hope your vision of the future possibilities in this office might be expanded. But if not, one thing is certain, the call to serve the gospel is a call to die to yourself and your plans and ambitions, only to be given a new life, new plans, and a new identity. Maybe you will go where you are called to go, maybe you won’t. But the life you now live is not your own. It never will be again. It is Christ in you. And he has a way of getting his will done even by those inclined to resist.
Conclusion
The call to faith and the call to go go hand in hand in the life of those called by God to be his witnesses. Faith without going is an abstraction. It’s faith that doesn’t cut to the heart of us, doesn’t break through our defenses and excuses. It’s faith kept at arm’s length. It’s faith that says all the right things while leaving you unchanged.
Faith without going is quite safe. Going without faith, on the other hand, is deadly. Going without faith is going in your own name, to a destination of your own choosing, for purposes of your own imagining. Going without faith results in building the kingdom of Julie, not serving in the kingdom of God.
Faith without going is quite safe. Going without faith, on the other hand, is deadly.
If we learn anything from the call stories we’ve been looking at this week, it’s that God can get his work done in spite of our efforts to thwart it. He can work through those of little faith or hope, and he can work through those who are reluctant to go. Jonah, for all of his opposition, was the most successful prophet in the entire Old Testament. The people actually repented based on his half-hearted proclamation. And Isaiah’s beautiful 66 chapters had to be delivered, at least in part, to a defeated people in exile, but his prophecy gave the Israelites hope.
God can get his work done in spite of you. And he keeps calling extremely challenging people into the service of his mission. Perhaps one of these servants of God resonates more closely with your own story. Perhaps you see yourself in one of them, for better or worse. Or maybe your story is more like the life of Isaiah, Deborah, Gideon, Mary Magdalene, Thomas, or Hosea. Whatever your story is, there are two certainties –you’re part of it and God is part of it.
Maybe you want to toss yourself into the sea in response to this calling. Maybe you’re eager to go, but just not where you’re needed. Maybe this call will be the death of you. Maybe there will be days you love and days you would rather be doing anything else . . . if only you could. But in any and all of these circumstances, the Lord is making a way. He is getting his work done. So maybe it’s time for you, servants of God, to just give up the fight. Resistance is futile.
Just listen to how Paul, whose calling would be the death of him, described it in Romans 1. “First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is proclaimed throughout the world. For God, whom I serve with my spirit by announcing the gospel of his Son, is my witness that without ceasing I remember you always in my prayers, asking that by God’s will I may somehow at last succeed in coming to you. For I am longing to see you so that I may share with you some spiritual gift to strengthen you or rather so that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine. I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that I have often intended to come to you (but thus far have been prevented), in order that I may reap some harvest among you as I have among the rest of the Gentiles. I am a debtor both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish —hence my eagerness to proclaim the gospel to you also who are in Rome” (Romans 1:8-15).
As seen in Paul’s words above, this sharing of the gospel is not just something you are obligated to do for others. It is also mutually encouraging. The same church that frustrates and infuriates you will pick you up in your lowest moments. The same community that seems indifferent to the work you are engaged in will give you moments of profound joy.
The office of pastor is not easy. It’s not glory unto glory. It’s not always held in high esteem by the world around us. And yet, it is a tremendous gift and privilege to be called into this work. And when faith finally breaks through all of our agendas and we can see this work as God’s work to save, then we get to know not only the deep joy of the gospel, but also the profound satisfaction of living into our vocations. What a great combination.
Rev. Julie Smith is the service coordinator for Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC), and she teaches at St. Paul Lutheran Seminary.
Endnotes:
1The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Gen. 12:1–3. The NRSV version is used throughout this essay.
