Vocation vs Job

The following paragraphs are extracted from a post by Brandon O'Brien on the Out of Ur site.

The struggle for pastors today, says Eugene Peterson, is to “keep the immediacy and authority of God’s call in my ears when an entire culture, both secular and ecclesial, is giving me a job description.”

According to Peterson, a job is “an assignment to do work that can be quantified and evaluated.” Most jobs come with job descriptions, so it “is pretty easy to decide whether a job has been completed or not…whether a job is done well or badly.” This, Peterson argues, is the primary way Americans think of the pastor (and, presumably, that pastors think of themselves). Ministry is “a job that I get paid for, a job that is assigned to me by a denomination, a job that I am expected to do to the satisfaction of my congregation.”

A vocation is not like a job in these respects. The word vocation comes from the Latin word vocare, “to call.” Although the term today can refer to any career or occupation (according to Webster), the word (vocatio, I imagine) was coined to describe the priestly calling to service in the church. So vocation=calling. This is how Peterson is using the word, anyway. And the struggle for pastors today, he continues, is to “keep the immediacy and authority of God’s call in my ears when an entire culture, both secular and ecclesial, is giving me a job description.”

When I was a boy, and growing up in the Catholic church scene, there was always talk of 'vocations' - so and so has a vocation to be a priest, or a nun, or.... It was like certain people were handpicked by God to go and do something the rest of us klutzes couldn't quite manage.

And in a sense, that's correct. While we're all ministers (in the sense that Protestant churches use the word), only some of us are called to be ministers, to take on a vocation. That's not to say, of course, that we don't have a vocation elsewhere, as Peterson mentions in relation to the artists he worked with at one time.