Vocations and leavers

Two more items in the occasional posts to this blog...

Jason Goroncy alerted me to a post by Michael Jinkins that asks the question; “What sustains you in your vocation?”

Jinkins begins by noting: 
John Calvin believed that it is the vocation itself, the fact of having been called by God which sustains us. That’s a great response, and I’m sure it is true. But, in the day-to-day slog and grind of living our vocations, beyond the assurance that we are where God called us (which is no small thing!), are there other things that sustain us? Prayer, regular Bible study, worship, the practice of Sabbath?  [I'm currently reading, at long last, Eugene Peterson's Working the Angles - it relates strongly to this question.]

The second item is the third post by Bradley Wright and his research team on the question of why people leave church.  In this post he asks, Does Christians’ bad behavior cause people to leave the faith?
This is a very useful series of posts, asking the right questions, attempting to find some answers - and of course, as always, the comments are as interesting as the posts themselves.

Busyness

“Busyness, of course, is not peculiar to the pastoral life; it is endemic to our culture.. We need a strategy that takes into account two sets of demands that seem to cancel each other out.. The first set of demands is that we respond with compassionate attentiveness to the demands of the people around us...demands that refuse to stay within the confines of regular hours and always exceed our capacity to meet them..

“The second set of demands is that we respond with reverent prayer to the demand of God for our attention, to listen to him, to take him seriously in the actual circumstances of this calendar day, at this street address, and not bluff our way through by adopting a professionalized role. This is a kind of attentiveness that we know from instruction and experience can be entered into only slowly and deliberately. There is a large, leisurely center to existence where God must be deeply pondered, lovingly believed. It means entering realms of spirit where wonder and adoration have space to develop, where play and delight have time to flourish. Is this possible for pastors who have this other set before them daily?

“It is possible for pastors. Because there is a biblical provision for it.. The name for it is sabbath…”

Eugene Peterson in Working the Angles

The Business of Making Saints

Eugene Peterson says, in a 2009 interview in Christianity Today called The Business of Making Saints: 

The problem was, I hadn't learned a way to live organically out of Sunday. I had two models, and neither could help me.

Where did you go for help?

I started discovering people who did it—Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Bernard, Newman, Alexander Whyte, Samuel Rutherford, a lot of the Puritans, and in particular, Dante. These became my mentors, my teachers, my professors. I lived with them.

We've got this wonderful history of Christian spirituality. We've got two thousand years of people who have been listening, writing, doing this. You're in a company of saints who have done this, and they've done it with great freedom and goodness.

These people weren't gullible. They developed a scent for sanctity; they were alert to the way holiness works, which hardly ever fits the stereotypes.

Some of it's an art, but if you live with these people through their writings, you develop the sense of proportion, a scent for truth.

How long did it take to learn pastoral care from these mentors?

After five or seven years, I realized, I can do this. There is a way to live as a pastor during the week that is congruent with the gospel I proclaim on Sunday. This is a pastor. This is what I want to be. I love this life.

I don't want to paint a picture that I got it all straight. It's not something you "get"; it's not like a diploma you can hang. This is a way of life in which you keep re-immersing yourself.

This interview was originally published 

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.

Paul's leadership model

Eugene Peterson translates the beginning of 1 Timothy 3 in this way:

If anyone wants to provide leadership in the church, good! But there are preconditions...

In an article on the site now known as Smart Ministry, Todd Rhoades takes a look at these 'preconditions' in the light of our current society, using Peterson's up-to-date language. He says it's worth doing a kind of examination of yourself every so often to see whether your leadership behaviour is 'fitting' to the leadership model Paul wrote about.

Are you pushy rather than gentle, for example; are you thin-skinned; are you well thought of by outsiders? These are just a few of the various points that need to be considered, and Rhoades' brief comments are worth giving attention to.

Rethinking the Translation

A translation like the New American Standard has served me well for many a year, but after repeated readings there's a tendency to begin to slide over what the text is saying, and it no longer hits the mark. I've been reading The Message version (Eugene Peterson) this time round, and Peterson has a real knack of hitting between the eyes, and waking you up to what's in the text.

Here's Galatians 5: 19-23 in the NASB, for example.

Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, of which I forewarn you, just as I have forewarned you, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

All good stuff, but a number of the words in the first list particularly aren't common to everyday speech.

Here's Peterson (I've broken up the list):

It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time:
repetitive, loveless, cheap sex;
a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage;
frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness;
trinket gods;
magic-show religion;
paranoid loneliness;
cutthroat competition;
all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied-wants;
a brutal temper;
an impotence to love or be loved;
divided homes and divided lives;
small-minded and lopsided pursuits;
the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival;
uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions;
ugly parodies of community.
This isn't the first time I've warned you, you know. If you use your freedom this way, you will not inherit God's kingdom.
But what happens when we live God's way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard - things like
affection for others,
exuberance about life,
serenity.
We develop a willingness to stick with things;
a sense of compassion in the heart;
and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people.
We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments,
not needing to force our way in life,
able to marshal and direct our energies wisely.

Yes, there are a lot more words, but the first list particularly strikes home in a much more hard-hitting way. And he doesn't reduce the language to pap: few words in his list would be unfamiliar to the average person.

Leadership's Golden Canon

Leadership is presenting a list of the ten books of 2008 they've decided are most useful for church leaders. They're not all books specifically relating to leadership as such, but rather titles that would help a leader in two areas: The Leader's Inner World, and The Leader's Outer World.

The titles were compiled from submissions by a diverse group of more than 100 pastors from across the country. Leadership's contributing editors then voted to determine the winners in the two categories.

The list is here. Among the titles I'm pleased to see N T Wright's Surprised by Hope, Andy Crouch's Culture Making, and the third in Eugene Peterson's recent series of books on the Christian life: The Jesus Way.