An Introduction to Understanding Christian Vocation

This is a rough draft of my introduction to a new graduate course we are designing at LETU, "Understanding Christian Vocation".

This course is about vocation, a word that is unfamiliar to some, and often misunderstood because it has a variety of meanings that are tangentially related. For example, sometimes we use the word as a synonym for occupation or profession. If someone were to ask you what your vocation was, you might reply “I am a doctor”, or “I am a lawyer”, or, or “I’m a high school English teacher”, or “I am a soccer coach”. At other times the word can be turned into an adjective and attached to other words: vocational training, for example, refers to an educational program that focuses on acquiring the specific skills necessary for employment in a particular craft or trade such as an auto mechanic, a hair stylist, a plumber, a dental hygienist, or an electrician. Traditionally, the point of calling this kind of schooling vocational training often was to distinguish it from a university education which is less concerned about training for a specific trade and more focused on developing character, critical thinking skills, and a breadth of knowledge that will make good citizens, neighbors, and leaders in society. But the adjectival form of vocation can also be used in a different fashion:  when someone is trying to figure out what kind of profession, occupation, or career to pursue, we might say that she is discerning her vocational calling. To make things even more complicated, in some Christian traditions vocation refers specifically to a religious calling into priesthood or a religious order that is distinct from a non-religious occupation or profession. Since this course is about vocation, and since vocation has so many potential meanings, we think it is important from the start to explain what we mean by the term “vocation”.

The word vocation comes from the Latin verb vocare, which means “to call”. Even within the Latin verb itself, we get a clue to the original meaning of the word vocation, because it drives from the Latin noun vox, or voice.  Vocation, in its most basic sense, a state of being called; another word for this is calling. In this course, we will use the words vocation and calling synonymously.[1]  To have a calling or vocation assumes that there are at least two parties involved--someone who calls, and someone who hears the call and responds accordingly. That is to say, there is an agent, who issues a commission or charge, and a recipient, who embraces the commission and seeks to execute the charge. It is important to point out that when the word calling or vocation emerged in the English language it carried with it this assumption—that there is someone who has a design or plan or will for our lives, and that it is our responsibility to hear and respond to that “calling”. So in this way that we will be using the term vocation or calling, a person could have a very clear sense of his career or occupation but still not understand or embrace his vocation or calling.

But it is also important to underscore that this is not necessarily the way the word is used or understood today. Often you will hear people use the world “calling” without any sense that there is an agent who has a claim on or a plan for their lives; rather, what they mean by “calling” is more akin to discerning how they can be authentic or true to themselves. In fact, we all, to some degree, have been conditioned to think about our “calling” without any reference to God or some other higher authority. In the formative years of high school, for example, if we thought anything about our “calling” it was likely to be related to what major we were going to pick, or what school we were going to attend, and that was often shaped by either our academic aptitude, and/or which professions paid well, and where we lived (or wanted to live!). Rarely is “calling” ever related to big questions like What is a good life?, or What kind of person do I want to become?, or What is my life made for? And even if in rare cases where these bigger questions are a factor in discerning one’s calling, these important questions are not usually shaped by deep reflection on the “caller”, the agent who has a claim on and plan for your life—in part because for many, perhaps most, these are simply things that we cannot know, but also because in many institutions those kind of big questions are sidelined as inappropriate. The result is that in most institutions where we spend our most formative years, we are trained to see a disjunction between “the caller” and our “calling”.

This leads us to the very important adjective that we add on to the word vocation in the title of this course: Understanding Christian Vocation. The assumption of this course is that we can know important things about the “caller”. We believe that this “caller” has revealed Himself in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, and that when we attend to the way that this “caller” reveals Himself, we see that vocation has a narrative quality to it. [2] That is to say that God has revealed Himself not primarily as a set of propositions to believe, but more foundationally within a story and as someone who is to be heard, known, and trusted.[3] This history of God’s interactions with specific people in specific times and places teaches us that vocation has more to do with understanding a story (and our place in it) than grasping a concept or idea. For this reason, in this course we will spend a significant amount of our energy recounting the storied-way in which God has revealed Himself to us in the Scriptures through His interactions with Israel, and climactically in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. This will mean that we will have a growing understanding of the plot-line of the Bible as it runs from Genesis to Revelation. Attending to this plot-line will give us a clearer understanding of what the world is for, what human beings are called to be and do, what God is up to in this world, and the goal towards which all of history is moving. In reflecting on the way in which God has revealed Himself to the world through Israel and Jesus Christ, we will pay particular attention to the unique identity of this God and how that unique identity shapes and animates our understanding of vocation. That is to say that this class is about discerning the voice or call of one very particular agent, the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and how understanding God in this way clarifies what we have been called to be and do. So, while most explorations of vocation or calling in our contemporary world focus on the particulars of our lives—exploring our gifts, proclivities, talents, stages of life, opportunities, networks of influence, resources, personality traits, strengths and weaknesses, passions, etc.—in this course, we will dedicate a large portion of our attention on the agent doing the calling: Who is God? What is His design for human beings? What does he require of us? Why did He make the world in the first place? What does He love, want, seek, and desire? What does He consider to be a good life? What is He up to in the world? What is His diagnosis for what has gone wrong in the world? What does He consider to be the solution? Etc.

But to attend faithfully to this narrative quality of vocation as it is revealed in Scripture, we must take seriously the way in which our own place and time already exert an enormous influence on us and how we understand our place in this world. That is to say that, the challenge of understanding and embracing our calling is partly the challenge of discerning between competing narratives or stories about who we are, where we come from, why we are here, and where we are going.[4] For this reason, in this course we will draw your attention to the larger Western story, in which we are all situated and which has had a tremendous influence on the way in which we not only think about our calling but also has had a profound impact on our understanding of our professions and academic fields.[5] In particular, we will focus on the way in which the Western story encourages us to think of our function or calling in life primarily in terms of mastery and exploitation of the physical world. In a variety of ways, the Western story “calls” us to use technology and science in order to dominate and transform nature, to conform the natural world to our purposes and desires—including our own bodies. As we reflect further upon this Western story, we will also see the ways in which we have been conditioned to believe that our truest self, our most authentic form of being in the world, is actually threatened by God, who seems to want to restrict our freedom and diminish our dignity. In exploring vocation in the way we will in this class, by focusing on the “caller” and what He has revealed about Himself and His desire for us, we will hopefully see that responding to the call of the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, actually secures our freedom and brings us dignity and the flourishing life that we all crave.

After we have taken the appropriate time to reflect deeply on the “caller”, and to think about the way in which the Western story shapes, and perhaps at times malforms, our understanding of vocation, we are in a place to think about how we might discern our own vocation, and what sorts of postures and practices are necessary to cultivate and remain faithful to our calling. In this course we will talk about two layers of vocation; “big V” Vocation and “little v” vocation. “Big V” Vocation refers to the aspects of our calling that we all share with one another by virtue of our union with the “caller”: gratitude, wonder, delight, hospitality, reconciliation, faith, hope, and love. “Little v” vocation refers to the way in which that “Big V” Vocation gets worked out in our individual lives, influenced deeply by our talents, stage of life, place and community, resources, passions, and opportunities. Once we comprehend the intentions of the “caller”, and once we become aware of the ways in which we are being conformed to the patterns of this world (the Western story), we then find ourselves in a place where we can fruitfully ask such questions as, Who am I? Why am I here? What am I to do with my life? How ought I live in this world? What do I want to become? In this regard, vocation or calling can also be understood in terms of mission: we are being sent to participate in God’s mission in and for the world. [6] And part of discerning that calling is to ask how your work, your profession, your academic training can enable you to faithfully contribute to God’s work of reconciliation and redemption, how your work and your academic discipline can foster gratitude, wonder, and delight. This way of thinking about calling or vocation reminds us that our appropriate posture in life is not to ask How can I get God to help me in what I am doing?, but rather, How can I participate with God and what He is doing in the world?

Vocation, then is not merely concerned with work; neither is it primarily focused on the future; it is also, and perhaps primarily, concerned with how to live in the present in light of who God is and what He has called us to be and do. You need time and space to discern not just what your life will be like in the future, but also what things you need to do in the present to respond faithfully to your calling. Here it is also important to underscore that vocation is not static; that is, once you have figured it out, you are done thinking about it. Rather, vocation is dynamic, because your circumstances are constantly changing, requiring you to respond afresh to the “caller”.  So, while there are aspects of our calling that we all share (“big V” Vocation), how we respond to that call looks different at different times and places in life. So, in one sense we never fully arrive at our “calling”; instead we must always be discerning. One of the aims of this course is to give you the tools that you will need for a lifetime of vocational discernment.

Finally, if vocation is a lifetime project, we will need to develop certain postures, dispositions, habits, and practices that will sustain us and enable us to reach the goal that God has for our lives. Traditionally, this approach to life has been called virtue ethics. In this course, you will be given the building blocks for a life of Christian virtue formation, which begins with an understanding of God’s story and your place in it. You will also spend time developing postures, dispositions, habits, and practices that correspond to Christian vocation.

Why This Course?

You are taking this course because LETU is intentional about being a Christian university, where students are given the opportunity to deepen their commitment to learning and living that is informed and shaped by what God has revealed to us about Himself and the world through His Son Jesus Christ. It is important to point out that this is not how most universities understand their mission. In fact, the fundamental assumption of the modern university is that there is nothing that orders our world, that there is nothing that unifies what we know; that there is no coherence in what we learn in the classroom; that we cannot speak definitively about a “caller” from which we derive a vocation. Most who have been shaped by the modern university come to LETU bearing a burden unlike any other generation before them: they come not only searching for meaning in life (as all generations have), but they come being told (in a variety of ways, some implicitly) that they have to make that meaning for themselves. They have been conditioned to believe that our intellectual, social, and spiritual lives are unrelated and in fact often compete against each other. They have been trained to think that no one really knows what the point of life is, or what we should be doing with our lives, or why we are doing what we are doing with our time. The implications of this kind of formation are significant though often undetected or unappreciated. This kind of education that emerges from the modern university creates fragmented lives. Students (who later become parents, coaches, doctors, pilots, nurses, entrepreneurs, community leaders, lawyers, etc.) are formed to believe that their lives are compartmentalized and disjointed, that they are not whole beings.

At LETU, our principal aim is to help every student see that the world does in fact have coherence, but that that wholeness can only be understood and experienced in and through Jesus Christ. You are taking this class because at LETU we want every student to think deeply and integratively about the way in which the Christian faith shapes and undergirds their profession or academic discipline. All of our professions and academic fields have been shaped by certain misconceptions regarding what human beings have been called to be and do. One of the goals of this class is to explore the assumptions of our professions or academic fields regarding “calling”, and how these assumptions might contribute to the brokenness and corruption of our world. But we also want you to be empowered to see how your study and work can be connected to God’s mission in this world, and how understanding Christian vocation can open up fresh ways of thinking about your profession or academic field, fresh ways of practicing your work and study. The core of our mission is to help students put the pieces together again, to make connections between their academics and their faith; to re-integrate their faith with their social lives; to let their studies inform their faith, and their faith inform their studies. This is part of our vocation, to recognize and understand that we have been invited to participate with God in His reconciliation project (Colossians 1.20), His project of bringing things back together. And so over the course of your studies at LeTourneau University, we want to walk alongside you, helping you to wrestle with these four questions: Who is God? What has God called you to be and do? What are the ways in which your academic discipline or profession contribute to the brokenness, fragmentation, and rebellion of this world? And what are the ways in which your academic discipline or profession can participate in God’s mission of redemption and love for this world?

This course is designed to give you the building blocks for that kind of educational experience here at LETU.

Having said all this, we conclude with an overview of what to expect in this class:

This course focuses on the way in which the identity of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit shapes and sharpens our understanding of the coherence of the Bible, the purpose for creation, the nature and purpose of human beings, the meaning of salvation, the place of academics and work, the foundational practices and dispositions of the Christian life, and the basis for ethics, especially within our increasingly technological world.  Special attention is given to sustained analysis of biblical texts, attending to the way in which the scriptural witness integrates theology with spiritual formation, ethics, work, worship, and discipleship.

There is perhaps no better passage in the Bible that captures what we are trying to help you do in this class than Romans 12:2: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, so that by testing you may discern what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God”. Our prayer is that through this course, you will not only see the ways in which we are all being conformed to the assumptions and patterns of life in this world that are harmful, but ultimately that you will be able to discern the will of God, that is, what God has called you to be and do for the life of the world as He invites you to share in His life of love.

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[1] So, in the way we are using the term vocation, to say some is pursuing her vocational calling would be redundant.

[2] Add a note about referring to God as “He, Himself”…

[3] That is not to say that propositions are unimportant, but that they are not exclusive or even primary manner in which God reveals Himself to us.  

[4] David Cunningham (“Why Vocation is Crucial” in At This Time and This Place: Vocation and Higher Education, ed. David Cunningham [Oxford Press, 2017], 7) has said that “vocational exploration and discernment is a multifaceted activity that demands attention over an extended period of time, during which those who undertake it are being buffeted with a thousand other influences and demands”.

[5] By “Western” story we are not referring to any particular ethnic group, nationality, or political ideology. The term is used as shorthand for the prominent and demonstrable assumptions that the West (Europe and North America) has shared, and which have shaped our foundational institutions and practices. While we will offer a critical appraisal of the Western story in this course, this does not mean that we wish to disparage our Western heritage, the technological advances that have been made, or the institutions that have emerged.

[6] The word mission comes from the Latin verb missio, which means ‘to send’.