Utumishi Blog

First – what ‘call’ are we talking about? When the letters to the first Christians talked about being ‘called’ they were almost always talking about being called by God to Christ, out of darkness into the wonderful light. This calling is by grace, entirely at God’s loving, sovereign initiative. It’s the call that meets us on the Damascus Road heading in the wrong direction. It’s the call that raises the spiritually dead. As Jesus said to his disciples, ’You did not choose me, but I chose you’ (John 15:16). David Watson writing about the Western context in the 1980s said:

“The Christian church today suffers from large numbers who feel that they have ‘made a decision for Christ’, or from those who think that they have chosen to join a certain church. Such man-centred notions spell spiritual death, or at least barren sterility. It is only when we begin to see ourselves as chosen, called and commissioned by Christ that we shall have any real sense of our responsibility to present our bodies to him ‘as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God’.” (Watson, Discipleship)

So that’s The Call – the main one. When it comes to this call perhaps we need to talk more about it.

But what about the ‘call to ministry’ or the ‘call to the mission field’. Leaving aside the troubling implications about ‘ministry’ and ‘mission’ here (the wrong thinking that ministry is only paid gospel ministry and that the mission field is overseas) are we talking enough or too much about this ‘call’?

In a very thought-provoking article, Philip Miles, Australian CMS missionary, questions a commonly-held belief that could be put something like this:

“Without a clear sense that God has called them to their particular task, missionaries will likely buckle under such pressure. Either their work will become ineffective or they will simply return home in defeat.”

Miles points out that in practice this doesn’t seem to work:

“Consider the one third or more of new missionaries who don’t stay the course. Was their problem that they didn’t feel called? I think it unlikely. In reality, a large proportion would have felt themselves called to the mission field. Yet that didn’t prevent them giving up. We hear the success stories of how a sense of call led to triumph. But we don’t often hear about the many real failures.”

In fact, Miles argues many of the failures, “are largely the direct outworking of the traditional approach to guidance and the ‘call’.” The article is well worth reading in full but here are his main points.

1. The sense of a calling to a particular place and ministry can create its own problems which it is then brought in to solve. This sort of call is often based on circumstances (e.g. a chance encounter or a ‘fleece’). When circumstances prove challenging (e.g. bad health or opposition) then that is taken as a challenge to the calling. ‘Does God really want me to do this?’ I must then go back to the original (circumstance-based) calling to find the strength to carry on.
2. The theology of the call can lead some mission agencies to place less emphasis on scrutiny and preparation of potential missionaries.
3. The theology of the call distorts or even destroys the relationship between the missionary and the local church. The call to mission is seen as a personal, private thing between you and God. “Interest in missions and supporting missionaries is seen as something only for those given a special ‘burden’. In other words, the whole area of missions is, right at its outset, marginalised in the life of the church.” The whole process of mission selection and deployment takes place outside the church in para-church ‘mission organisations’. There is no sense of partnership in the gospel. ‘God has called you, he will provide for you, Goodbye and God bless you.’

What’s the alternative Miles suggests?

1. Wisdom – godly thinking; thinking with other brothers; thinking within the framework of God’s great mission plan what might be the best use of my life.
2. Church-based selection and preparation and sending of missionaries.
3. Partnership – the Philippians model of believers and churches united in Christ, united in preaching the gospel, communicating, loving, praying for one another, sending people to one another across countries and continents.

In all this we are not denying that there is a way in which Christ moves some people rather than others into the sphere of cross-cultural mission or pastoral ministry. Often this seems to happen through a combination of factors – an inner desire and willingness (1 Tim. 3:1; 1 Peter 5:2), the opening of a door (1 Cor. 16:9 – but look at the end of this verse!), a Macedonian appeal (Acts 16:9), force of circumstances (Acts 8:4), what we have been entrusted with (Matt. 25:14-30) and the recognition and commendation of others (Acts 6:3; Phil. 2:19-22). The point is – should we call this ‘the call’? And are we laying too much emphasis on personal calling to ministry? Have we privatized or overly-narrowed the process?

And what are the wider issues in our context that feed into this? The question of how we hear from God? Individualism? Dualistic separation of the spiritual and the mental or the sacred and the secular? Taking our models of ministry from Old Testament characters (e.g. the calls of the prophets)?

What do you think?