A Few Thoughts on Vocation

1. What you are called to do depends on who you are and where you are. The shape of active missional engagement for a particular community is determined by the giftings and passions of that community, the deep needs in the social and geographical location of that community, and a shared awareness of and commitment to the direction of the Spirit for engagement.

2. The shape of active missional engagement should not arise out of negative pressures such as personal guilt-feelings, sources of fear, or envy of the particular activities of another community.

3. We must not fail to acknowledge the places we already are as the primary places for our missional engagement. Our jobs and our families and our neighborhoods are where we need to be doing what Jesus commanded, first and foremost.

4. Because of this (#3), the nature of discipleship in a missional community will necessitate regular practices of discernment. Specifically, critical questions of how to resolve conflict, demonstrate love, act as agents of peace, etc., in the workplace, the home, the market, and the neighborhood should be talked about with prayer and biblical/theological reflection, and, where appropriate, decisions made regarding specific steps of action.

5. We must recognize the assumptions we have received from previous church experience regarding the corporate activity of a believing community, and identify whether those assumptions are fair or not.

Previous Assumption A: Missions work done by a church must be organized and accomplished by the church.

Previous Assumption B: A church needs programs that are oriented in service to others.

Practical Result: Such work and programming places missional engagement within a parenthesis outside of “the rest of my life.” At the same time, it dismisses “the rest of my life” as the primary place into which I am sent as an agent of the kingdom (see #3).

6. We must pay more attention to the places we already are, and the responsibilities we already have, and help each other to be faithful agents of the kingdom in those situations. I don’t think we honor enough what we’re already doing where we already are as kingdom work (actual or potential).

7. Living from vocation demands that we spend time in prayer and in theological/biblical reflection so that we will have imaginations that are shaped by the resources of the scriptures through which the Spirit teaches and directs us.