What Is A Vocation?
You, I, and everyone else in the world have a vocation. But what is a vocation?
I’m not talking about some kind of preordained task that everyone has to fulfil. Instead, what I mean is that everyone has something they can do. Each person has a way they can be human that uniquely participates in the transforming love of God. We often, rather unhelpfully, narrow down our sense of vocation. I’m trying to open it up.
What is a Vocation?
The word ‘vocation’ comes from the Latin word for a ‘summons,’ deriving from the word meaning ‘to call.’ Since the 15th century, the English word vocation has been used in a religious sense. It means a divine call on an individual’s life to religious service of some kind. This caused vocation and calling to be used interchangeably. The idea was that God wants someone to undertake a specific task.
Today, vocation is more commonly used to describe a role or job done out of a sense of duty. It refers to a calling or where a person finds meaning, like being a nurse or a teacher. In this sense, vocation can be used to distinguish between a job that a person does for money or lifestyle. It also distinguishes a role a person performs because it is grounded in their sense of self. This role makes sense of their identity.
Where Does Vocation Come From?
A key place to start is understanding that a person’s vocation does not have to come from divine communication. It does not need to emerge from an experience of a voice. It does not need to come from a single moment of clarity. You don’t have to believe that there is nothing else you can do that could leave you feeling fulfilled. All of those experiences are perfectly valid expressions of vocation, but we should not limit vocation to those experiences.
A person’s sense of vocation can also be a realisation over a long period of time. It can be confirmation of an offer of service. It could be the blessing of a decision to undertake a particular service. Vocation can be something which is worked out over time. I believe there’s an aspect we sometimes overlook or ignore. Vocation is also something that we choose for ourselves.
A person can choose to fulfil the divine mandate and vocation to humanity. A person can choose to enter into full-time ministry. They may do so not because they believe God has chosen them directly. Instead, they believe it is the best way for them to serve God.
A person’s vocation for ministry can come from a swift moment of realisation or clarity. It can also result from a lengthy confirmation and blessings. Alternatively, it could be something a person chooses as a way to serve God.
Different Kinds of Vocation
There are two kinds of vocation: general vocation and special vocation. General vocation is God’s call for all people, while special vocation concerns an individual’s purpose and task.
Understanding General Vocation
This includes the vocation of humanity as a whole and the vocation of disciples in particular. I’m going to focus on general vocation first and then return to special vocation.
If we are looking for a definition of what it means to fulfil a vocation, I think this comes close to it:
To be confirmed by Christ to participate with God in the facilitation and actualisation of God’s undending and utterly grace-filled love for the neighbour.
This is true for all of humanity and for Christian disciples. The Vocation of humanity as a whole was to be creative. People were meant to be stewards of God’s creation. They were to reflect the worship of that creation back to God. The Vocation of humanity is to do with this idea of being made in the image of God. Humanity is there to reflect God’s glory in creation. It also mediates creation back to God. Even people who are not Christian fulfil part of this vocation. They do this when they act lovingly towards each other. They care for their neighbour and care for creation.
Special Vocation
However, there is also a special vocation for disciples of Jesus. This vocation is about Christ working on us to conform us to himself through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. This prepares and equips us to love our neighbours as Christ does. Without the work of the Holy Spirit in joining us to Christ, this would be beyond us. Our participation in Christ is a faithful response to the grace that is freely poured out for us.
We have been empowered by the Holy Spirit to participate in Christ. This enables us to join with God in God’s love for the world. We facilitate this by preparing the ground. Then we do the work to help people come to know the Kingdom of God. We actualise it in our demonstration of love for the neighbours. This task looks different for each person. Each person is unique in what they can undertake and who they can be for the sake of Christ.
In that sense, vocation is not necessarily about the specifics of what we do. It is about the way that we live our lives. This is the foundational kind of vocation. Every human being is called to fulfill it. We join with Christ in loving our neighbours.
We Need Spiritual Discernment
This requires a level of discernment on our part. To recognise and understand who our neighbour is and how we should love them. Such discernment also requires patience and commitment. Discovering and recognising our neighbour does not always come easily. We need to look past our own prejudices and see through the veils thrown up by our society. Then, we can grasp the reality of the people in our communities who are in need of God’s mercy. They are our neighbour.
John Swinton puts it this way: Vocation Requires that we remain in the places God wants us to be at the times God wants us to be there.
The Vocation of discipleship takes time to work out. We must give ourselves the space and the time to dwell in the world. This allows us to grow into who God wants us to be. It also helps us share in Christ’s love for the world. Being a disciple means being in the world, grounded in the world, and living fully in the world.
We cannot fulfil our vocation if we think being a Christian is about going to heaven when we die.
Formation, Vocation, and Illumination
Special vocation is not actually special. It means that it is specific to the individual rather than generic for humanity or all Christians. Everybody has a particular vocation in their life.
For many people, this might be a general sense of how they should live. It could also be a broad understanding of the kind of work God wants them to do. This sense might last for their entire lives and inform many of the decisions they make.
For others, this might be a call for a specific task. It might involve officership or local leadership. It could also be a particular job, or a volunteering position. Alternatively, it could be a specific act of service to a neighbour. These are just a few examples. Specific vocations might be for a lifetime. They could also be for only a season. This depends on how God directs a person through their life.
A person’s sense of vocation can deepen or broaden. This change occurs as they mature and grow in their faith. They might find a new vocation growing alongside a call they are already responding to. This new vocation magnifies what they are doing rather than replacing it.
An example could be someone who has been called to officership. Later on, they feel that God is calling them to a specific place. This may be a form of ministry as part of that wider calling. Or it could be someone initially called to help their elderly neighbour. In doing so, they find a vocation to care for people in their community more widely.
Formation and Vocation
Within the personal experience of specific vocation there is a flow or movement within which we respond to the continuing work of God in our lives:
Formation… Illumination… Vocation
We are shaped into a way of being. This enables us to recognize and understand what we should do. It shows us how best we should live to participate with Christ in loving the world. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote extensively about this subject. He posed a key question as part of this formation, illumination, and vocation process: “Who is Christ for me today?” In other words, I will know what Christ needs me to do when I know where I will find him in the world. This means coming to know where our neighbour is because it is in loving our neighbour that we love Jesus the most.
Exploring, understanding, and developing our vocation can be understood in the three parts above. We are first conformed by the Holy Spirit to the person of Christ and formed by our cultural and contextual experiences. From this formation, we come to a point of illumination. In illumination, we know how best to participate in Christ’s loving and redeeming mission to the world. As a consequence, we come to know what our vocation is. Then, once we have responded and undertaken our vocation, we are once again formed, illuminated, and directed to develop or re-identify our vocation.
Formation for…
Two things are going on in this phase. Conformation, and formation.
We are conformed by the Holy Spirit to the person of Christ. This is what we normally call sanctification. It is the process by which we are united with Christ. Through this union, we are alive in Christ. We also become a new creation. By the work of the Holy Spirit, we are turned away from our own selfish hearts and towards the needs of our neighbours in the world. Conformation is a continuing process throughout our life as we are changed ‘from glory into glory’ to become increasingly grounded in the person of Christ.
This is essential for all Christian discipleship and practice. Being conformed to Christ by the Holy Spirit is the foundation for understanding our vocation because unless we are open to being transformed by the Holy Spirit, so we can look beyond ourselves, we will not be able to recognise what and where Christ is calling us to serve him.
Alongside the divine work of conformation is formation. We are each formed by our culture, our education, our employment, our consumption of media, and our friends. We are not a product of our own desires and decisions. Our experiences within a particular historical and culturally conditioned environment form us. This changes and influences how we think, believe, and engage with people around us. The way that we are formed is the way that we interpret and make sense of our being conformed by the Holy Spirit.
The task of formation
Our task in formation is to safeguard how we are formed by our experiences, culture, media, and environment. We can intentionally engage in practices of formation that direct our attention towards scripture and the person of Jesus in order to make better sense of our experiences in the world.
Through prayer, the study of scripture, and worship, we can be directed towards Jesus and away from things which might harm our thinking. Engaging with and belonging to an active church-community is vital for our formation. Our environment shapes us in ways we don’t always appreciate at the time.
By combining being conformed to Christ by the Holy Spirit and our intentional formation, we may come to a place where we can start to answer the question, ‘Who is Christ for me today?’ In other words, we can arrive at a place of illumination as to what our vocation is.
Illumination of….
Illumination means revealing what was hidden or, more importantly, making sense of what was confused. This is what we might talk about when we say that we have an experience of calling or when we have a moment when everything makes sense and we understand what God is saying to us. This could come in an instant or emerge over time. The point is not when illumination comes to us but that it does.
As we are illumined, we become open to our neighbour, and to Christ, and so become aware of how best we can participate with Christ in His mission. This is the key part. For some people, illumination might come as a sense. They might feel that God is directly telling them to go and do something specific.
Illumination makes sense of life
For others, illumination is a process of making sense of where the elements of their life have been leading them, showing them that a particular role or way of living is their best way of participating in Christ’s mission. Sometimes, illumination means a person deciding that there is something they can do. It is something they can offer, which will be the very best thing they can offer to Jesus. It is something that no one else can offer in quite the same way.
This is part of illumination. Knowing ourselves. Being honest with ourselves. Without that self-honesty, it is far too easy to mistake vocation for desire, to confuse a way of serving Christ with a way of serving ourselves. But when we know the very best that we can offer Jesus. When we know which part of our lives we can most fully and freely give to Christ and our neighbour. When we can come to terms not only with where we are going but with where we have come from, then we can understand what we can do for Jesus or what Jesus wants from us.
Through illumination comes our recognition and acceptance of our vocation.
What Is Our Vocation?
We have been formed, conformed, and illumined. We have recognised how best we can serve Christ by participating with him in his loving mission to the world. Then, we are given the choice. Yes or No. We can accept our vocation and work towards it, or we can walk away from it. It is always a choice.
There is no compulsion in love, and there is no compulsion in Christ. But we will know that if we do not accept our vocation and work towards it, then we will not be doing all that we can do for Christ.
Our vocation might be a particular role, such as being a teacher, a minister, a social worker, or anything a person thinks they can do for God. It could be a general area of ministry, like youth work, social care, or education. Or it could be a very specific ministry in a particular area and context.
This vocation could be something we are called to for a specific time in a specific place, or it could be a more general thing which could last a lifetime, or could be the start of something which will develop later.
The key is to remember that discovering and entering our vocation is not the end of the process.
Discernment is a Cycle
Our vocation is itself formative, and we will continue to be conformed to Christ by the Holy Spirit. This means that if we pay attention and continue to reflect on our relationship with God and the way that we are living in the world, we will remain open to further illumination. As such, we recognise that our understanding of our vocation may well change, develop, deepen, or grow throughout our lives.
We could move from one season to the next and enter a new kind of vocation. We could add an additional sense of calling that enriches and enlivens our existing vocation. Or (hopefully) we can come to understand our vocation more deeply and more richly as we continually grow in our knowledge of Christ and in our self-understanding. Vocation doesn’t stand still. Like all of life, vocation changes, develops, and grows with time.
The Danger of Special Vocation
There is a danger when we emphasise special vocation over general vocation.
Dangers of Leadership
Sometimes we think too much of vocation as a special divine calling. This can undermine our theological commitment to the priesthood of all believers. It suggests that only a select few, a special and holy gaggle, can do ministry. This is very far from the truth. Everyone is called to Ministry.
A person in formal ministry is no more special than anyone else. They do not have a special divine blessing for their work. They are not empowered by divine mandates. This is not because of a sense of special divine calling. They are fulfilling a purpose just like anyone following their vocation to love the neighbour.
The experience of a divine calling to formal ministry does not set a person apart. Rather, it is simply a way of taking up the same calling given to all disciples. The person in formal ministry is essentially a professional Christian who is also undertaking a specific role for the sake of the Christian community. They are not set apart, higher or greater or better than anyone else. They are a disciple first and last.
But there is another kind of danger, lurking beneath the surface of special vocation.
The Danger of Mistaking Our Voice for God’s
The confusion of our desires with the honest recognition of how we can best serve God. In practical theology, there is a helpful term: ‘reflexivity.’
Reflexivity expresses the need to be aware of how our own stories and experiences can impact our decisions and assumptions. This is particularly important when we start ascribing divine motivation to our decisions. The minute we say “God wants me to…” we must be very careful about what we are saying and whether it is true.
It is better to say “I believe that God wants me to” but even then, we must have the appropriate spiritual humility to recognise that this is our best understanding of our experience. We need to be aware of how our formation has led us to our decisions about our vocation.
I think sometimes the idea that a person needs to have some specific experience of calling, or has a verifiable and externally validated experience or understanding which can be nailed down as a ‘calling’ can lead to people not fulfilling their vocation simply because they are not the kind of person who relates to God in that way.
Perhaps it would be more honest and positive if we were to say that everyone needs to work out their vocation. This needs to be done in faith and humility, through radical self-honesty, and in submission to the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in conforming us to Christ.
When we can see vocation in this way, then we might get away from some of the dangers, and also perhaps remove some of the barriers, that are inherent within an emphasis on special vocation.
The Task of Vocation
Ultimately, our vocation comes down to participating in the facilitation and actualisation of God’s utterly graceful love for the world through our care and consideration and commitment to the neighbour. This may be worked out in all kinds of ways, but this is the foundation and cornerstone of all vocation.
The task and purpose of vocation is the transformation of the world through the salvation and sanctification of humanity. The task of vocation is to be part of what God is doing in the world. It is not about being special or set apart, it is about being more deeply interconnected with the people around us as we learn to shed our own self-interest in favour of the needs of our neighbour.
Exploring, accepting, and fulfilling our vocation requires trust in God, the humility of radical honesty, and the thankfulness of realising we have been invited to participate in Christ’s work.
It is the privilege of every believer to fulfil their vocation.
You have a vocation, even if you don’t know what it is yet. If you do know, then work for it. If you are living out your calling, then don’t become locked into a fixed idea. Continue to form yourself and be conformed by the Holy Spirit to better understand and develop your vocation.
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