Parish Magazine Item for October 2018

For the last few years, our diocese of Chichester has had an annual focus (Mercy 2016, The Bible 2017, Prayer 2018). The Bishop of Chichester has designated 2019 as a Year of Vocation, when parishes and individuals are encouraged to think about their Christian calling.

With a large number of clergy due to retire soon, the Church of England wants more people to explore a vocation to full time paid ministry (especially young people and those from black and minority ethnic communities). But the idea of the Year of Vocation is to stress the calling of all God’s people whether ordained or lay. It embraces not only our church life, where we will be encouraged to use our gifts and to serve others in a whole variety of ways, but we also want to think about our family and work lives, and other forms of volunteering as something to which God calls us.

One of the great rediscoveries of the Reformation was the lawfulness and dignity of what might be termed “secular” callings. You didn’t have to be a monk or a nun – or even a vicar! – to be really holy and properly spiritual. Obviously, it’s not open to the Christian to pursue a vocation as a bank robber or a fraudster, but one can be a Christian butcher, baker or candlestick maker. And neither is there a kind of hierarchy of jobs. We sometimes think of vocations to teaching or medicine, but any job that needs doing can be a calling done with faith, in the power of the Holy Spirit and to the glory of God. God wants us all to serve him full time, including through our employment, paid or otherwise.

We recently had a diocesan clergy conference on this theme of vocation. We were reminded of the primary call to follow Jesus. The Bible’s great concern is that we should hear the call of the gospel to repentance and faith, from darkness to light. Far more important that we seek to live a life worthy of the heavenly calling that we have received, than that we get just the right job.

Ideally there will be a recognised line-up between our personality, interests, gifts, opportunities, circumstance and needs. Sometimes callings are very straightforward and obvious. One of the conference speakers discussed the Venerable Bede, the father of English History, and his settled and acknowledged calling as a scholar and teacher. But sometimes a Christian’s calling is much less smooth. Sometimes the needs of the hour or the pressure of circumstances are so great that we can’t do what seems to be the best fit for us. We serve where God has put us. Christians are sometimes called to great suffering and to the witness of martyrdom. All Christian vocations are patterned after Jesus, but sometimes the cross to which Jesus calls us (“take up your cross and follow me”) looms very large in a life. Such Christian vocations that scorn worldly visions of success proclaim a confident hope of the resurrection.

As the writer to the Hebrews says, we seek not this world alone, but by faith we look to the as yet unseen promises of God. We see and welcome these things only at a distance and admit that we are aliens and strangers on earth. We are looking for a country not our own, longing for a better heavenly country, looking forward to a city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God, which he has prepared for us.   

And what more shall I say? I do not have time to tell about Gideon, Barak, Samson and Jephthah, about David and Samuel and the prophets, who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised; who shut the mouths of lions, quenched the fury of the flames, and escaped the edge of the sword; whose weakness was turned to strength; and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies. Women received back their dead, raised to life again. There were others who were tortured, refusing to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection. Some faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were put to death by stoning; they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated— the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, living in caves and in holes in the ground. These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.  (Hebrews 11)