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Overview
At once “travel guide” and vision for the future, the Transformation series is good news for the Episcopal Church at a time of fast and furious demographic and social change. Series contributors - recognized experts in their fields - analyze our present plight, point to the seeds of change already at work transforming the church, and outline a positive new way forward. What kinds of churches are most ready for transformation? What are the essential tools? What will give us strength, direction, and purpose to the journey?
Each volume of the series will:
- Explain why a changed vision is essential
- Give robust theological and biblical foundations
- Offer a guide to best practices and positive trends in churches large and small.
- Describe the necessary tools for change
- Imagine how transformation will look
In the Episcopal Church, it seems the only real purpose and end of Christian discernment is professional ordination, either to the priesthood or to the vocational diaconate. This book deals with such questions as, How can both communities and individuals discern a call from God within the vocations and tasks in which they find themselves? How can the Church deal creatively with its confusion about the differing roles and authority of ordained and lay ministers?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780898698206 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Church Publishing |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2008 |
| Series: | Transformations |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 326 KB |
About the Author
James Lemler is priest-in-charge of historic Christ Episcopal Church in Greenwich, Connecticut and the former Director of Mission for the Episcopal Church. He has also served the church as a leading pastor and preacher, former dean of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary and a consultant in the area of philanthropy, stewardship, and congregational development. He resides in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Read an Excerpt
Transforming Vocation
By SAM PORTARO
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2008 Sam PortaroAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-89869-820-6
CHAPTER 1
Why Am I Here?
WANTED: Persons for a vocation that leads God's people in bearing witness to God's new creation revealed in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. Work schedule is shaped by relationships, focusing on what is important in people's lives, and depends on regular rhythms of work, rest and play. Compensation is shaped by a mutual discernment of what is necessary in order for the persons (and, where appropriate, their families) to have an appropriately well-lived life. The vocation involves cultivating holy dispositions, preaching and teaching, nurturing rigorous study and shaping practices of faithful living in church and world. Lifelong education and formation is expected in order to enable others also to grow throughout their lives. The successful candidate will collaborate with others toward the same ends. The person with this vocation reports to God.
— Gregory Jones, "Job Description," in The Christian Century (10 January 2006)
Vocational discernment has in some circles become nearly as lively an interest, and as nebulous a subject, as spirituality. And like spirituality, considerations of vocational discernment have tended toward a rather narrow treatment, suggesting that vocational discernment is limited to an elite or specialized few, and that those who undertake it are, or ought to be, set apart. Little consideration is given to vocational discernment outside the realm of ordained ministry in the church.
This book aims to encourage a renewed commitment to the ageless Christian discipline of vocational discernment as the foundation of all ministry, a discipline and responsibility of all the baptized, individually and collectively. With few exceptions, I have drawn most heavily upon the most reliable source I know, which is my own experience of more than thirty years in active ministry. Nearly all of those years were devoted to a campus ministry, a context aptly described by one former divinity school student as "a little laboratory" within which one can try things much more difficult to attempt in a parish. Those years also include a stint in a small mission congregation, its transition to self-supporting parish status, and six years as associate to the rector of a large, complex congregation with over one thousand members. Moreover, extensive supply and consulting work have allowed me to establish abiding relationships with a variety of congregations in the urban, small town, and rural communities of northern Illinois, and several states beyond.
Those experiences and relationships are used herein to frame, illustrate, or punctuate a text primarily aimed at stimulating consideration of and conversation about vocational discernment. These stories are frequently and intentionally cast without specific identification. By treating them generically, I emphasize that what distinguishes these stories are principles that are hardly unique to one place or parish and may be articulated in varied practices. They are thus, like the parables of Jesus, more likely to provide a point of entry or identification for the reader. And they remind us that discernment is not imitation.
Discernment is an aspect of the Christian life and experience that pervaded my ministry to such an extent that it constitutes a significant portion of my own vocation. In Inquiring and Discerning Hearts: Vocation and Ministry with Young Adults on Campus, Gary Peluso and I identified vocational discernment as a significant and substantive portion of ministry on campus. In Crossing the Jordan: Meditations on Vocation, I reflected upon the life of Jesus and his vocational discernment revealed in scripture as a guide to contemplating our own vocational journeys.
This book, in returning to a subject so central to my own thought and ministry, allows me opportunity for greater scope. It reaches more deeply into Christian history, scripture, and experience, locating a biblical and theological foundation for vocation in Genesis. It likewise reaches farther than my previous work into Christian practice, expanding some of my learnings in campus ministry beyond that context to find application in congregations. Written in the first years of my retirement from the institutional responsibilities of ministry, this book has been shaped by my own discernment and transition into a new vocation in an ever-unfolding ministry. Though still very much an ordained priest, my daily life looks and feels more akin to that of the first order of ministry, the laity. I am aware once again that the boundaries of one's identity and vocation are more fluid than a more narrow interpretation of vocation would allow, and that the best laid plans are subject always to change. Vocation is boundless, freely traversing the categories of sacred and profane, church and world.
Wresting vocational discernment from its narrow and near exclusive confinement to professional ordained offices and restoring it to the whole church is a priority for ministry in and beyond the twenty-first century. For while there is precious little warrant in scripture for a church that gathers and keeps its members unto itself, there is abundant commission for a church which, through its scattered members and their varied gifts, extends to the farthest reaches the compelling love of God. Vocational discernment is not just how the institutional church finds its ordained leadership. Vocational discernment is the most basic and essential expression of the church's mission.
the big question
Experience has taught me that in any process of vocational discernment attention must first and always be paid to the BIG questions, which are really only ONE big question: Why am I here? This essential question has many dimensions. It can be posed in any moment and in every instance beckons the asker into deeper reflection even as it offers insight. It is cast in three dimensions—the three dimensions of human life in all its fullness:
* Why did God make me? (past)
* What am I to do with my life and love? How do I fit in here? (present)
* What and where will I be tomorrow? (future)
What kind of work will I do, to whom will I commit my love, and what kind of shape and meaning will my life take? For Christians, the answers to these questions—and the journey to those answers—is the subject of some of our most fervent and sincere prayer. The journey to those answers takes us through our riskiest and richest relationships, animates our anxiety and our exhilaration, traverses our deepest sadness and our most substantive satisfactions.
Moreover, the natural processes of aging and maturation only renew and reshape these challenges, framing the questions within the changing context of our personal lives as the web of relationships and responsibilities grows. As I grow older, what meaningful work can I do, what shape and expression will my love take?
The church has a name for this process. Its called vocational discernment.
Practically speaking, it means separating and setting apart the desires of God for my life from all the competing desires and demands thrust at and upon me. And sometimes, clarifying and embracing the challenge of diminished options.
Throughout the journey of vocational discernment we are accompanied by the big question of why I am here, but the question takes on a particular urgency when a poverty of possibilities leaves us stranded on an unfamiliar threshold. This was the case in my senior year of college, when my intention to pursue graduate study in English was dashed by President Nixon s order canceling all educational draft deferments except for students of medicine, dentistry, or ministry. Once the shock of this news settled into reality, I was plunged into an intense introspection, surfacing only on the rare occasion when in the company of friends in similar circumstances.
Pondering my fate, I set out on an aimless walk one afternoon and was soon lost in deep thought. My feet knew the campus well, so on I walked, like a human pointer on a cosmic Ouija board, giving no thought to destination. I had no clue where my life's path was tending except, perhaps, an early death in some distant Southeast Asian jungle. I was thus surprised to find myself in the rector's office at the Episcopal church, where for three and a half years I'd lurked in a pew pretty regularly on Sunday mornings. I was even more surprised to hear myself say, "I think I want to be a priest."
Suddenly my life was radically reoriented. With dizzying speed I was propelled into a new and totally unexpected future. Within six weeks I was confirmed. I hurtled through the postulancy process and a few short months later, I began seminary. Safe and secure in the notion that I had found my vocation, it was not long before all those hibernating impulses to control roused from slumber and moved back into action. But in the course of three years in seminary there were many occasions of challenge, confrontation, and change, and once again, on the brink of graduation a number of experiences brought the realization that I could not move forward. I went to my faculty advisor and then to my bishop and I closed the book on the ordination process.
The search for employment did not go well. The nation was in economic recession and all the logical leads to which I applied, like education and social services, deemed me overqualified, an assessment less flattering than frustrating. In desperation I turned to an employment agency and was astonished, and grateful, to be hired as corporate general manager of a family-owned women's wear retailer. Why, I asked the owner, was he hiring me? I had no experience to suggest any preparation—much less aptitude—for this position.
The answer he offered was simple. "Our previous manager had an MBA and was a promiscuous womanizer whose numerous affairs, some with employees, destroyed staff morale and, in turn, ruined our business. We've fired our entire management team and are starting fresh. We've just hired a new floor manager, a young woman with an undergraduate degree in religion and a certificate in fashion merchandising. We'd like you to be our general manager. We can teach you everything you need to know about this business in six weeks, but you can't teach a person how to be moral."
I did indeed learn much about the business in a few short weeks and discovered the pastoral dimensions of supervising and overseeing more than sixty employees and a complex organization. Then, just over a year into the job, I developed a near-fatal illness that left me literally all by myself, quarantined and flat on my back for days on end, providing ample opportunity to get deeply in touch with myself, and with God. Later I would find compelling parallels with the vocational discernment of Ignatius of Loyola, a sixteenth-century Basque noble who had been destined for a career in the military and nobility. His life was radically changed when a severe wound at the battle of Pamplona in 1521 ended his military career, and during his long and painful convalescence he struggled to discover what his heart's desire truly was.
Miraculously, I survived the illness. Nearly two years after graduation from seminary I went to my bishop. I did not ask to be ordained; I simply offered myself to the possibility. My first assignment was to a small mission congregation in a southern mill town whose major employer, a textile factory, had recently closed. In that post and every one that followed I discovered that in God's economy no experience is ever wasted. My brief hiatus in the retail world had completed my education and preparation for my ministry. I had learned and was called to use all I knew of financial management, public relations, promotion, and communications in service to the church. And the time eventually came when language and writing skills honed in college and integral to my work in management and ministry became a prominent part of my vocation. This dynamic process of vocational discernment is the heart of each believer's life journey, yet despite the foundational theology of the laity developed in recent decades, the church in the beginning of the twenty-first century offers few resources to assist any except those examining a call to ordained service.
orders of ministry reconsidered
Interest in a "theology of the laity" emerged in Europe after World War II, notably in the works of the Dutch Reformed scholar Hendrik Kraemer, the first director of the Ecumenical Institute in Bossey, Switzerland, whose Theology of the Laity appeared in 1958, and of the French Dominican Yves Marie Joseph Cardinal Congar, who published Lay People in the Church: A Study for a Theology of the Laity in the same year. Both men opened serious inquiry into the role and vocation of the laity in the mid-1950s and their work was succeeded and amplified in the 1960s by another Catholic scholar, Hans Urs von Balthasar. These three European theologians, two of them Roman Catholics whose influence was strongly felt in the work of the Second Vatican Council convened in 1962, pioneered a new consideration of lay life and vocation.
The changing nature of ministry and its orders has lifted the laity to new prominence and has at the same time prompted a reconsideration of the servanthood of the episcopal, presbyteral, and diaconal orders. Yet one more time in Christian history, in ways reminiscent of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, after a long season (in some cases amounting to centuries) in which the laity toiled to raise edifices, salary administrators and sacramentalists, and support programs in a system that invited and encouraged their passive acquiescence to an agenda not their own, the tables are being turned.
At present, however, we are in the midst of the turning. As in any massive reformation, the middle state is marked more by chaos than not. The dismantling of old systems only partly done, and orderly transition into a new manner of living incomplete, we are still sorting what to discard, what to keep, what is sufficient, what is still needed. Hints do, however, emerge.
The revision of the American Book of Common Prayer in 1979 added a clearly articulated Baptismal Covenant that has become for many Episcopalians a helpful and clarifying expression of the baptized life. In this covenant we are asked to make these affirmations about the way we will live:
* Will you continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?
* Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?
* Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?
* Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?
* Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being? (BCP 304–305)
With the Prayer Books emphasis on baptism as a public rite, especially in the prominent celebrations of Easter and Pentecost, the Baptismal Covenant has become familiar to many. Its language is often repeated in sermons and makes its way into diocesan and parish mission statements. The notion and expression of "living into our baptism" are fairly common in Episcopal contexts. Yet while the concepts of baptismal promise and responsibility are more widely evident in such repetition, the practical reality suggests that the Episcopal Church has lagged in its provision of vocational discernment and support for and among the laity, the frontline laborers called and commissioned to bear the fullness of God in and to the world.
The canons of the Episcopal Church likewise point to a renewed appreciation for the ministry of the laity, the fullness of which the church has not yet lived into. It was not until 1988, for example, that the General Convention amended its canons on ministry even to acknowledge "the Ministry of All Baptized Persons," directing that "Each Diocese shall make provision for the development and affirmation of the ministry of all baptized persons in the Church and in the world." Another fifteen years (five triennial conventions) lapsed before canonical revisions mandated specific attention to resources for vocational discernment for the laity:
Canon 1: Of the Ministry of All Baptized Persons Sec. 1. Each Diocese shall make provision for the affirmation and development of the ministry of all baptized persons, including:
(a) Assistance in understanding that all baptized persons are called to minister in Christ's name, to identify their gifts with the help of the Church and to serve Christ's mission at all times and in all places.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Transforming Vocation by SAM PORTARO. Copyright © 2008 Sam Portaro. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Series Preface.................... vii
Acknowledgments.................... ix
1. Why Am I Here?.................... 1
2. How Did We Get Here?.................... 23
3. God's Gift to the World.................... 50
4. Why Are We Here?.................... 80
5. The Whole Church.................... 112
A Guide for Discussion.................... 135
Resources.................... 141
Notes and Sources.................... 147