What Does It Mean to Be Called (by God)?

This article was conceived after I read Bill Leonard’s Aug. 18 opinion piece titled “Celebrating a new generation of ministers overtaken by ‘the call’.” His article was thought-provoking, and I am sharing here some of my reflections about what it means to be called, including my own sense of call. 

Leonard’s View about Being Called

Many of you know or know of, Bill Leonard. He was born in Texas in 1946, earned his Ph.D. at Boston University in 1975, taught at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1975 to 1992, and became the founding dean of the Wake Forest University School of Divinity in 1996.

During Bill’s sabbatical in 1988-89, he served as a visiting lecturer at Seinan Gakuin University in Fukuoka, Japan, where I had lived and taught since 1968. While I knew about him previously, it was a privilege to get to know him personally and to claim him as a friend ever since.

In his article, Bill says he can’t remember his first experience of “the call” from God, so his “call to ministry wasn’t some watershed moment.” But along the way, especially as a religion major in college, he concluded that some sort of “Christian vocation” was in his future.

Because of that “call,” he was ordained to “the gospel ministry” fifty years ago, and he has been faithful to that call and ordination up to the present, even though he was named Professor of Divinity Emeritus in 2018.

Protestant View of Being Called

Unlike the hierarchical difference in the Roman Catholic Church between religious and secular work, from Luther on there has been a broader, more egalitarian view of vocation (“calling”) among Protestants.

In 1978, I presented a paper titled “The Biblical Concept of the Laity” at an interdenominational missionary seminar in Japan (see here). In it, I cited the following statement from a 1977 Anglican conference in England:

Christianity is a one-caste religion: all Christians are equally called to minister to Christ in the world, and ministry must be seen as a calling for all, not a status for some.

Accordingly, my son, who is a lawyer, has spoken to his church about his sense of call to be a mediator and hearing officer. In spite of the financial impact, he has been faithful to that call for many years now.

So, a divine call can be more than to religious ministry. As Frederick Buechner wrote in Wishful Thinking (1973), 

My Experience of Being Called

In his article, Leonard cites Buechner’s “inestimable passage” from The Alphabet of Grace” (1970): “'I hear you are entering the ministry,’ the woman said . . . meaning no real harm. ‘Was it your own idea, or were you poorly advised?’”

In my case it definitely was neither, nor was it even because of any awareness of my “deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger.” It was because of an unexplainable and inexplicable “mystical” experience.

For me, though, I didn’t experience “the call” during a worship service with a high-powered preacher. My call came, indubitably, during the summer of 1952 while I was mowing hay on the farm where I grew up—and it was a “watershed moment.”

My sense of call that August day was definite enough that I soon went to my high school office and changed a couple of sophomore classes I had already signed up for. I replaced them with Speech and Typing.

But because I was so “shy,” I didn’t tell anyone about my “call” for nearly a year. So that is why I say that I was not ill-advised. And certainly, it wasn’t my own idea: to become a preacher/pastor was not something I felt capable of.

Because of his “call,” Bill Leonard continues to write and to speak publicly, even though he turned 75 this year. My son continues to follow his “call” in the legal profession. And now at age 83, I keep plugging away at what for many years now I have referred to as my 4-L Ministries (now mainly this blog).

One can retire from a job, but a “call” is for life. Thanks be to God!