Problems with ‘the call’

This is the third in our Sola Saturday series on giving up your life for Christ in anticipation of the July/August issue of The Briefing. In our first post, Robert Doyle looked at the concept of giving up your life in the context of worship. Then Dave Andrews tackled the important question “What should I be doing with my time [as I give up my life]?” This week, Philip Miles deals with giving up one’s life in missionary service and the problems with the theology of ‘the call’.

It was a happy day for Art and Zelda when they attended the special missionary meeting held at their church. It was there that they first felt specially called by God to go into missionary service. From that time on, they began to speak to others, especially those with a burden for missions, about missionary work and where they might be able to serve. Gradually their sense of call became focused on a particular country, and they found their way to a missionary society which could help them obey that call.

In speaking to the board of this missionary society, they were asked about many things—their background, their training, their vision. However, one topic of particular interest was their sense of God’s call. On the board were a number of retired missionaries who knew how important a sense of God’s call can be. It had sustained them all through some real missionary trials. After all, the task of the missionary is one of the toughest around. Without a clear sense that God has called them to their particular task, missionaries will likely buckle under such pressure. Either their work will become ineffective or they will simply return home in defeat.

Eventually Art and Zelda were accepted, given some orientation training, put together their support and soon found themselves expectantly waiting to depart. Their story is a fairly typical one. In particular, the view that a sense of God’s call is essential to a missionary’s survival on the field is quite widespread. As my wife Lyn and I have talked to others about the topic of guidance, it has often come up as an objection to views of the kind presented in The Last Word on Guidance (P Jensen & T Payne, St Matthias Press, 1991). Such views are all very well, it’s thought, but what is there left to stop a missionary giving up at the first sign of difficulty? How can they face the great trials of missionary work if they don’t know God has deliberately chosen them for a life of service in a particular job or country?

This is a fair question, and we’ve given a lot of thought to the problem. The answers we’ve come up with are not only a little surprising, but also have some far-reaching implications, especially for anyone who agrees with the approach of The Last Word on Guidance.

Creating your own problems

A good line for weddings runs, “Now that you’re married, you’ll have someone with whom to share all those problems you would never have had if you hadn’t got married in the first place!”. Something similar can be said about the famous ‘missionary call’. It’s the answer to a problem—yes. It has helped many missionaries cope with difficulty on the field—no doubt about it. However, this problem would hardly exist if we didn’t believe in a special missionary call in the first place. Of course, many stresses will exist for missionaries, regardless of their view of guidance. Nonetheless, the traditional view has both added to these stresses and hampered the missionary’s ability to cope with them.

To explain how this can be so, let’s consider the thoughts of a contemporary church planter on the ‘call’. In a recent issue of an evangelical magazine, he gave ‘ten commandments’ for church planters. Significantly, the first of these was ‘Make sure of your calling’. Under this heading, he related how his own clear sense of calling sustained him through tough times. However, a careful reading of what he said shows that his theology of guidance and ‘the call’ largely contributed to his difficulties in the first place!

One of the difficulties he encountered was his wife being diagnosed as having cancer the same week that services for a new church began. In these circumstances, he felt, he might not have continued without his clear sense of calling. However, I believe that without his theology of the ‘call’, he would have had little reason to think of giving up in the first place. This isn’t to say that his wife’s diagnosis would have been easy to cope with. The question is whether it would have led him to give up his ministry.

Consider for a moment the case of a Christian plumber faced with the same terrible news. We would think it odd if he said that the news of his wife’s cancer came as such a blow that he thought he’d give up his present job and look for a new one! The two things just don’t connect up like that. Why, then, should someone in ministry react this way? One crucial reason is the belief in a special calling.

The sense of call puts one’s life and work in a new light. Circumstances gain a whole new significance. The author explains that his sense of call came from the Bible and circumstances. Furthermore, he also says that circumstances such as his wife’s diagnosis led him to ‘question the call’. This is significant. Dealing with the cancer itself wasn’t the ultimate problem. Rather, it was the timing of the crisis at a key moment in his ministry. It led him to question whether he was doing the right thing after all, and this was difficult to cope with. He thus turned to his sense of call for strength and accordingly commends to his readers the importance of a sense of call. He doesn’t seem to realize that such events wouldn’t lead him to question his call if he didn’t believe in such a thing in the first place. The news of his wife’s diagnosis was traumatic, but it was only his theology that made it a threat to his ministry.

The author doesn’t give details about the cancer episode, but he does mention times of discouragement when his work seemed fruitless. He speaks of handing out tracts and yet, for all his effort, seeing no response. Naturally enough, he turned to his sense of call to sustain him through such times. Can his theology of guidance be blamed for such times of discouragement? I believe it can be.

The theology of the ‘call’ tends to downplay the use of human wisdom in its focus on special leading from God. The use of strategy, planning and so forth take second place to listening for God’s guidance. Indeed, it may seem very unspiritual to plot and plan, whereas faithfully giving out tracts in the face of adversity because you feel called to that work seems very spiritual indeed. Thus, his theology locked him into a scheme inevitably leading to discouragement. Of course, he turned to his sense of call to sustain him at such a time; but without this theology, he may well have avoided the problem in the first place.

Read the full article online (2623 words).