Calling or Career

How do I maintain a sense of pastoral vocation in the middle of a community of people who are hiring me to do religious jobs?

--Eugene Peterson, from Working the Angles

This is one of the deepest questions of pastoral work. How do we live from our identity and vocation to be a person of God--to be a God-bearer--in a vocation that seems in the day-to-day to be more of a career than a calling. I come back around and around to the realities of running a pastoral office/team/program and the need to be immersed in prayer, in people, and in the Word. It seems as though the administration monster grows ever bigger and that the call to efficiency and "getting it right" [whatever that means] becomes what the people around me need. Yet, what the community needs truly is someone who listens to Jesus, who prays, who spends time immersed in scripture, who living into the kingdom work.

The quote above puts more on the community of people and their requirements than is accurate for me. Yes, it is true. But I also find myself choosing religious work instead of pastoring from the heart. Cultivating the center of ministry in the heart of God is no quick process. Again and again I find myself caught in web of getting things done--so necessary to my work, and being pulled away from prayer and people.

Naming my work becomes important so that I can remind myself what my mission is. My mission is not to improve or get it right. My mission is to be a God-bearer in this community.

As a God-bearer, I attend to my own soul. I listen and pray with others. I practice spiritual direction and am directed spiritually. I immerse myself in God through prayer and scripture. I pay attention to the world around me, looking for signs of the Spirit. I prepare messages and teaching with prayerful discernment and creativity. I wait for God to move. I limit my commitments and obligations. I follow through on what I commit to, but am careful to commit to that which will keep me away from the practice of the presence of God.