VocationCARE: Congregational Practices

to Notice, Name and Nurture Call with Young People

Why Us, Why Now

The Fund for Theological Education (FTE) supports the development of the next
generation of leaders for the church. FTE has, from its inception, made financial awards and
provided a network of support to young people who sense a call to pastoral ministry. Since
1999, more than 1,700 young adults have received support for their own exploration of and
preparation for ministry; nearly 70% are serving as pastors in congregations, missionaries,
religion and theology professors, and leaders in church-related and non-profit organizations.
FTE was founded in 1954 by a group of leaders who wanted to encourage bright and
gifted young leaders to pursue ministry. They developed the Rockefeller Brothers Trial Year
program—a project in which college students were nominated, primarily by religion professors,
and selected through a competitive process to spend an all expense paid year in seminary to
discern whether they might be called to ministry.
Since then, the Fund has implemented many different programs to encourage and
support young people for church leadership but our core mission remains the same: to identify,
nurture and support the next generation of gifted leaders. Our means and methods are different
today and appropriately so. Every generation needs be met in the particularity of their time and
place. And the world now is not quite exactly like it was in 1954
For instance, in 1998 when we began the current iteration of FTE Fellowships, we sent
our notices to lots of religion professors, but very few of them nominated students to explore
ministry through our fellowships. Religion Departments have become Religious Studies
Departments, intentionally, self-consciously committed to the scientific study of religion rather
than a confessional approach. We also sent thousands of brochures to campus ministers, but
very few nominated students. Now, more students participate in evangelical parachurch
organizations, which often do not encourage theological education, than in traditional mainline
campus ministries.
In 2002, the Fund broadened its focus beyond the campus to include communities of
faith in which young people form Christian identity and learn to listen for God’s call, particularly
asking how to put the question of calling the next generation of leaders before congregations.
FTE’s mission now includes serving as a creative, informed catalyst for communities of faith in
developing their own capacities to nurture men and women for vocations in ministry.

©  2010  by  The  Fund  for  Theological  Education  (FTE)  All  rights  reserved.  
 For the past five years, FTE’s Calling Congregations initiative has looked for—and
looked carefully at—congregations that notice, name and nurture vocation with young people. In
finding the habits and practices of “cultures of call,” FTE has learned that young people grow
into strong Christian identity, vocations, and the call to ministry in congregations that care for
vocation—the vocation of every Christian. While it is certainly God who calls us, there is a role
for congregations in God’s call.
What do we mean by call and vocation?
The words “call” and “vocation” have become so familiar to us at FTE that we sometimes
neglect to clarify them in conversation with people outside the office. We offer here only a brief
commentary to put vocation in context and to specify our approach to it. Good literature about
vocation—from the practical everyday to the deeply theological—abounds.1
Stepping back to look at the span of Scripture, we can see a pattern of God’s call: first,
God calls a people—Israel, the church—and then God calls individuals. God’s call is first
general and then specific; first to the life of faith and then to its expression in the particularity of
our individual gifts and the needs of the people and places where we find ourselves. And, God’s
call in all of its forms is effectual; that is, it has an effect on the hearer. From Scripture, we know
that when we hear God’s call, we are moved to do something—to put down our nets, quit the
job as tax collector, pray for those who persecute us—in obedience to the command to love
God and neighbor across every realm of our lives. Our call then is to participate in God’s dream
of Shalom, in which all will be healed and reconciled, where the child shall play over the hole of
the asp and the lion lay down with the lamb, the blind see and the lame walk.
We have Martin Luther and John Calvin, leaders of the Christian Reformation, largely to
thank for our understanding of the priesthood of all believers. They broke open the Roman
Catholic teaching about, and practice of, vocation, rejecting the notion that priests and nuns
were the only Christians with vocations. Rather, the Reformers argued, by virtue of our
baptisms, we are each charged and equipped to live as ministers of God’s love. They extended
vocation outside the walls of the church by claiming that the sacred and the mundane, the holy
and the human, are not two separate realms. We do not find God in one and not the other.
Instead, God’s Shalom is manifest in all parts of our life and work.
Therefore, we hold the assumption that the call to pastoral leadership, the particular
ministry to which some are called, is embedded in the call of vocation issued to all the baptized.

1
For a very good summary of the history and Christian approaches to vocation, see Chapter 2, “The Bible
on Vocation” and Chapter 3, “Theology for Vocation—Religious Affections and Vocation” in Douglas J.
Schuurman, Vocation: Discerning Our Callings on Life, Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004.

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If young people were formed to ask “What am I to do with my life—my whole life—in light of my
faith?” or “What is my part in God’s dream of Shalom?” the question of whether he or she is
called to ministry might more easily be heard. We think of our work—your work—as creating
space for hearing, learning the practices of listening, and opening up pathways for responding.
This is necessary work because it is not easy to hear and listen, much less respond, to God
calling.
How do congregations care for vocation?
Most Christians can cite the extraordinary call stories of Abraham, Moses, Samuel, Paul.
But those unmediated experiences of God are actually the exceptions. Think about the disciples
called by a man by the name of Jesus; Nathaniel called by his cousin; Timothy called through
family upbringing. Indeed, God’s presence mediated through the webs of our relationships,
strings of experiences, epiphanies and emptiness, failures and successes, and lessons in
Christian faith and practice leads us into and sustains us in our vocations.
Congregations, then, are the primary locus of revelation and interpretation of God’s
calling voice. Congregations are the caretakers of vocational formation and discernment; the
particular places where people hear and respond to a call to pastoral ministry. The ways in
which congregations embody this responsibility are unique to every church, its traditions and
particular context. And yet, there are observable patterns in this extraordinary diversity that can
be named in four core congregational practices of vocational care—four VoCARE practices:
1. C - Create space for exploring vocation;
2. A - Ask questions for self-awakening;
3. R – Reflect theologically; and
4. E - Enact ministry opportunities.
Create space for exploring vocation
More and more, youth ministers talk about the challenge of finding time when teenagers
can be together. Their lives are scheduled with school, extracurricular activities, music lessons,
traveling sports teams, leadership retreats, community service, group projects and more. Adults
themselves negotiate multiple commitments between
work, family and friends. Creating space for seems
daunting; at least, we know it takes intentionality. We need space in our inner
The kind of space we imagine for exploring lives and in activities of
congregational life for t the
vocation is both inner space and outer space—it is not question: How are our lives
an additional program. It is like the space Jesus made are being caught up in the
life of God?
for himself to pray all those times he went to the river,

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the boat, the hillside, the desert, the mountaintop, the other side, the garden. It is like the space
of all those upper rooms in the Bible where amazing things happened with widows and their
sons, with harlots and their ropes, with 12-year-old daughters coming back to life, with roofs
being taking off so friends can get close to Jesus, with tongues of fire igniting the church itself.
But we want to play with a more familiar-to-you metaphor. Most of us have had the
experience of making room in our homes for something new –a new baby, a relative come to
stay, a new piece of furniture. When that happens have to create a new kind of space within
what already exists: taking out some of what is already there, rearranging some of what
remains, bringing in the new things and leaving some empty places for what we will need as this
reality develops. Creating space for exploring Christian vocation is kind of like that. Here are
some questions to ask in preparing to create space for exploring vocation.
1. What needs to be moved?
Sometimes, making room for engaging vocation requires shifting around other priorities,
commitments and activities.
What needs to be moved will be different in each congregation, but overall, we suspect
that there are some common, perhaps unexamined, inhibitions to attending to vocation. A young
pastor recently told us about her twelve-year-old fascination with her United Methodist bishop
which developed during the Bishop’s Confirmation Retreat. She says, “I was so captivated that
day by the Bishop’s leadership and abundant joy that I asked the bishop how much money he
made. You see, I had been taught all my life that money was important, and I wanted to see if
his salary fit in with the expectations that had been placed before me. While my call to ministry
might have been started at that moment, no one said anything to me.”2
We invite you to consider our observations of the norms that get in the way of vocation
and then make a list of your own: (a) We do not have patterns for talking with specificity about
our material lives (work, role, money); (b) It can be difficult to bring faith into decisions about
work, marriage, children; and (c) We often unreflectively adopt the notion of the good life
presented by American media and culture as the Christian ideal of the good life.
2. How can we use what we already have?
While we sometimes think “wide open spaces” as we imagines creating room to explore;
in fact, what makes defines space and often what makes them beautiful, are their boundaries.
For Christians, we come to know the spaciousness of Gods’ grace through boundaries such as
Scripture, reason, experience and tradition. Perhaps a fuller knowing of the boundaries actually

2
http://wordsfromwashington.blogspot.com

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makes a space for healthy growth rather than one in which there is no “yes” because there is no
“no.” Do we know the defining lines of vocational exploration for a Christian?
What we already have includes not only the wisdom of Scripture and tradition, but also
the activities of the life of the church—worship, mission, formation, congregational care,
administration. Can space be made within each activity of congregational life for the presence of
the question: How are our lives are being caught up in the life of God through the work at hand?
3. What new is needed?
From our observation, the actual word “vocation” and the explicit phrase “call to ministry”
come awkwardly in most congregations. We need to learn the language of vocation and use it to
open up exploration space in every part of our life together. But more poignantly, Christians
need to live into their vocations and to claim that journey as one of the walk of discipleship of
Jesus Christ, and one done alongside each other.
Each congregation will hear the questions most important for them to address amidst all
these suggestions, and each will be accountable to themselves for the ones which follow as the
new realities unfold. Yet, to really create space to explore, it cannot only be discussed.
Someone has to move some furniture. We suggest the following variety of activities whose
leading edge is to create space for exploring vocation and we imagine that many more will
emerge as congregations begin to open up a new kind of space:
♦ Use a robust vocabulary of vocation and call in worship, in public prayer, in all parts of
congregational life.

♦ Eat meals together, sitting and talking with other generations, taking one another
seriously.

♦ Create soul-safe spaces: Circles of Trust, clearness committees, periods of silence

(communal and individual), tech-free zones.

♦ Learn and practice Holy Listening, including asking open and honest questions.
♦ Learn and engage contemplative practices – centering prayer, labyrinth walking, Ignatian
examen.3

Ask questions for self-awakening

Vocation is a journey, not a destination. That phrase sounds like something on a lame
poster a well-meaning adult would post in the youth room, but it is actually theologically sound.
Jesus’ living of his own vocation serves as the prime example; he was nothing if not on the

3
For an accessible resource on this practice, see Sleeping with Bread: Holding What Gives You Life,
by Dennis Linn, Sheila Fabricant Linn, and Matthew Linn.

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move. And the call he issued over and over again demanded people to get up and move: Put
down your nets and follow me. Take up your bed and walk. Get down out of that tree.
Jesus also asked people an important question: What do you want me to do for you?
Sometimes he would do what they asked—like restore sight or life to a child, and sometimes he
would not—like award seats at his right and left in heaven. But the question always invites
Jesus’ friends and followers to interrogate their lives and their deepest desires. It is not a
question in the abstract. It comes to a person in a particular community and the response is
lived out in community. It is a question that says pay attention—to who you are and who you are
becoming, to where you are and what is needful, to the
presence of Jesus and the promises of God.
The spaces we create for exploring vocation
Jesus’ friends and followers
are asked to pay attention— give us room to ask questions that will wake us up to
to who they are and who
our own lives, the life around us and the life of God. This
they are becoming, to where
they are and what is may not be as easy it sounds. Consider the young
needful.
people among us: parents tell them what they should do
with their lives. Teachers at school specify what they
learn, in what order and how they will learn it. They belong to groups of friends with potent
stated and unstated norms for life together. They are at the mercy of powerful forces telling
them that they are what they buy. Change some of the roles named here and we are describing
the world of adults. How do we even know what we would ask of Jesus?
If we had a vocational GPS to use in navigating our paths through these competing
scripts, it would have to ask us questions—over and over as we make our way, helping us
adjust our path—that are vital to discovering vocation:
1. Where are you now?
For Christians, this question demands response from one’s heart, soul, mind and
strength grounded in the particularity of this time and place. This question probes our gifts and
strengths, our wounds and our burdens, our opportunities and our limitations, our passions and
our fears.
The question here goes to the self but also to the self-in-relationship with other people
and all creation. While we must emphasize the importance of awakening to self, given the
strength of current culturally embedded temptations of narcissism and entitlement, we cannot
risk asking only about self. We need to know where we are in a family, a tradition, a community,
a global commons and a planet in trouble.

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 2. Where do you want to go?
As Christians, we know our destination is God’s Shalom, and that we get there by
increasing in love of God and neighbor. But we need to discover what particular shape that
takes in each of our own lives: What do you dream of for your life and for the life of the world?
What of God’s life is waiting to be born in the places where you work, play and worship? What
would it look like for you to become fully alive? What would a day be like? Who are your close
neighbors—parents, siblings, partners, friends—and how do you hope to love them? Who are
your far away neighbors and how do you love them from here?
3. What is important about how you get there?
The journey itself forms who we become. We can say without fear of successful
contradiction that we all need to slow down. Sit with one scripture passage for a week. Soak up
what is around you rather than gulping it down. Ask what do I usually miss during my travels?
What don’t I see? To what do I want to attend along the way?
4. Who is traveling with you?
Jesus never sent anyone out alone. Who is with you now? Who do you need to leave
behind? Who do you need to join you on the journey? What voices do you long to hear? Whose
scripts have you taken as guides and where are they leading you, your community, the world?
We know that congregations will experiment with ways in which to ask these questions
that awaken self in the world as fits their own language and context. We offer here a few
suggestions about asking self-awakening questions:
♦ Have the courage to let the questions not be answered right now.
♦ Use songs, hymns, poems that ask self- awakening questions.
♦ Learn to ask critical questions that probe beneath the surface of what is seen or
experienced and practice this in worship, in committee meetings, in coffee hour, in the
bulletin and newsletter.

♦ Invite the congregation to journal using guiding questions and ask for offerings to share
in a booklet or email series.

♦ Invite people to blog the critical questions on the church Web site.
♦ Map the environment by drawing home, school, congregation, city and depicting who
you are in each.

♦ Use self-discovery tools from the Meyers-Briggs, the DISC inventory, or the
Enneagram.4

4
Many of these tools are available through on the Web and can be found using your favorite search
engine.

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Reflect together theologically

We recently asked a group of pastors and church staff members what came to mind when they
heard the phrase “theological reflection.” Their responses were muted: few of us generally have
confidence about theological reflection as a robust, revelatory practice. We are Christians so we
know it must be done – we must ask some version of
“Where is God in all this?”—but good theological
reflection does not come easy. Too often, what passes While we must create space
for exploring vocation and
for theological reflection are comments meant to ask questions that awaken
interpret a difficult situation such as “It is God’s will” or us to self and world, we
cannot find our Christian
“When God closes a door, God opens a window” or vocations without paying
“We cannot know the ways of the Lord.” Our need for attention to our lives as
participants, with many
theological reflection as part of vocational care requires others, in the life of God.
something more than platitudes stuck over human
experience like bumper stickers.
Vocation at its core is the call to participate in God’s healing of the world. Therefore, we
need to know something about God’s dream for the flourishing of creation—about the life of
God—to even glimpse what we are being called into. Theological reflection doesn’t come easy
in part because many Christians—as revealed through the faith lives of teenagers—have an
impoverished knowledge of God’s Shalom. Christian Smith and Melinda Denton, in their book
Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, report findings of the
National Study on Youth and Religion5: Smith describes the functional faith of teenagers as
“moralistic therapeutic deism” in which God is the Cosmic Butler waiting to fulfill our needs on
request; in which everything I do is okay as long as I don’t hurt anyone; and in which God really
does not ask anything of me. Where do they get these ideas? Smith says teenagers have
inherited this faith from their parents. This de facto theology does not provide a foundation for
discerning Christian vocation.
Yet, we know that people in congregations long for lives of meaning and purpose and
they posit their hope in the life and love of God as revealed through the Christian story and lived
through the Christian community. If they can connect their stories with the stories of Jesus and
his friends and those of the believers who have shaped our traditions, they can begin to detect
patterns that reveal God’s life in the world –patterns that display God not as Cosmic Butler but
as the one who liberates us from our malformed selves and transforms us toward whole selves,

5
http://www.youthandreligion.org

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free to love and serve with extravagance. While we must create space for exploring vocation
and ask questions that awaken us to self and world, we cannot find our Christian vocations
without paying attention to our lives as participants, with many others, in the life of God.
Consider Peter, John, James, Andrew and the rest of the believers in the days before
Pentecost. In Acts, we see them together in a safe space they had created, devoting them-
selves to prayer, waiting for the promise of God. As human beings, we can only imagine that
they were asking each other all kinds of questions: Did you have any idea Judas would turn on
Jesus like he did? What will happen to Judas’s family now that he’s dead? Who can we trust? Is
it safe for us politically? When is Jesus coming back? Is that the promise of God he was talking
about? How long should we wait? This is the trajectory of theological reflection: Something
happens in our lives. As we sit with it, we begin to ask questions to make meaning of what has
happened to us and our loved ones and to anticipate what will happen next in light of emerging
meanings. But this is not where it ends.
Peter, as a leader of the community, stood in their midst and offered interpretation of
these events based in scripture. Drawing from psalms that expressed ancient betrayals, he
argued that Judas’s betrayal and death occurred to fulfill “what the Holy Spirit foretold through
David”6—that was its meaning. Theological reflection moved into the public discourse of the
community and held the events alongside the authoritative texts of the religion in which they
were formed.
Further, Peter addressed the present needs of the community—to fill the role in the
community left vacant by Judas’s death—as a forward-moving thrust of this theological
reflection on the events. Again he turned to scripture to validate the need (“Let another take his
position as overseer”7), and he proposed a plan that honored the community of witnesses but
also put them before God in prayer, holding them to trust in the providence of God. And so,
Matthias was called to his vocation in service to the gathered believers and the congregation
remained faithful to its call to wait for the promise of God.
The practice led by Peter in the pre-Pentecost community takes the community from
experience to question to scripture to prayer to action. It is, however, only one way of doing
theological reflection among many very good models and methods developed over the history of
the church. For the care of vocation, we do believe theological reflection is a critical pathway
best done in the company of other travelers. Each of us brings different questions to even a
shared experience. None of us know all the stories that need to be told, from scripture, from

6
Acts 1:16
7
Acts 1:20

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tradition and from the lives of saints, both living and dead. Each of us see needs within and
without the community that may be hidden to others and the gifts and possibilities that lie in our
midst. The call of God often comes through many voices.
Knowing that each community will find its way, we nevertheless recommend that
congregations focus on certain key practices for theological reflection:
♦ Tell stories from the Bible, the traditions and the life of the congregation as part of all
kinds of communal gatherings; include references to biblical stories in articles and
announcements on the congregational web site or in the electronic newsletters and
embed links to places on the internet where biblical stories are well told.

♦ Offer testimony from church members that rehearses and models theological reflection
grounded in events of their own lives.

♦ Add intentional theological reflection to all service, outreach or mission events.

♦ Establish a book group to read of Christians who found vocation through action and
reflection, i.e. Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, etc.

♦ Learn and practice together a theological reflection method, using it frequently in

education, meetings, small groups.

Enact ministry opportunities

Early in Jesus’ ministry, he gathered his friends and sent them out in pairs to DO
something. They had heard Jesus teaching, and while they remained confused about who he
was and what exactly he was up to, they were nevertheless given responsibility in a larger
arena. Not only did Jesus instruct them to spread the message, but he gave them authority over
unclean spirits and the power to heal people, to raise the dead, to restore sight to the blind and
to do all manner of miraculous signs. 8 The disciples no doubt came back with adventures to
share and stories to tell—back together to unpack what had happened and discover who they
were becoming.
In a similar way, we believe it is important to send younger people among us into action,
to try some ways of following the call of Christ even as they are growing in knowledge they
cannot fully articulate. All the experts tell us that younger generations learn by doing, that they
value experience over abstract information, that it is the authentic tale which holds authoritative
force. To care for vocation, our ministries have to include purposeful and meaningful ways to try
out a vocational impulse, especially in the areas of ministry and church leadership, and to reflect
on the experience alone and together.

8
Mark 3, Matthew 10

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 Each congregation’s life and situation holds unique promise for ministry opportunities
and for experiences in which young people might hear a call to their own vocations. We suggest
that you conduct an environmental scan in preparation
for structuring particular activities. Look across your

To care for vocation, our congregational and community landscape using these
ministries have to include questions as survey tools:
purposeful and meaningful
ways to try out a vocational 1. Where are the arts? From Spoken Word in
impulse, especially in the coffee shops to the Chancel Choir, where are the
areas of ministry and church
leadership, and to reflect on places for the wonders of creativity, self-expression
the experience alone and and collaborative that open us to God in unexpected
together.
ways?
2. Where is community life shaped? Where
can young people become active agents in crafting
who the church will be together? Where can leadership be formed and practiced?
3. Where is the church beyond our walls? How can young people’s view of the vastness
of God’s church and the particularity of its work become fuller? Where are places for global and
local missions, collective action, worship and prayer—both inside your denomination and
ecumenically?
4. Where are the needs of people and planet in our neighborhood? Where might young
people identify what is needful and establish and serve in new ministries to respond? What
would they need to know, to learn and to do?
Some particular ways to approach vocationally-enriched experiences include:
♦ Invest in mentoring and apprenticing people in Christian ministries of education, pastoral
care, preaching and leading worship, administration.

♦ Design a process for discerning calls to new kinds of ministries in the congregations.

♦ Build in time for play, drama, singing during congregational gatherings.

♦ Connect young people with service opportunities beyond the local congregation, through
interfaith youth corps, volunteer summer of year of service, and similar activities and
provide venues for tale-telling and interpretation within congregational life and among
congregational members of multiple generations.

♦ Ask vocational questions as part of mission and service activities.

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