Calling

A copy of an article I wrote for the P's and G's Blether Magazine last month:

A few weeks ago in a sermon, those who felt a calling to lead the church were told to ‘get ready to die’. Sitting in the balcony as a final year Divinity student and currently exploring my own calling, I felt pinned to my seat.

Exploring ‘the call’ can sound like a pious response of a final year student trying to scrape an answer together to the question ‘So what ARE you going to do with a Divinity degree?’ Yet the fact is we are all called into ministry within the church: our God is a missionary God, Jesus embodied that mission on earth, and the church now continues it.

John Pritchard’s The Life and Work of a Priest summarises the different aspects of ordained ministry under three headings: The Glory of God, The Pain of the World and The Renewal of the Church. While written for those specifically exploring a call to ordination, it is certainly not exclusive. We can all recognise elements of this in our every day journey with God: maybe you long to honour and glorify God in your life, maybe seeing conflict and starvation around the world or closer to home fills you with a pain unrelated to your own circumstances, or maybe you’re frustrated with the apathy towards the church and long to see it reclaim a role as salt and light in society.

Listening to God and understanding where he is calling you to be is no easy task. Some of us may be called full time ministry, others will feel called to their family, a specific career, job, vocation, study, mission abroad… But above all, Pritchard states that we are all first and foremost called to a life of holiness; by spending more time with our holy God we are able to hear his call on our life more clearly – a daunting, yet joyful, task.