“
Contents
Introduction -the task we face as a Churchpage 3
The significance of baptismpage 4
Our understanding of Church as a wholepages 4,5
Encountering God in daily work and lifepage 6
The artificial divide of sacred and secularpage 7
Working in partnership with God for the Kingdompage 8,9
Understanding the Kingdom of Godpage 10
God’s involvement in our daily workpage 11
Exploring vocation and belonging to Godpage 12
Discerning and testing our callpage13,14
A prayer for vocationpage15
After Sunday contact details page 16
Introduction
The following are extracts from the report published by the Archbishops Council entitled “Setting God’s People Free
“A great opportunity lies before us. It is the same opportunity that has presented itself to the Church in every decade for the last 100 years. It is an opportunity that arguably has not been fully grasped since the days of Wesley.”
“We are all called to abundant life (John 10:10). Through his coming among us as a human being in Jesus Christ and by his dying and rising, God has rescued human life from chaos and absurdity and called us into the life of his Kingdom.
As a “royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2:9), we are summoned – clergy and laity alike – through baptism to a common vocation of divine blessing that originates in Jesus Christ.
Baptism is the mark of our incorporation into the life of the Church and a commissioning to participate in God’s mission in the world. As such, the Church, as the whole people of God, clergy and laity, gathered and sent, are charged with continuing Christ’s priestly work of blessing, mediation and reconciliation on behalf of the whole of humanity, to bear witness to, and participate in the mission of God.
Indeed, it is only when understood in the context of God’s whole redemptive plan – at work in the life of the world, of the Church as a whole, and of the individual Christian – that the call to grow lay
ministry, influence and leadership can be seen to be biblically and missionally both urgent and essential.
The task we face as the Church is not a functional or managerial one. We are not trying to train up new volunteers to fill the gaps left by declining clergy numbers or make people work even harder to rescue the institutional Church. Rather our aim is that all should be able to respond to the saving work of God in Jesus Christ and rejoice to the full in following the vocation and using the gifts he has given them. Our aim in this paper is to find a way to enable Christians to live the life of Jesus Christ in all its fullness”.
Our Baptism a view from Archbishop George Carey
“Your Christian baptism lays on you the onerous task to be a Christian disciple where you are -in your workplaces, social encounters, and, of course in the home. If we accept that God has put each of us in a certain place – be it a factory, boardroom, home, college, or wherever –then that is the place where we are called to exercise a royal priesthood as Christians in the world…What is God calling you to be and do?...There has never been a greater need for imaginative women and men who can be trusted to lead us with conviction and wisdom.
Baptism and belonging to the Church
At baptism we become part of the church – the body of Christ in the world. At baptism we welcome the newly baptised with these words:
“There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism; N by one Spirit we are all baptised into one body
We welcome you into the fellowship of faith: we are children of the same heavenly Father; we welcome you.”
These words clearly indicate the relational nature of our part in the body of Christ and the equality we find as we are invited to participate in a movement of love empowered by the Spirit. Church is not described in this way as an institution or organisation but as a community reflecting the collaborative life to be found in God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Our understanding of Church
How do we imagine or think about church.
It can be helpful to think about church in three modes which together make up a more complete understanding of what ‘the church’.
First church exists in its gathered form – coming together for worship or learning or fellowship. The liturgy is the work of the people and we are all involved but some are more prominent in the part they play in leadership. In fact some as specifically licensed to lead.
The church also exist in a form serving the locality where it is set. It is clearly identifiable as the church as a body and may work on its own or in partnership with other non-church bodies to provide service in the community. It may be providing food banks, furniture schemes, toddler groups, support for the young and elderly and isolated, community cafes, homeless shelters, job clubs, drop in centres, debt counselling and support and so on. Currently across the UK, the church in it is organised mission in the locality delivers countless thousands of social action programmes through millions of volunteers.
Thirdly the church exists in its dispersed form where members of the body of Christ find themselves each day of their life getting on with lifeand work, its joys and its challenges, in virtually every part of our human existence. Whether at paid employment, caring for relatives young and elderly, working as volunteers in a wide range of organisations, enjoying leisure activities and time with friends, pursuing creative interests and hobbies, sharing their skills with others and so on. Every moment of the day the Church is engaging with life and encountering God in the midst through the body dispersed in life. It is very often when working or engaging in this ‘secular’ context that people of faith recognise and experience God’s love most clearly through others who have no expressed Christian faith.
The Church Dispersed
Encountering God in daily work and life
In his book ‘God on Monday,’ Simon Phipps observes that the Christian biblical view of the world we live in is threefold:
1The world is ‘man’s’ means of freedom
2The world is God’s means of communicating with ‘man’ in
his/her freedom
3The world is ‘man’s’ means of response to God
God is his love gives humans freedom and gives us the world as his gift for us to enjoy. God makes it possible for us to live a lifetime without the word ‘God’ meaning anything at all. But no other sort of world would leave us truly free.
Although God is not seen in the world he is seen through the world. He is in the very fabric and fibre of life. He is not seen but he is sensed and heard. There are things in life that catch our eye and nudge us into awareness, arousing our concerns. The impact on us may be slight or it may be great. God communicates to us indirectly in the world disturbing our freedom but never undermining it. The climax of this indirect communication in the world is the life of Jesus Christ –God’s word made flesh. Some people are stirred up to that realisation and so in the life of Jesus they see the key to life itself and commit themselves to following this way.
Those who hear this challenge come to see that it is in the world that we are called to respond for the sake of the world and our life in it. Our love that responds to God’s love has to work itself out here and now in the network of judgements and choices and decisions with which daily life presents us and which it challenges us to attend to and act upon.
Sacred and Secular
It’s all too common to think of our life of faith in terms of that which is called sacred and that which is secular. We can find ourselves thinking and responding in compartments where somehow by labelling something as secular means that we don’t expect to encounter the movement or voice of God within it. God is whitewashed out of the scene. It’s all too easy to put God in a ‘godly box’ separated from the realities of life. This is unhelpful thinking that gets in the way of us making sense of our discipleship in everyday life.
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience.
We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
Teilhard de Chardin
“If our finding God in churches leads to our losing him in factories, it were better to tear down the churches, for God must hate the sight of them.” Geoffrey Studdert-Kenned
Born to Work in Partnership with God
Having been made in God’s image, we are called to be God’s representatives. We are God’s hands and feet working in partnership with God in his world. In Genesis chapter 2 we are told that God placed Adam in the garden to till it and keep it, to cultivate it and conserve. Thus God’s creative work is linked with our creativity – a creativity which designed both to preserve what God has give and to build on it through further creative ventures, using the resources God has provided. The ‘tilling’ suggests that we have a role [part] to play in helping prepare things so that the potential for growth which God has placed in them can be realised.
From ‘Where’s God on Monday?’ by Alistair Mackenzie(NavPress 2002)
Working for the Kingdom
Our vocation is less about our role within the organised life of the Church. It is more to do with the Kingdom of God – that time and space where God is God and everyone and everything is in union with God. It is ensuring that we ourselves are signs of the Kingdom and that we give our lives to working for supporting the values of the Kingdom. This vocation is lived out in the world…. The world is where we encounter God and where we have opportunities to discern God’s will and
co-operate with his Spirit….Being alive to God’s presence within the world also has the effect of making us sensitive to people or situations where there is suffering or exploitation or wickedness. We sense God’s suffering in the midst of his creation and we recognise our own calling to bring light into dark places, to bring hope where there is despair, to bring life where there is death. Our ongoing vocation is to struggle for peace and justice within the world whether it be situations we ourselves encounter, or situations we read about in our newspapers and watch on television...they become channels by which God calls us to action in working for the Kingdom.
From ‘The Call to Continue’ by Stephen Ferns, in ‘This is our Calling’ edited by Charles Richardson (SPCK, 2004)
How we understand the Kingdom of God
Which of the pairing of ideas do you tend to agree with most?
1The Kingdom that Jesus spoke about is only to be realised in the future
or
The Kingdom has arrived and is in the process of breaking in into the present
2The Kingdom is primarily an inward experience of the mind or a spiritual state of mind – something which someone thinks about?
or
The Kingdom is about the transformation of the material and social world as we know it to be
3The Kingdom is really only concerned with our personal character. Jesus teaching is relevant for character building and personal ethics but not social ethics
or
The Kingdom is concerned primarily with social justice and liberation of the oppressed
4Eternal life is about some state of eternal bliss which starts when this life ends and takes place in a place called heaven
or
Eternal life is not about duration of life but about a quality of life – God’s life, dwelling in him and He in us
5Spiritual things are much better than social or material things
or
You can’t really separate the spiritual from the material as they are so interwoven
What is your understanding and how does that affect your perspective on discipleship in daily life?
For or against the Kingdom
In Jesus’ parables of the kingdom, the point is made that a decision for and against the kingdom is a decision for or against Jesus himself. The stories of everyday matter of people at work in the fields and at home, or going on a journey, and in each story it is made clear that one cannot sit on the fence – in ones attitude or action one declares oneself to be for or against the kingdom, for or against Jesus through who the new humanity and the kingdom is coming into being.
Margaret Kane What Kind of God
In what ways is God involved in our daily work?
“Because people’s occupation’s often centre life’s meaning so powerfully, does that mean that they are bending the knee in de facto obeisance to secular gods, kingdoms and morals of a workaday world, saving Sundays for Christian activity? What does the church say to someone who is out in the world of commerce and industry, someone whose Christian vocation seems challenged by service to idols of mammon. Typically, the church’s response is a palliative suggestion that one’s job can be a springboard for kindness towards others, a platform for keeping the Ten Commandments, an opportunity to make a witness, a location for a ministry of presence, or a context from which arrow prayers may be shot. This message implies that, while so-called secular careers have some value as a service to others, they posses no inherent value in their own right. But what about the welder who believes welding per se is his Christian activity? What about the homemaker who believes she shares a personal delight with God in a good cheese soufflé. Would it be possible that God motivates the engineer who works on fuel cells or sustains a man who collects garbage?
Could it be that the knack for finding good teaching methods is not just hard work but also the prompting and gift giving of the Holy Spirit? Could the promise of Christ be part of what motivates the designer who wants to improve sewage disposal? Are not all these equally cases of godly work?”
From ‘After Sunday: A Theology of Work’ by Armand Larive
Thinking about Vocation
Belonging to God
“Earlier in my life, I thought there was one particular thing I was supposed to do with my life. I thought that God had a purpose for me and my main job was to discover what it was…..
….Then one night when my whole heart was open to hearing from God what I was supposed to do with my life, God said, “anything that pleases you”
“What?” I said, resorting to words again “what kind of answer is that?”
“Do anything that pleases you,” the voice in my head said again, “and belong to me”.
At one level that answer was no help at all, the ball was back in my court again, where God had left me all kinds of room to lob it wherever I wanted. I could be a priest or a circus worker. God really did not care. Whatever I decided to do for a living, it was not what but how I did it that mattered. God had suggested an overall purpose but was not going to supply the particulars for me. If I wanted a life of meaning, I was going to have to apply the purpose for myself.
“Do anything that pleases you,” the voice in my head said again, “and belong to me”.
From ‘An Altar in the World’ by Barbara Brown Taylor
Discerning our call - A Perspective
Based on work by Stephen Ferns in ‘This is our Calling’, edited by Charles Richardson
‘Our idea of what God is like may severely restrict the kinds of things that we expect God to call us to do. We need to be careful in listening for God’s invitation to us, for it may not be God we are listening to but an inner policemen, or head-teacher, or critical parent, or religious authority figure. The true God is concerned with life and longing and will draw us out of ourselves in ways that we never imagined possible.
Discernment is a process that takes time, years even and cannot be forced. God’s calling continues throughout our lives and is not a one off thing. Our previous experience may suddenly become meaningful and relevant in ways we had not expected.
At the heart is the discipline of prayerful listening to God and waiting expectantly and silently. Reading scripture, especially the gospels, opens us up to the presence and life of God. We need to open ourselves up to God’s action in the world where he is trying to grab our attention to engage with his purposes for creation. We need to remember that our calling is to share in the life of the risen Christ who has come to bring God’s kingdom to earth. Being open to the movement of the Spirit within the world means we also have to be open to the movement of the Spirit within ourselves. God speaks to us through the language of everyday events. Each new moment or situation holds a clue to God’s call and we always find our call in the circumstances and experiences of daily life.
St Ignatius observed that when we choose a particular course of action we should try to discern how it makes us feel. Does it fill us with a sense of joy, peace and consolation or does it make us feel ill at ease, restless and disconsolate. Sometime we need to monitor our feelings over time since a decision which initially brings us peace can in time make us feel deeply uneasy. For the most part we will probably experience God’s call in listening to his voice in the every day and trying to discern in each present moment what it is that God requires of us.
At other times we encounter what seems to be a maze with dead ends with no obvious way ahead. Even yet in the middle of such confusion we are prompted by some force which leads us on. This only seems to make sense in retrospect.
Some of us will affirm never to have heard the voice of God or felt any promptings but yet still remain committed to a journey because they know that God is with them even though no call has come to them.’