Vocational Formation: Against an Unholy Trinity of Errors

By Chris Armstrong, reprinted from Humanism as a Way of Life.

See previous posts in this series starting here and continuing here and here.

Too often Americans think vocation is…

• singular – We will have only one vocation
• mysterious – Only God knows that vocation
• inflexible – If we miss it, we won’t get a second chance

Summing up, probably the most common bad vocational theology I’ve found among Christian students is the lie that we must discover “the” one, mysterious vocation God has for us.

For some students, even worse, this bad theology can become melded with a pressurized view that right now, during your college years, is the time you must find this vocation.

And finally, attached to this unnecessarily limiting and urgent approach to vocation is the fear – again, for some, though not all – that if you don’t find that single, mysterious vocation by the time you graduate, you will irrevocably miss God’s will for your whole lives.

Let’s examine and challenge this “unholy trinity” of vocational beliefs:

Do We Really Have Only One, Life-Long Vocation?

First, the belief that our vocation must be singular:

Christian sociologist Tim Clydesdale tells us that these days, most of us are convinced we must identify our lifelong career while in college. Which, since we tend to identify vocation closely with career, as the single Big Thing God has planned for our lives, means that the stakes are incredibly high for students right now.

But is the idea that we will have one lifelong career, let alone one lifelong vocation, true?

No, Empirical Evidence Shows Complexity & Fluidity

There are two problems with the “single-vocation belief.”

The first problem is an empirical one: people simply don’t experience careers (which are, again, just one species of what Christian thinkers have called “particular vocations”) in that way today.

A young employee starts in an entry-level position as a worker with a certain set of “beginning skills” that are valued by their organization.

Then, along the way,

• first, they get to know themselves better as workers, discovering new things they are good at – and not good at.
• second, through this or that circumstance, they move from one opportunity to another in the workplace.
• and third, as they do so, they tend to experience a growth in skills, responsibilities, authority – in other words, they mature through various career stages.

In short, almost every working life shifts repeatedly—not only within an organization, but also between organizations and even between sectors!

These days, those who track such things estimate that the average person will have something like 9-10 jobs and in fact 5-6 distinct careers in their lifetime.

So the empirical evidence flatly contradicts the “one-vocation” belief, at least in the area of marketplace work. Marketplace work is quite evidently a multifaceted journey, and the pressure to get that first job “right” misses this fact.

Good Theology Does Not Support “One-Vocation Belief”

But here we come to the second problem with “one-vocation belief.” It is not supported in the Christian tradition.

To take again the example of Luther—the Reformer taught that in every linkage or relationship between our life and the life or lives of others, we have a vocation.

Thus for the theological tradition that grew up from Luther, our particular vocations are not only sequentially multiple, as we’ve been describing. They are also simultaneously multiple

Think of it this way: a person can be at the same time a child, with a vocation to honor their parents, and also a parent, with a vocation to raise their children well, and also a citizen, and a neighbor, and an employee, and a boss, and a friend, and a teacher . . . with each relational status enmeshing them in distinct, particular vocational duties and activities.

Luther, by the way, loved to illustrate this with the example of the father (not, note, the mother!) changing his baby’s stinky diaper. He said that a Christian father who understands what God intends by bringing him together with that child will see even this menial task as part of a high and holy calling.

Finally, Luther and much of the Protestant tradition after him also taught that we should not only recognize and be responsible in each of these distinct, particular vocations. We should also carry each of them out so that they fulfill that other vocational layer: our general callings—the universal call to holiness—that is found in Scripture’s accounts of creation, of the moral law, of the commandment to love God and neighbor, and so forth.

In particular, this relational dimension of Luther’s teaching on vocation points to our Gospel vocation to love not only our neighbor but also God in our neighbor. So Jesus teaches in the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25 that as we love God’s precious human creatures, we are in fact also loving the Lord himself.

In other words, nothing in the Protestant tradition supports a construal of vocation as single and monolithic. And I’m fairly sure that nothing in the Catholic or Orthodox traditions support it either.

Must We Really Wait for God’s Mysterious Call?

So much for the first piece of bad vocation theology we may have picked up—the myth of the single life-long vocation.

But what about the second piece: Is God’s call to particular vocations really mysterious? That is, are we incapable of knowing our vocations until God reveals them to us directly?

What would the evidence be for this belief? Some might say, it comes from Scriptural accounts of direct calling.

No, Christian Experience Points to More Ordinary Sources of Discernment

But out of the thousands of people we meet in Scripture, by one count, fewer than 100 experienced anything like a direct call from God to a specific work.

While this doesn’t prove that no one today can expect to receive such a direct call, it should call into question a theology that insists that everyone must.

Instead, most Christians seem to arrive at a sense of their particular callings through much more ordinary, everyday sorts of paths:

First, we seem much more likely to discover the special kinds of work we have to do in the world by hearing what others tell us about the gifts they see in us, and what we learn about ourselves vocationally through our own experience of those gifts.

Second, we seem much more often to discover that special work as we become aware of the needs of the world around us.

Those needs may sometimes be very hard and personal – unlike anything we’d choose – like the vocation to care for an elderly parent with dementia.

Third, our process of discovering our particular vocational directions seems quite often to involve an evolving awareness of the desires God has put in our hearts from birth – desires to do certain kinds of good work that contribute to the world.

In other words, God is not playing some divine joke on us by hiding our particular vocations from us until he speaks them to us directly. Rather, he seems to have ordained more “ordinary” sources of vocational discernment and awareness—sources that any person can discover for themselves (though not, it is important to note, by themselves!)