EMQ » January–March 2022 » Volume 58 Issue 1
[memberonly folder=”Members, EMQ2YearFolder, EMQ1YearFolder, EMQLibraryInstitution”]By A. Matthews
“But these people are called!” The recruitment director was adamant. These people should be received on a team with open arms because they were called! Regardless of a sense of fitted-ness or chemistry or other apprehensions there may have been with these particular potential teammates, any team should be happy to have them – simply because they were called!
“This is a hard place to serve, and we only want people joining us who feel called. It’s not enough to be open to coming here or open to missionary service or cross-cultural church planting. They have to sense God’s call.” Despite a desperate need for help in their ministry, my colleagues insisted that they would only take team members who felt called to their specific country of service.
Missionaries repeat this same refrain. When I speak with missionaries about what they most look for in prospective colleagues, one of the very first qualifications they list is the prospective person’s call. How strong is their call? How clear? We are looking for people who are called. It’s not exclusively missionaries who believe this. I have heard pastors involved in interviewing missionaries before they deploy overseas ask the same question. Pastors and missionaries alike expect that someone sent to serve overseas in some capacity has had the call.
Not everyone, however, defines the call in the same way. Nik Ripken demonstrates some of this confusion when he describes his own discussion with his sending agency about his calledness. During a pre-appointment interview, Ripken tells of how he was asked to share about his call to overseas mission. In response, he just asserted that he had read Matthew 28:18 and Acts 1:8. They replied that that was good, but that they wanted evidence of a divine call to overseas missions.
Ripken details his reply. “I was quite confused. ‘Well, I read the Bible,’ I said. I read Matthew 28:18 and I read Acts 1:8. I read God’s command to go to the nations, and I am trying to obey that command and go!’ I glanced over and saw that Ruth was now in tears. She had been raised within the denomination and suddenly I realized that I did not know the secret code words that opened the doors for overseas missions…”[1]
In his book, Hijacked by Glory, Pastor Sunder Krishnan describes a similar issue with the concept of call.
In my experience, most people tend to answer a question like that [why they are not serving overseas] by saying, “Well, I haven’t received the call; I haven’t been called by God to missions.” This immediately raises two questions: What really is the call, anyway? And how does one know whether he or she has been called to cross-cultural evangelism? The failure to root these questions firmly in biblical revelation has ended up with two kinds of problems: people serving overseas who shouldn’t be, and people here at home who have prematurely concluded that God did not want them in cross-cultural ministry – if they ever examined the question in the first place.[2]
These conversations illustrate some of the primary tensions surrounding the idea of a call into missions. Who determines this call? What does this call look like? Does just anyone who claims to be called need to be sent? Is there biblical precedent for this idea of call? Often those considering the idea of missions and whether they should serve overseas also struggle with this idea of calling. Many have justified not going to the ends of the earth because they don’t have this call.
Is the call of God just a code word for the initiated? Or is there something valid behind this concept? The problem is that even missionaries and sending organizations, don’t have a very clearly defined idea of what a call is, so situations like Nik Ripken’s occur too frequently. We owe it to those considering missionary service – and to pastors and churches helping people consider their ministry futures – to demystify this thing we have labeled the call of God. In this article, I will propose a way to understand what the call is, clarify what it is not, and explore why it is important to get it right.
What the Call Is
Put simply, the call of God is the conviction that God speaks to people and invites them to follow him in a specific direction. It is rooted in the belief that God speaks to us today and in that speaking, he makes clear his will to us that we move forward in a specific direction.
Acts 13 tells us, “While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.’” God speaks to the leadership of the church of Antioch and out of that comes the first missionary journey. Acts 13 doesn’t give us much more detail and we don’t know anything specific about how God spoke in this instance, but God spoke and indicated a direction that he had for the lives of Barnabas and Saul. Together, the church of Antioch responded and sent them on their way.
Ruth Haley Barton describes the role of listening to God that must characterize followers of Christ: “Commitment to discernment … presupposes commitment to Christ and the real presence of the Holy Spirit, who has been given to lead and guide us on Christ’s behalf. The Spirit is an immediate presence who can be heard and responded to through disciplines and practices that help us to listen.”[3] The call, then, is discerned as the leading and guiding of the Holy Spirit. When it comes to cross-cultural service, this call is the leading of the Spirit in the specific direction of ministering cross-culturally.
The call is more of a descriptive term we use to describe what God is doing and saying. It is not a biblical term in that we see that particular nomenclature used every time to describe God’s leading in the Scriptures, but the concept itself occurs over and over again. In fact, Os Guinness says, “calling in the Bible is a central and dynamic theme that becomes a metaphor for the life of faith itself.”[4] From Adam in the Garden, to Abraham in Ur, to Moses and the burning bush, to Jonah and Isaiah, to Philip hearing God say to go, to the desert road to God speaking to the church in Antioch and God speaking to Paul through the Macedonian man – the call is a recurring theme of Scripture that God speaks to his people and indicates to us his desire for us to walk a particular path.
Quite simply, this is the call to missions: God speaking to individuals and leading them to be involved in cross-cultural missions. In his book on calling, Os Guinness talks about two callings. The first and primary call is the call of God “to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion and dynamism lived out as a response to his summons and service.”[5] The call to cross-cultural ministry, however, is what Guinness would describe as a secondary calling. “A special calling refers to those tasks and missions laid on individuals through a direct, specific, supernatural communication from God.”[6]
Now that we have delineated what the call is, perhaps I can allay some concerns about some weaknesses that have cropped up because of the ambiguity with which we have defined the call in the past. It will greatly help us to consider, then, what the call is not.
What the Call Is Not
The call of God on a person cannot be reduced to a solitary assertion in an individual’s life that God has definitively called them. We must understand that the call should not be solitary. The call of God must encompass more than a plain assertion by one person that God has spoken and therefore everyone else should fall in line. A pastor friend tells the story of a couple in his church who came to the church leadership and expressed a call. When the church leadership did not sense God’s confirmation of the call, the couple got quite angry. They insisted that God had called them and that they had to go, but the godly leadership of the church could not substantiate that. The couple left the church in a huff – looking for someone else who would enable them to pursue their call. Just as with the people described at the beginning of this article, one person’s assertion that they are called does not constitute the final word on their calling.
The call of God to cross-cultural service should be affirmed and re-affirmed by church leadership and the church community. In fact, I would suggest that God’s will is discerned best in community, particularly in light of the new covenant.[7] Under the old covenant, God addressed his people often through miraculous encounters and the community played little role. Today, however, as a people listening to God’s Spirit and desiring to discern the voice of his Spirit, community plays an important role in ensuring we hear him correctly. As when someone hears from God, we must remember our limitations as fallen people and, that because of our sinful nature, we don’t always ascertain his leading correctly.
Dallas Willard characterizes the humility that must be present when we believe we hear from God. “When God speaks to us, it does not prove that we are righteous or even right. It does not even prove that we have correctly understood what he said. The infallibility of the messenger and the message does not guarantee the infallibility of our reception. Humility is always in order.”[8] This is why it is vital to confirm the call of God with the community of God. Being called does not give anyone the right to arrogance or to bulldoze others under our conviction of the call. Gordon Smith writes, “It is perilous for a person to be convinced she knows the will of God while also assuming that anyone who questions her is misguided or not as sensitive as she to the presence of the Spirit. When pastors or religious leaders take this stance, they forfeit their capacity to lead; they have assumed a posture that is antithetical to true spirituality and discernment.”[9]
Second, the call of God is not uniformly identical. It is so easy for missionaries to think that everyone’s call must be similar to their own. But hearing from God can be so unique to each one of us! Sometimes the call comes in a Damascus road type experience, sometimes it is the church moving and identifying people for mission and sometimes it is the much more subtle, still small voice of God, saying, “This is the way; walk in it” (Isaiah 30:21).
One missionary colleague of mine said to the Lord, “I will follow you and if you want me to go overseas, keep opening those doors.” And that is exactly what the Lord did. He kept opening doors and these colleagues now serve in a difficult place among a resistant people because they simply said “Yes” to God and he continued to open doors for them. Does this constitute a call? By this definition, yes, it does. This colleague believed God was inviting him to follow a specific direction and he just kept saying yes. Because it is God speaking, it can look very different for each one – sometimes he seems to call to a land, sometimes to a people, sometimes just to the mission, but always it is his voice leading and speaking and guiding.
Why It Matters
We owe it to missionary candidates and those interested in missions to understand what the missionary calling truly is. People like Nik Ripken ought not be turned away from service or to feel inferior in some way because their understanding and experience of the call may differ from the more dramatic type of call some have in mind. Nor should we send people overseas only based on their solitary assertion that they are called. We must explore their calling with them. What is it that they hear God saying about their calling? How is it that they have come to discern that this is God’s voice leading them in this direction? We want missionaries who have arrived at a level of spiritual maturity in their lives where discernment of God’s voice is a regular practice. As Gordon Smith says, “The capacity to discern, then, is a critical sign of spiritual maturity.”[10] Exploring the call in a framework that reflects this could be helpful in more appropriately determining a candidate’s qualified-ness for service.
It also matters because for many of us, our call is what keeps us where we are. My family and I serve among a resistant people in a place where security is a regular concern. The local people regularly ask us, “Why would you come here? We have been to the US and life there is so much better and easier than life here. Why would you ever want to live here?” The answer we give them is that God has led us here and we truly believe that. While we love these people and long to see them come to know Christ, we would not stay here if we believed for a second that this is not where God has led us for this time. We have been through many difficult experiences over these past fifteen years, but we have persisted and persevered because we have been convinced this is where God has us for now. That call has sustained us through language learning and the trials of serving and ministry here. Knowing we are called is of monumental importance to us and to so many other missionaries serving around the world. It is a key foundation to our resilience in serving.
What About the Vast Unmet Need?
Ripken’s contention with the idea of calling seems to stem from this reality: there are still millions without a meaningful opportunity to know who Christ is and yet, so many Christians are apathetic to this – and for many this indifference is rationalized as, “Well, I can’t go into missions. I don’t have the call.”
This is of grave concern, but more than a deficiency pertaining to the idea of calling, I would suggest that two other issues are at work here. First, there is a discipleship issue. Too many Christians grow up in communities where they believe following Jesus means intellectually assenting to a set of beliefs rather than an invitation to follow a Savior who invites us to take up our cross and follow him. Because few have truly chosen to become serious disciples of Jesus, only a smaller percentage of those hear God’s voice leading them overseas. Perhaps the real issue is the failure of our churches to produce disciples of Jesus. As Dallas Willard astutely diagnosed, “The governing assumption today, among professing Christians, is that we can be ‘Christians’ forever and never become disciples.”[11]
Second, this is a missional issue. While some have embraced the call to follow Jesus and to become his disciples, even within that group not all have fully comprehended the missional bent of what it means to be the people of God. Life with Jesus is life on mission! As Christopher Wright says, “It is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world, as that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission – God’s mission.”[12] Too few Christians have fully embraced the mission aspect of what it means to be God’s people. Too few have realized the invitation of God not just to follow him and grow into his likeness, but to also be on mission with him – that all people on earth may have the same chance to know him. Piper puts it quite starkly: “There are only three kinds of Christians when it comes to mission – zealous goers, zealous senders, and disobedient.”[13] Too many fall into the third category. Our discipleship must recognize these inadequacies and find ways to resolve them so that people will properly wrestle with the call of God.
My hope and prayer is that this article demystifies the call and that once demystified, disciples of Christ can wrestle more fully with the question of whether God is leading them to pursue service cross-culturally. As believers wrestle with what it looks like to carry out God’s mission in the world, may they grow in their own ability to discern God’s voice and leading and respond to that voice in obedience. May the Lord of the harvest speak to many and invite them to follow him to places in the world where people still have had little chance to ever know Jesus.
Dr. A. Matthews is a missionary who has served in the Middle East since 2004. Matthews coaches local leaders in the underground church and is engaged in evangelism and church planting. Additionally, he coaches cross-cultural church-planting teams across the region.
NOTES
[1] Nik Ripken and Gregg Lewis, The Insanity of God: A True Story of Faith Resurrected (B & H Publishing Group, 2014). Kindle location 77.
[2] Sunder Krishan, Hijacked by Glory: From the Pew to the Nations (Self-published, 2014), 177–8.
[3] Ruth Haley Barton, Pursuing God’s Will Together: A Discernment Practice for Leadership Groups (IVP Books, 2012). Kindle location 842.
[4] Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling God’s Purpose for Your Life (W Publishing Group, 2003). Kindle location 641.
[5] Guinness, The Call, Kindle location 212.
[6] Guinness, The Call, Kindle location 943.
[7] Gordon T. Smith, The Voice of Jesus: Discernment, Prayer, and the Witness of the Spirit (Intervarsity Press, 2003), 153.
[8] Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God (Downers Grove, 1999), 39.
[9] Willard, Hearing God, 39.
[10] Willard, Hearing God, 20.
[11] Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship
(Harper One, 2006), xii.
[12] Christopher Wright, The Mission of God’s People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission (Langham Partnership International, 2010), Kindle location 155.
[13] John Piper, “The Need of the Nations” video, accessed on May 3, 2021, https://joshuaproject.net/resources/videos.
EMQ, Volume 58, Issue 1. Copyright © 2022 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.
