God Equips the Called

by Nathan Humphrey

A few years ago I participated in a weekend retreat on “discerning your spiritual gifts.” I was excited. We were going to harness the powers of modern diagnostic tools such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, as well as the traditional methods of Bible study and prayer, to probe deep into our hearts and psyches and to find where our true gifts lie. And the procedure worked–by the end of the weekend, I knew I have gifts for teaching, writing, and leading worship. There was only one problem: I knew all of this before the retreat! It was nice to have my gifts affirmed in this way, but when a group of us got together at the end of the weekend to discuss how to use the gifts we had discerned, it was all speculation. We had discerned our talents and gifts, but we still hadn’t a clue what, if anything, we ought to do with them. I left the retreat confused and disappointed, praying: “God, I thank you for all your gifts, both large and small, but what can I do with my life that will be most pleasing to you?” I didn’t even know if I should base my life on my already-known talents.

Retreats like the one I attended tend to support what I call the corporate model of discernment. Cloaked in God-talk, the corporate model sounds something like this: through prayer and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the church discerns with an individual what that individual’s spiritual gifts are and, based on that discernment, prayerfully determines what he or she is called to do with those gifts. What that basically means is that the best-qualified candidate gets the job, and everyone’s calling is simply the thing they’re best qualified for. Discernment therefore becomes nothing more than matching resumes with job descriptions. And one’s success at a given vocation is more or less an indicator of a properly discerned calling.

Let’s suppose our church needs a new treasurer to manage our growing endowment. In the congregation are Jen, a cpa and former Wall Street stockbroker, and Tim, a third grade teacher at the local public school. Under the corporate model, Jen, with her clearly manifested administrative gift, is the obvious choice for treasurer, and Tim–whose spiritual gifts survey indicates that, yes, he might enjoy teaching–would make a valuable male addition to our predominantly female Christian Education team. We pray on it, we vote on it, and we’re ready to move on to the next item on our church board’s agenda.

Sounds great, right? People are matched up with tasks they will presumably enjoy, and the church gets skilled help when and where it’s needed. But the model doesn’t always work that simply. Just because we identify someone’s gifts doesn’t mean that we’ll know what they should do with them. At my retreat, some in my small group said I should be a priest and seminary professor, others a monk, others a prep school teacher. When others shared their gifts with me, I could only guess at how they might use them for the service of humanity or the glory of God. And even if the corporate model had offered me an obvious gift-based calling, it doesn’t address the fact that my call may not be related at all to the gifts I’m able to discern. In fact, if the Bible is any indication, it probably isn’t.

God has a disturbing habit of calling eminently unqualified people to carry out the work of God’s Kingdom. Even a cursory glance at Scripture confirms this fact. There we find a gallery of misfits: Abraham and Sarah, far past childbearing years, lack the abilities necessary to found a nation more numerous than the stars in the heavens. But God doesn’t stop there; we soon meet Moses, a stuttering, murderous exile called to lead a people he hardly knows out of bondage in the land of Israel. Then there’s Rahab, a harlot who helps Joshua. And at the opposite end of the spectrum we find a virgin, Mary, giving birth!

Perhaps the most unqualified person from a human point of view is Jesus of Nazareth himself. True, he meets some of the Messianic specs, but as the author of the epistle to the Hebrews reminds us, our eternal High Priest isn’t even a Levite. On a more pedestrian level, we know that Jesus’ contemporaries viewed him as the illegitimate son of a backwater town in Galilee, and even accused him of being a drunkard. Maybe it’s just God’s sense of humor, or maybe the theological method to God’s madness is that the Lord delights in raising up that which was cast down, and making old things new. In any case, God’s method doesn’t seem to be purely the stuff of surveys, church meetings, and weekend retreats.

“Spiritual discernment is not synonymous with what might be described as prayerful Christian decision making,” writes Suzanne Farnham, executive director of the Christian Vocation Project and author of Listening Hearts: Discerning Call in Community. “It is that and something more–something much deeper.” In When God Is Silent, Barbara Brown Taylor gets at the heart of this something when she writes,

Even now, some Christians have trouble listening to God. Many of us prefer to speak. Our corporate prayers are punctuated with phrases such as “Hear us Lord” or “Lord, hear our prayer,” as if the burden to listen were on God and not us. ƒ Sometimes I think we do all the talking because we are afraid God won’t. Or, conversely, that God will. Either way, staying preoccupied with our own words seems a safer bet than opening ourselves up either to God’s silence or God’s speech, both of which have the power to undo us.

Are we praying, as the young Samuel did, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening”? Or are we only talking to ourselves?

Unfortunately, there’s no fool-proof formula for spiritual discernment. This is because discernment isn’t decision-making; it’s listening for God’s voice, even in the absurd: a burning bush, a pregnant virgin. When we put the emphasis on call first and gifts second, we are more likely to hear the Spirit. Paradoxically, focusing on gifts-based discernment may distract us from God’s call to us. God’s way of calling us to prophetic, priestly, or pedagogical offices isn’t necessarily based upon who we already are. Otherwise Moses would have remained a fugitive herdsman, Mary Magdalene a prostitute, and Jesus a carpenter.

Take the hypothetical Jen and Tim, still pondering how best to serve their church: it may be that the two of them are called to channel their already-developed gifts into the service of the church. But our gifts aren’t necessarily the best road signs. One of the reasons Christian leaders fall is because we allow pride in our own abilities to overshadow our use of them in loving service to God and neighbor. We forget that the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

In the end there is no formula, and discernment boils down to listening rather than just filling out a multiple-choice survey. So how exactly do we separate God’s voice from the others that would seek to influence us? Many voices–our family, friends, employers, pastors, church groups, and so forth–vie for our attention, but how do we hear the voice of God in all that racket? Part of the solution is leaving silences in our own life, spaces for God to speak. But another is to let our communities help, rather than hinder, the discernment process. When God first calls Samuel, the young boy is baffled. It is only with the advice of Eli, the high priest, that he is able to pray, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

As long as our communities value the neat-and-tidy logic of the corporate model of discernment more than we value helping one another hear God’s voice, it will be difficult for us to discern our individual callings. If Tim can’t be called as treasurer because he might bungle the accounts and Jen as a teacher because she might have disorganized lesson plans, then we have succumbed to the spirit of success which attempts to out-shout the voice of the Spirit.

Let’s say that for some reason Tim has always wanted to learn more about being a good steward of his resources and is embarrassed that he can hardly balance his checkbook. And let’s say that Jen, always too busy pursuing her career and nurturing her God-given gift for numbers to marry or have a family, has a secret yearning just to sit and play with children–to rediscover through them a wonder at God’s creation. We might never know about these seeds of calling if we focus only on the corporate model of discernment. But if Jen and Tim have a place–a small group or regular silent worship time, perhaps–to voice the sort of desires and inklings that would not necessarily show up on your average spiritual gifts survey, they might be encouraged to test and pursue these impulses rather than just do what makes the most sense from a human standpoint.

If their community doesn’t stretch and nourish them, or focuses merely on external qualifications, or insists on success and immediate, measurable results, Jen and Tim will be much less likely to hear God’s call to each of them. But in a community that focuses on the call of God over human qualifications, Tim, as church treasurer, might get the chance to figure out how compound interest works and to learn from his friends about Christian stewardship in general. And Jen, as a Sunday school teacher learning how to discipline a child out of love, not anger, could deepen her own understanding of how God is a loving Father to her. Both are free to experience the joys and trials of stepping out into the unknown, of trusting their community to accept them even if they fail, and of listening for the voice of God instead of just filling out a survey.

Nathan Humphrey (njahumphrey@hotmail.com) recently discerned a call as chaplain to an Episcopal day school in Bethesda, Maryland. He is the editor of Gathering the NeXt Generation: Essays on the Formation and Ministry of GenX Priests, due out from Morehouse Publishing in July.

This article was originally published as ‘The Still, Small, Multiple Choice’ in Re:Generation Quarterly.