What Am I Called To Do? Perry Hazeltine, Ph.D. The Ministry Assessment Program (MAP) is beginning its thirteenth year at the Samaritan Counseling Center. I am grateful that MAP has given me the opportunity to speak with people who feel called by God; some by the quiet inner voice of intuition and others by a more pronounced epiphany or conversion. Either way, hearing people talk of their “sense of call” has helped me to appreciate how finding one’s way into a vocation is not something to take for granted. In fact, love and work, Freud suggests, are the most important adult activities. In John Irving’s novel Cider House Rules, the gruff and principled physician advises the beloved boys of his orphanage to make themselves useful. Perhaps at its best, work is love made useful. One must be involved in meaningful activity fully know oneself.. Work can be defined as all meaningful activity. This includes nurturing the young and caring for the elderly as well as work that is compensated monetarily. It is, then, because of the importance of work in our lives that we feel great anxiety when we do not know what we are to do, or find that our work no longer is meeting our needs. Roger Gould, a psychoanalyst who has written about vocational identity, says that the way one defines oneself as a person is “a license to be”. He explains that while operating within that license, a person feels minimal conflict or anxiety and a maximum sense of security.” Functioning outside this “license” creates anxiety and even a sense of being threatened until we either retreat to the established self-definition or redefine our license. Movement toward self-redefinition is what Gould calls “Transformation” and this experience is common in the middle adult years. The anxiety that precedes the redefinition of self is part of what is commonly referred to as mid-life crisis. Conventional wisdom has us fearing this crisis because of the damage it can inflict on the things we hold most dear: marriage, family, cherished friendships. Our fear of such a crisis is out of balance, however, if we only look at the potential damage without looking at the possibility for growth. Mid-life allows for the rich experience of earlier life to be scrutinized through the lens of matured reason. The shedding of a regressed way of relating for a more mature relationship is actually one of the loftiest goals of counseling. Family therapists call this differentiation: the ability to relate to the beloved without loss of self. This crisis is mirrored in our vocational lives and may be the catalyst for one to seek more meaning in ones life. It should not be surprising, then, that greater numbers of mid-life and mid-career people are entering the ministry. Having established their core competencies in work, they are seeking meaning in ways that people have sought meaning for millenniums: in religious life. Frank Stalfa, professor of pastoral theology at Lancaster Theological Seminary, and pastoral counselor at the Samaritan Counseling Center, has investigated the psychological and faith factors that contribute to ones sense of call. His distinction between two aspects of the call are helpful. First, there is the Imperative Call, which is the sense of being called by God directly as in the case of the Old Testament prophets. The call comes as external to ones will, and often is depicted as initially counter to ones will for oneself. Secondly, there is the Volitional Call, based on ones own desire to enter ministry and ones own sense that one has and desires to use their temperament and skills to be an effective minister. Both aspects of the call are important. If we do not examine the imperative call, we run the risk of leaving God’s will out of our decision entirely. On the other hand, if we do not examine the volitional call, we risk not discerning whether there is an appropriate match between our temperament and skills and the demands of ministry. We need to respect and balance both aspects of the call as we make our decision. The chief constituents of MAP are the governing bodies, or judicatories of various church denominations. They seek our assessments to aid in personnel selection. They need us to be sensitive to the spiritual sense of call, while using our science to help to identify those who are and are not well-suited for ministry. Secondly, for those who are well-suited they need us to identify areas where growth is needed. We also serve the candidates themselves. In most cases the candidates are people well-suited for ministry who benefit from the assessment process by gaining greater self-awareness as it relates to their call. Other times, ministers themselves seek help in deciding whether to stay or leave a call to a particular church, or seek a confidential place to struggle with whether or not to continue in ministry. What starts out as the anxiety of feeling trapped can become the transformation into a renewed albeit, different vocation. Many can look back on such an experience and see grace at work. Maybe all of us can resonate with the question, “What am I called to do?” Life is dynamic, and so the answer is not always the same. It is our belief that it is better to enter into the sometimes murky process of discernment than it is to not ask the question at all.
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