The Great Evasion: The Calling of the Laity
by Robert Benne
from Spring 2020
It is a great blessing to have a firm sense of purpose in life. The Lutheran teaching on vocation gives such purpose to life, not only to one’s work but also to one’s life in marriage and family, in citizenship, and in church. One’s purpose is to respond to God’s gracious call to employ one’s deepest interests and gifts in loving service to the neighbor in those “places of responsibility” [1] (Bonhoeffer’s phrase).
Calling to Church Vocations
I was particularly blessed as a youngster when I was powerfully and clearly called to the ordained ministry of the church. I knew it was the Spirit calling me—through the voice of a prominent woman in our town who thought I would be a good minister—because that was the last thing I wanted to be. It really didn’t turn out that the ordained ministry was to be my calling; rather I was to become a Christian teacher and writer. But nevertheless, the call sent me on a journey of “long obedience in the same direction” in service to the church.
It was not difficult to talk about the reality of such a call when I got to Midland College in the mid-1950s and was surrounded by many students like me. It was during the surge in post-World War s church life when many of the best and brightest were called to the ordained ministry. Some of the most impressive students at Midland were headed to seminary, for service in the local church, or for missionary activity. Several were sons and daughters of missionaries themselves. We even had students from overseas missions who had been called to the ordained ministry and were at Midland to prepare for seminary.
My own sense of call, as well as those of my colleagues, was tested and corroborated by the call committee of the Nebraska Synod of the United Lutheran Church in America. Having just an internal sense of call was not enough; representatives of the church had to monitor and finally say “yes” or “no” to that sense. That testing process has been present in the church since biblical times.
Indeed, when we look at the Bible and most of the Christian tradition, it is pretty clear that a call meant the call to ordained ministry or some other essential work in the church. In Ephesians 4:11, Paul writes about Christ choosing some to be apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. All these offices are focused on sustaining the life of the church, an understandable and necessary concentrating of the notion of the calling to roles within the institutional church.
Divine callings became so closely tied to church work that the Catholic tradition named them vocations. So when Catholics speak of vocations, they mean those called to take lifelong vows for work in the church. The large Catholic families of my growing-up years all wanted to produce at least one young man or woman for a vocation to the priesthood or a religious order.
Throughout Christian history to the present day, the call by God to ordained ministry has not lost its meaning or application. I’ve taught seminarians for many years, and almost all can speak of their call to the ministry. Without it, they seem less than ready to take on seminary study. So the word call is intelligible and usable to the present day. God calls people to work in the church.
Callings to Lay Ministries
The same cannot be said with regard to lay persons feeling called to their occupation, marriage and family life, citizenship, and life in the church. The church has failed to teach that crucial Lutheran teaching of the vocation of the laity—and the purpose it bestows—to its own laypeople. We have spurned a great treasure.
There is little doubt that Luther’s teaching on vocation—not only for clergy but for the laity—was a great treasure, a momentous contribution to Western history. It was his teaching that first gave ordinary people a sense of divinely ordained purpose in the ordinary activities of their lives. Max Weber described Luther’s innovation well:
But at least one thing was unquestionably new: the valuation of fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs as the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume. This it was which inevitably gave every-day worldly activity a religious significance, and which first created the conception of a calling in this sense…Every legitimate calling has exactly the same worth in the sight of God. That this moral justification of worldly activity was one of the most important results of the Reformation, especially Luther’s part in it, is beyond doubt. [2]
Sadly, however, when Weber was writing in the early twentieth century, he thought the religious meaning of lay vocation had already been leached out of Western society, replaced by a desire for success for its own sake. “In the field of its (the idea of the calling) highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions.”[3]
What was left was that religious meaning was attached solely to church vocations. That was corroborated in the early 1950s by a young American Lutheran by the name of William Diehl. Diehl, who as a youngster felt called to be an engineer and who later became a vice president of Bethlehem Steel, told a story that illustrates the failure of the church to communicate Luther’s revolutionary teaching. As a young man, Diehl attended a church camp in which the closing service was led by a pastor who wanted to raise up candidates for the ordained ministry. Diehl had a sense of call but it was to be an engineer. When the pastor asked those who had an urgent sense of call to come up and whisper that intent in his ear, Diehl thought the pastor’s summons was meant for him too. So he whispered in the pastor’s ear: “I have been called to be an engineer.” To which the pastor loudly remarked: “That’s not good enough.”
More than a little resentful, Diehl went on to write a number of fine books on the ministry of the laity. One was cleverly titled Thank God It’s Monday![4] He organized workshops in the former Lutheran Church in America to recapture Luther’s teaching, but his efforts were pretty short-lived. There seems to be little effort to teach the Lutheran doctrine of vocation in the LCA’s successor church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America—or for that matter, any other major Lutheran body.
My own experience with college students over many years indicates a continuing failure for the churches to teach the meaning of vocation to young laypeople. A very small number do indeed feel called to so-called secular vocations, but they are rare, and their sense of calling is even more rarely honored by the church. Most do not have a clue about such an important way to find meaning and purpose in life. Our failure is perhaps one reason why the present generation feels that life is meaningless and purposeless, thus exposing it to despair as well as to the pathologies that accompany despair.
When I came to Roanoke College in 1982, I sensed that few students had been taught about vocation, so I set about writing a text that would present the Lutheran teaching on vocation in a contemporary mode. I had already worked out the bare bones of that project at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago because I thought the clergy-to-be needed to teach that doctrine when they became pastors. When my first sabbatical at the college came about in 1985, I wrote Ordinary Saints—An Introduction to the Christian Life. [5] It was published in 1988, and I wrote a revised version of it in 2003. I have taught the material in college, seminary, and adult church classes. But who knows how much is appropriated in a meaningful way? And where else is it being taught in the church?
Even when entire colleges focus on teaching vocation, it seems to be a difficult task. One of the Midwestern colleges I worked with in the early 2000s won a Lilly grant to teach and strengthen the doctrine of vocation. The college, supported by its president, used that grant valiantly. It was taught in a number of required courses and was enriched by a center for vocation. After some years of strenuous effort, a major survey was taken. Disappointingly, only about twenty percent of the respondents came even close to the Lutheran teaching. Most emphasized that vocation meant “following your bliss” or “shaping a successful life.” They had a self-centered calling without a caller.
One might think the classic notion of vocation has been resuscitated by the strong emphasis on discipleship by the North American Lutheran Church and its former bishop, John Bradosky. But their laudable efforts identify discipleship with evangelism—spreading the Gospel by both clergy and laity—to those nearby. Heaven knows we need such efforts, but such a notion of discipleship narrows the grand teaching on vocation (the Lutheran version of discipleship) to the worthy activity of evangelism.
So why have we evaded a disciplined and widespread teaching of this Lutheran treasure? One reason is that the institutional church itself is in decline, and it is understandable that we emphasize the calling of the clergy, not the laity. The Lord knows that He needs to raise up strong, talented, and orthodox pastors for our churches. The Lord also knows that He needs both clergy and laity to spread the Gospel among the increasing number of the unchurched in our society. It is therefore understandable that even when we do teach discipleship, we narrow it to evangelism. It is also true that pastors in our churches are necessarily focused on the central religious practices that allow a congregation to flourish—preaching, pastoral care, administration, teaching, conducting worship, and the like. Teaching the meaning of vocation is often only an afterthought. Finally, there is a tendency of theologians in the Lutheran tradition to relegate ethics—discipleship—to a minor role in their teaching; there is a long-standing tendency to focus on justification and reduce sanctification to a secondary concern.
There are also more profound reasons why the teaching on the vocation of the laity has languished in both church and society. Weber observed what he called the “disenchantment” of the world already infiltrating Europe and North America in the early part of the twentieth century. The God-hypothesis was gradually disappearing from advanced Western societies, particularly among the well-educated. Scientific rationalism didn’t allow for a calling from a transcendent source, especially a divine one. So the caller disappeared and the calling became a purely mundane perception.
But if a sense of divine calling still persists among the clergy-to-be, why can’t it be expanded to include devout lay people? I think it can, partly because the division of the churches between the progressives and the orthodox has gathered a group of increasingly high-commitment laity among the orthodox. They have as lively a sense of God’s presence in their lives as the clergy. They are open to the teaching that God calls them to service in their various places of responsibility. So I continue to teach Ordinary Saints to lay people in church and seminary, and I encourage the seminarians to teach vocation in the churches they will serve in the future.
Practical Suggestions
Though I cannot know how much of my writing and teaching on vocation really reaches the hearts and minds of my readers and hearers, I continue to hope that some is received. Further, I hope that the classic Lutheran writings on vocation become newly relevant. George Forell’s Faith Active in Love,[6] Gustav Wingren’s Luther on Vocation,[7] Einar Billing’s Our Calling,[8] and William Lazareth’s Luther on the Christian Home[9] are worth reintroducing to seminarians, pastors, and lay readers. Recent work is also commendable: Mark Tranvik’s Martin Luther and the Called Life [10] and Joel Biermann’s A Case for Character: Towards a Lutheran Virtue Ethics.[11]
One of the most valuable and workable adult education programs I have ever done in local churches involves panels on lay vocation. I organize panels of members of the same profession or occupation to ponder these questions: How do your Christian convictions affect the work you do in the world? Have you felt that God has called you to that work? Do those Christian convictions sometimes find you in tension with what the world demands in your work? Panels of doctors, lawyers, teachers, farmers, blue-collar workers, homemakers, and office workers provide the participants for an extensive series on lay vocations.[12]
I have found wonderful surprises in conducting such educational ventures. Some lay persons can be remarkably articulate in connecting their faith with their work, which also generally means that they have a sense of calling from God. When those persons perform well, they challenge other laity to do the same sort of reflection. They teach vocation better than the professor possibly can. In one such case, an oncologist did such a wonderful job that one of my colleagues who heard him wrote a book with him on medical and religious perspectives on cancer. When I asked the physician whether it got depressing to treat so many people he knew would die, he answered: “Not at all; the gift to minister to those folks came with my calling.”
Twenty years ago, I organized a version of that approach for academics, the faculty at Roanoke College. The series is called “Faith and Reason Lecture/Dinner.” A member of the faculty is asked to carry out the same task I ask of laity in the church. They are to connect their core religious convictions with their academic work—teaching, research, and their treatment of students. Sadly, few are able to make the connections effectively, partly because their graduate training has encouraged them to do the very opposite—separate their personal religious convictions from their academic work.[13]
Just recently, however, a young Orthodox professor pulled off a real coup. He not only spelled out which Orthodox Christian teachings are relevant to his work in political science, he then elaborated on how they do in fact have profound effects on his teaching and research. His presentation was magnificent, just the kind of performance that linked Christian belief with real life, and placed it all in the context of vocation.
I’m sure readers can supply further suggestions for teaching our Lutheran treasure to coming generations. Not only is it a crucial part of our heritage, it is a healing balm for a culture that increasingly produces young people thrust into adult life without a sense of meaning and purpose.
Robert Benne is the Jordan-Trexler Professor of Religion Emeritus and Research Associate at Roanoke College, Salem, Virginia; and professor of Christian Ethics, Institute of Lutheran Theology.
Notes
[1] See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 222ff.
[2] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 80–81.
[3] Ibid., 182.
[4] William Diehl, Thank God It’s Monday! (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982).
[5] Robert Benne, Ordinary Saints: An Introduction to the Christian Life, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2003).
[6] George Wolfgang Forell, Faith Active in Love: An Investigation of the Principles Underlying Luther’s Social Ethics (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1999).
[7] Gustav Wingren, Luther on Vocation, trans. Carl C. Rasmussen (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004).
[8] Einar Billing, Our Calling, trans. Conrad Bergendoff (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1964).
[9] William Lazareth, Luther on the Christian Home: An Application of the Social Ethics of the Reformation (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1960).
[10] Mark D. Tranvik, Martin Luther and the Called Life (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016).
[11] Joel D. Biermann, A Case for Character: Towards a Lutheran Virtue Ethics (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014).
[12] It is important to have each panel consist of members of the same profession or occupation, with roughly the same level of education. It is also important to invite high school students to the discussions.
[13] It is perfectly permissible, however, for faculty members to connect their political convictions with their work! Indeed, in many cases it is required, provided the political convictions are correct.
