Calling in Context

Social Location and Vocational Formation

Susan L. Maros

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781514001455
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

"I don't care for vocational books written in the United States; they're too American." When Susan Maros heard this comment from a Malaysian colleague, she was initially taken aback. Isn't the concept of calling universal? Why wouldn't resources with a biblical perspective on vocation apply to everyone?The reality is that each of us encounters our questions of calling from within a particular context. In this paradigm-shifting book, Maros explores how various dimensions of social location—including race, ethnicity, culture, socioeconomic status, and gender—shape our assumptions and experiences with vocation. Maros helps Christians in the United States in particular see how ideas about calling that emphasize certainty, career paths, and personal achievement arise from cultural priorities that shouldn't go unexamined, such as individualism, productivity, and meritocracy. She explains how unexamined "mental maps" can distort our perspective and refocuses our attention on biblical insights about calling as a lifelong journey. In the process, she helps us find both clarity and encouragement to explore the paths before us.God calls all people, yes—but calling is not a monolithic concept. Filled with numerous stories from Christians in diverse communities, Calling in Context invites anyone exploring questions of calling to find fresh possibilities in their own identity and engagement with God's mission. Reflection questions and Bible study prompts are included throughout.

PART 1

MAPS, THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS, AND “YOU ARE HERE”

WHEN WE NAVIGATE A CITY using a digital map on our phones or when we use a posted map in a large space such as a shopping mall, we need to have a sense of where we are before we can figure out how to navigate to where we need to go. We know to look for the “you are here” marker on the mall diagram or for that blue dot on our digital maps. This first section of the book seeks to orient us to the “you are here” of our vocational development at this moment in time.

➤Navigation Point

Calling, Vocation, and Vocational Formation

I use the terms calling and vocation somewhat interchangeably in this text. The popular understanding of vocation tends to focus on a career or occupation. However, the word comes from the Latin word vocare, which means “to call.” Theologically, calling and vocation are synonyms. I use the phrase “vocational formation” to reference the process of being equipped and sustained in a lifetime journey of faithful participation in God’s work in the world.

In this section, I lay out foundational concepts, exploring some common elements in how Christians in the United States think about calling and the process of vocational formation. The first chapter introduces a key idea for the text—social location—and a central metaphor: maps. The second chapter investigates elements of biblical content related to calling, considering how our cultural maps affect how we approach the Bible and what we see in the calling stories we most commonly reference. The third chapter explores the nature of vocational formation as a lifelong process by reflecting on useful perspectives from developmental psychology.

All of this work is intended to help us name our current locations, both literally in terms of the communities and social groups where we live and figuratively in terms of where we are in the process of discerning and developing in our callings. God is already present and already at work in our lives. My prayer is that you will reflect on this content in such a way that you are able to perceive with greater clarity the presence of God in your circumstances.

1

MAPS, THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS, AND “YOU ARE HERE”

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

FREDERICK BUECHNER, WISHFUL THINKING

“YES, BUT WHAT IS MY CALLING?”

Dante was a man in his early thirties working as a counselor in a program for at-risk youth. Many nights he could be found out on the streets, engaging the teens he encountered with a winsome evangelistic presence. Dante had a deep love for God and for people, particularly young people on the margins of society. His passion was evident and he clearly demonstrated giftedness and skill in this work. Yet Dante wondered about his calling.

Dante’s question “What is my calling?” came in the context of an intense classroom discussion about the ways God works through life experiences to shape a person’s sense of calling. The discussion followed an assignment—an exercise intended to help a person think through their life experiences and what those experiences suggest about God’s purposes in their lives.1 Dante had a long list of experiences in which he saw God at work in his life. Many of them were part of the series of experiences that led Dante to the ministry he was currently engaged in and to the decision to return to school for further training. Yet somehow this was not enough for Dante to feel he “knew” his calling. “I’m encouraged to see, in writing, all the events and ways in which God has been active,” Dante said. “But I still want to know: What is my calling?”

What was the gap for Dante? Given that he was already engaged in ministry and that he was able to name experiences that demonstrated God’s leading to that place, why did Dante still wonder about his calling? Why were the experiences Dante identified insufficient to create a narrative of calling?

Dante was one of the many emerging and developing Christian leaders I worked with in a quarter-century as a professor in undergraduate and graduate education. My focus has been the formation of individual leaders: helping women and men discern God’s distinctive formation in their lives and the particular place of invitation to participation in God’s work in the world. Some of these emerging leaders were traditional college students in the early stages of figuring out what they wanted to do with their lives. Many were adult learners with significant life experience. For some of these individuals, assignments like the one Dante engaged in helped them identify and articulate their sense of call. For many others, though, the response was like Dante’s: “That was an encouraging exercise. But what is my calling?”

Over the years, I watched people go from book to book, workshop to seminar, counseling session to prayer session, class to class, seeking to know their calling. The search is often full of anxiety. I see many people struggle and question themselves, even when they, like Dante, are already meaningfully engaged in some area of work or ministry. They seek to have some clear method, some strategy for being assured that they know their calling. They fear missing God. They fear choosing wrongly. They fear making decisions that will result in a wasted life. They fear purposelessness.

FRAMING LENSES OF VOCATION

A number of unspoken assumptions undergird the question, “What is my calling?” These assumptions have to do with who God is, who we are as God’s people, and how God relates to us and to the world. They also have to do with what constitutes a Christian sense of calling and whether or not calling and vocation are the same thing or two different but related things.

The challenge with engaging assumptions is that assumptions are largely unconscious. We don’t know what we assume. Until some experience comes along to show otherwise, we usually don’t even know that we have assumptions. Or we may know, in principle, that we have assumptions but we cannot name them. They are like the 90 percent of the iceberg that lies underwater, present but hidden from our sight.

In the early 1990s, I was on the staff of a training program with a mission organization. We hosted groups of participants from multiple countries who were living, working, and studying together for six months at a time. During the first week, while everyone was still excited about meeting new people from all over the world, we divided the participants into small, diverse groups and gave them a task to do together. The assignment was to name whether, in their church context and in their broader social context, each item on a list of activities was considered an acceptable behavior or not. We told the groups that the purpose of the discussion was not to debate the rightness of the activity; it was simply to name how their church or their community viewed that activity.

One activity on our list inevitably generated a lot of conversation: hunting. The US-Americans in the group often seemed puzzled as to why we included hunting on the list. They thought it was a random activity to mention. The Europeans in the group often expressed surprise that their US-American colleagues didn’t immediately see how “wrong” it is to kill animals for sport. It became clear that the US-Americans had one set of assumptions and the Europeans another, and both had cultural and theological values that shaped their assumptions. The goal of the exercise was to bring the assumptions to the surface and make them discussable. From that point we were able to introduce a mantra that became very important in later stages of the development of the group: “different, but not wrong.”

“Different, but not wrong” applies to the discussion of vocation as well. I, as an educator and scholar, hold a set of assumptions about calling. You, as the reader, hold a set of assumptions too. Some of our assumptions are shared and others are different. My purpose in this book is not to attempt to replace your “wrong” assumptions with my “right” assumptions. Instead, my purpose is to offer reflections and a set of skills that foster our capacity to be aware of and examine our assumptions about vocation. The issue is less about what assumptions are “wrong” or “right” and more about considering what assumptions are helpful for pursuing a life of faithful engagement with God’s work in the world and what assumptions hinder that engagement.

We turn now to a central metaphor of this book: maps. Looking at maps can illustrate the power of assumptions as well as help us take a first pass at what “different, but not wrong” and “helpful versus hindering” mean for thinking about calling.

WORLD MAPS: AN ANALOGY

I love maps. On family road trips when I was a child, I would sit in the car with the road atlas, tracing the route of our journey, watching the landmarks go by. As an adult, I became interested in world maps and have collected world maps from different countries during my travels. Let me share several of my favorite maps with you.

The world map in figure 1 utilizes the Mercator projection, a cylindrical projection developed by Flemish cartographer and father of modern mapmaking, Gerardus Mercator (1512–1595), in the mid-sixteenth century.2 Mercator was a maker of scientific instruments and terrestrial and celestial globes who became interested in problems experienced by European marine navigators. Mariners could find themselves hundreds of miles off course because a constant direction at sea did not match a straight line on their charts. Mercator’s solution was to devise a map designed around longitudinal (north-south) lines, increasing the latitude (east-west) lines in such a way that a constant direction at sea could be recorded as a straight line on the map. Together with the development of the magnetic compass and the use of the northern pole star, Polaris, this Mercator’s projection became the standard map used by northern European seafaring navigators. This map was adopted as a standard world map and used commonly in many contexts, including US-American school rooms, through the twentieth century.

Figure 1. Mercator projection world map

Notice that the midpoint—top to bottom—on this map goes straight through northern Europe. The equator—the actual, physical midpoint on the globe—is located almost three-quarters down the image, making the northern hemisphere more than twice as large as the southern hemisphere. One of the ways to see the distortion of land masses caused by this choice is to compare Greenland and Australia. Greenland is the large mass at the top center-left of the map. Australia is the largest landmass on the bottom-right. In this projection, Greenland looks like it is several times the size of Australia, whereas in reality, Greenland is more than three and a half times smaller than Australia.

Also notice the size of Europe on the Mercator projection compared to the size of Africa. Measuring north to south, they appear to be approximately the same length. Now take a look at Europe and Africa on the map in figure 2.

Figure 2 utilizes the Peters projection. Arno Peters (1916–2002) was a German historian who, concerned with what he saw as the Eurocentric bias of common world maps, developed a new equal-area map, likely based on an earlier map by Scottish clergyman, James Gall (1808–1895).3 This equal-area projection depicts the landmasses in their correct relative sizes.

Figure 2. Peters projection world map

One comment I hear about this map is “It’s stretched out.” The Peters projection retains accurate relative area of landmasses, correcting the distortion of the Mercator projection in that regard, but doing so by introducing a distortion in the shape of those masses. For many of us, used to seeing the world from the perspective of a Mercator projection map, this distortion is very noticeable. Meanwhile, we don’t notice the distortion of the Mercator projection because that map has been the familiar and normative projection for much of our lives.

Notice how much larger Africa is on the Peters projection map compared to Europe. One response I’ve often heard when showing this map is the question, “Is Africa really that big?” The unspoken assumption for some US-Americans is that Africa is, perhaps, the size of the United States. In reality, Africa is large enough to fit the United States, China, India, Mexico, and many European countries combined inside it. Notice, too, the location of the equator on this map. Whereas in the Mercator project map, the equator is far down on the image, the Peters projection puts the equator at the vertical center. The “northern hemisphere bias” of the Mercator pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Maps, Theoretical Frameworks, and “You are Here”
• Part 2: Social Locations Considered
• Part 3: Examining Intersections
• Conclusion: Finish Well
• Notes
• General Index
• Scripture Index
• Praise for Calling in Context
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright