Calling

Jim Goodmann

Regional Director, Calling Congregations

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August 01, 2009

Transitions into Ministry, Into Life

Our last issue celebrated first engagements by young people of high school age with the language of theology and vocation. These newly conscious selves receive from their mother the food that feeds the heart and stirs faith; they begin to see their own story aligned with Jesus' story.

This issue is about those in transition from a long engagement with that language and with God's people as apprentices and sojourners toward the formal practice of ministry. Yet, in either case—as teenagers or transitioning seminarians—no one makes these transitions through solitary movement. The companionship of others is essential. Our transitions mark our movements into deeper life—in this case a transition into becoming those who, on behalf of the Church, welcome others into the mystery of their lives in Christ. In her little book, To Pause at the Threshold, Esther de Waal talks about a Christ who “dismissing certainties shows us what freedom might mean.” Some of those certainties surround who we may think God to be as well as what the church is and—not least—who we are. This path of vocation encourages us to part with certain prized beliefs that veil our recognition of the Living God and where or how God may be present. Our contributors to this issue show how that works in the practice of ministry.

The features of this issue are testimonies to that transition experience—for those new to the practice of ministry and their companion elders. One senior pastor offers a perspective on how her particular work with pastors in transition has affected her work with young people of high school age and an entire parish's orientation toward the question of vocation. A newer pastor acknowledges the choices in ministry that a residency has afforded her. Still another young pastor sees the effect of his transition experience on his current mentoring of those in discernment of this calling.

All of these perspectives are to be honored, with a particular hospitable lookout for the giftedness of those younger. Samuel sought for the next leader of Israel and found him in a place somewhere beyond the obvious. Our notice of the next generation of leaders leads us down a similar path—often with similar surprises. Even in the case of those most obviously gifted, there is the story that is presented as the call and there is the story beneath that story, the mixed landscape of qualities and personal history that holds even deeper gifts beyond those originally suspected. Our intersection with both of these layers is crucial to the support of young leaders in pastoral ministry—as these features will show. The emerging theme is a reverberation of what most of us know from an engaged spiritual journey: we find not necessarily what we were looking for but that which—of God's goodness and pleasure—was waiting to be found.