I had started a post (the previous one) on this, and begun by referring to the video I watched last night, and got sidetracked into a technical issue, so here I take up the original subject, Vocation and Gifts. Jim Wallis, in the aforementioned video, said:

Vocation is where you discern your gifts and see where those gifts match and meet the needs of the world.

( I found this on Jordon Cooper’s blog)

This matches up with what The Church of the Saviour has been proclaiming since their beginnings in 1947.

I have taken Elizabeth O’ Connor’s Journey Inward, Journey Outward down from the shelf and was looking at the chapter on “The Calling Forth Of Gifts”, and found myself scanning entire two page spreads because there is this quote or that quote that I simply must blog about, and end up finding one paragraph leading to another on the next page, and ended up scanning the whole chapter.

A sample:

Just as we are committed to being on an inward journey for all of time, so are we committed to being on an outward journey, so that the inner and the outer become related to one mother and one has meaning for the other and helps to make the other possible. If this does not happen, then those who are critical of the contemplative man are rightly so. If engagement with ourselves does not push back horizons so that we see neighbors we did not see before, then we need to examine the appointment kept with self. If prayer does not drive us out into some concrete involvement at a point of the world’s need, then we must question prayer. If the community of our Christian brothers does not deliver us from false securities and safe opinions and known ways, then we must cry out against that community, for it betrays.

Faith results in works. So many in the Christian Right want to scream “works rigtheousness”!, as if this ended the matter (and , conveneiently, keeps the discussion from getting into matters of just what it is that God has for them as a mission; or what it takes to be in a community that truly dedicates itself , life by life, to the priority of finding that call of God for this people at this time in this place.)

All the while I say this, I am frustrated constantly these days by the fact that I am not finding the starting place; the OTHERS with whom I share this, and with whom I am a particpant and a fellow sojourner. There seems to be a total lack of awareness that a Christian community is truly “what it’s all about”. The things called Churches today have none of this sense of importance and urgency, nor does it command the dedication of energies, time, personal involvement, and confrontation with the culture.

At times, which seem to be on the increase these days, I wonder how there may be things about me that drive people away. I considered myself pretty popular in college, and in Seminary, and really felt I was a solid part of a student community. After college and seminary, the relationships outside of the home and marriage have seemed to steadily decline, and I wonder what’s happened to me.

The inner life is not nurtured in order to hug to oneself some secret gain. It is not important in the end that in the quiet of a morning hour we find in ourselves a dwelling place, unless in the midst of the commerce and affairs of men we can get back to it, and what is spoken there and what we become for being there comes to have its influence on the world outside ourselves.

(p.29)

I know that the onus lays with me to keep looking, and to take advantage of what opportunities I do have. But I am finding it increasingly difficult to take Churches seriously when I see such a glaring inattention to the real world, and to real struggles amongs many people of faith to come to terms with that; it’s like the “class warfare” that is talked about in political debate has infected the Church, and the people who can’t separate politics from faith, or have chosen the road unpopular amongst mainstream Christians, are simply “malcontents” or dedicated to “opposition for its own sake” (at least this is the sense one gets from those who keep most of real life out of Church— like the very real issues in politics or the the very real dangers of increasing war brought on by an increasingly shallow and arrogant and militant nationalism).

I want to get beyond that, and into an involved community; a community that is involved on both side of the Journey (The INward and the Outward, and fully appreciate the support that one gives the other; that maintain that balance between nurture and movement.

It is true that the structures of the Church have little to do with the need of the world. That is half the problem. The other half is that they so often have little to do with the need of those within a church. They do not help us to realize our essential selves to follow Christ, who saves us from being other than who we are. The Church has too often told us what to do and failed to help us become who we can be. The new forms of the Church will be shaped by the need of every man to become the person he can become. It is our common humanity that we affirm, our need of one “other, and above all our sonship we are joint heirs with Christ. It is the glorious freedom of the sons of God to which all in= are called that our structures are to proclaim.

The outward journey is determined in part by the gifts discovered in the inward journey. The story of the buried intents is the story of how seriously God considers the matter of unused gifts. This is what psychiatry calls “unlived” life, which takes its terrible toll even that which you have will be taken away.” There are a thousand warnings, however, to the man who walks away from himself and his own destiny. Restlessness, sleepless nights, discontent, anger, meaninglessness, boredom these are the cries of the violated self. Through our suffering we are called back to our own truth: to turn and be healed. We can walk, however, beyond the hearing of the voice that calls, into a land of apathy, complacency, not cuing there is a place beyond the point of safe return. “You will hear and hear, but never understand; you will look and look, but never see” (Matt. 13:14, NEB).

(note: the above was written in 1968, and I would bet that now people in the COS community point to how Elizabeth O’Connor herself was still using the terms “sons of God” and “every man” at that point, and that you don’t hear that much in that community anymore (since we have become more sensitive to inclusive language); on the other hand, when you get caught up in what is being said here, and realize the almost 40 year time lapse, and timelessness of the concept, you can easily forgive and overlook that. I thin k that Elizabeth herself probably noticed that herself not too long after she wrote it, and probably before many of us woudl have.)

In a class in our School of Christian Living, Gordon Cosby was speaking on the subject of Christian vocation. He said in summarizing that the primary task and primary mission of the Church is to call forth the gifts of others. “We are not sent into the world in order to make people good. We are not sent to encourage them to do their duty. The reason people have resisted the Gospel is that we have gone out to make people good, to help them do their duty, to impose new burdens on them, rather than calling forth the gift which is the essence of the person himself.” He then said that we are to let others know that God is for them and that they can “be.” “They can be what in their deepest hearts they know that they were intended to be, they can do what they were meant to do. As Christians, we are heralds of these good tidings.”

How do we do this? “We begin,” Gordon said, “by exercising our own gifts. The person who is having the time of his life doing what he is doing has a way of calling forth the deeps of another. Such a person is Good News. He is not saying the good news. He is the good news. He is the embodiment of the freedom of the new humanity. The person who exercises his own gift in freedom can allow the Holy Spirit to do in others what He wants to do.”

There is practically no indication that Churches are focused on developing the gifts of its members so that some ministries can be born for each and every member. One never hears talk of “sounding a call” like they do in the Church of the Saviour. They don’t have to call it “sounding a call”, but to bear witness to a sense of call to do a particular thing, and bring it before the community so that the community can reflect upon it, those who may feel a companion call to be involved and thus form a new mission, and give the community the privilege of having a hand in enabling and encouraging and confirming that this truly sounds like good news, and must be done. There seems to be too much dependence on prior existing structures. The Church of the Saviour is quick to affirm that there is a time and a life for any and all structures; indeed, they radically altered the very structure of their life as a Church by dividing into separately functioning (but deeply related) communities. Their “ecumenical” service that is held at the “Headquarters” is a linguistic expression of this relational/structural reality.