The following segment from Servant Leaders, Servant Structures describes the early process of discerning call in COS:
Movable Theoblogical: SLSS: Chapter 1- The Laying of Foundations

Waiting for Call

To help us through our impasse we formed classes in Christian Vocation. In these classes we were taking a deeper and longer look at the whole matter of call as having to do with the transcendent-the being grasped by that which is greater than we. We began with the basic assumption of the New Testament that there was no way to be the church except by the call of Christ, and that there were a number of dimensions to this call:

First, to a relationship with the Father as intimate as the one which Christ knew.

Second, to be persons in community with others responding to the same call, surrendering something of our authority that we might have a shared life and bring into existence a new community where the nature of the relationships would be such that each person would be called fully into being.

Third, to an inward developments call to change. We were to overcome those obstacles in ourselves which held us back and kept us from growing into the full stature of Christ. The call of Christ was a call to die to the old self in order to become the new creation.

Fourth, and not last, the call was to move out-to discover where we were to lay down our lives-to take up the stance of the suffering servant, and make witness to the power of Jesus Christ’s work in us.

The class dealt primarily with the fourth dimension. If the church is a sent people, where was Christ sending each of us? To what segment of the w

orld’s need were we to make response? We began each session by sitting for an hour in silence, feeling that if any word was being addressed to us we had more opportunity of hearing it in the stillness of our own souls. Part of the work of the hour was to center deeply enough in ourselves to be in touch with our most central wish. Somehow we had then, and have now, the conviction that our wishes lie very close to “who we are” and what we are to be doing, and that to be in communion with them is to have a sense of being dealt with by the One -,who is Other.

We discovered in this class that too many of us had taken up our work without any sense of being called to it. “Vocation,” Gordon said, “has the element of faithfulness to your own inner being. You are enhanced by what you do. Your own awareness converges with some need out yonder and intersects with it in such a way that you have the sense that you were born to this.” Jesus said, “I must be about my Father’s business.”* He knew. His knowing was an inner one.

When the time of silence was over we timidly put forward any intimations of direction that had come to us. We were so uncertain and so consumed by misgiving that the question was inevitable: “Is not one’s call often shot through with self-doubt?”

We decided that doubt is a dimension that oftentimes is there, and that there is a time to move on in spite of it. In fact, we agreed that if anyone were too dogmatic about call, he or she needed to question it because there is always the possibility of acting out of some compulsive need rather than genuine call. Frequently along with the Call comes the feeling that one is not up to it. There is a sense of unworthiness in relationship to what one sees. “Who am I to be called to bring into existence anything so significant? Surely there are other people more qualified to do it.” This is what Moses felt. He was forever protesting that Yahweh could choose someone better equipped for the job, someone who talked more convincingly than he did. Jeremiah said flatly that he was too young, even going to the extreme in that declaration, “‘I am only a child.’ But the Lord said, ‘Do not call yourself a child; for you shall go to whatever people I send you and say whatever I tell you to say.”‘* All of us resist in some way the new thing into which we are drawn that demands a whole new dimension of creativity on our part. We do not want to be responsible in this way. “It may be,” says Gordon, “that if a person responds too eagerly, he is not seeing the whole picture and is not aware of the problems of implementation, so that he goes into it with large areas of unconsciousness.”

Despite our expectancy and all the assurance and encouragement we gave to each other, no one was addressed by a Voice, which is the real meaning of having a vocation. Perhaps it was because we were too disbelieving, or too unpracticed in the process in which we were engaged, or perhaps we were too literal in our understanding of call-expecting somehow that God was going to descend out of heaven and summon us as we sat with heads bowed. Actually call was to come to most of us through the ordinary events of life, which were to be extraordinary events because we brought to them a new quality of asking and listening.