Kingdom Calling

The vocation, ministry and discipleship of the whole people of God

The Faith and Order Commission

• Publisher: Church House Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780715111765
• eBook ISBN: 9780715111772
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Ministerio cristiano

Kingdom Calling offers a compelling theological grounding for the vocation, ministry and discipleship of the whole people of God. Building creatively on previous studies, it challenges all of us to change so that the whole church can serve the whole mission of God in the whole of life.Kingdom Calling provides a thorough diagnosis of the theological factors that have prevented such a vision being realised over previous decades. These factors are embedded in the social realities of our everyday life and in the sometimes hidden assumptions that shape our thinking in the church. By setting out a sustained proposal for the renewal of our theological imagination, the report points the way to address some deep running fault lines in our common life.Written in an accessible style, Kingdom Calling looks in turn at the vocation, ministry and discipleship of all God's people, asking what kind of theological thinking and imagining might most help us to flourish together. It affirms and celebrates the vital lay and ordained ministry roles that support the church in God's mission, and it identifies changes in practice that can better foster the vocation, ministry and discipleship of the whole people of God.

Chapter 1 Vocation: Being social creatures

Creation, culture and calling

In the beginning: humanity in creation

God’s call to humanity begins with creation. To be made in the divine image and likeness is to be called for a purpose, to respond to God’s speech to us, by the way we hold responsibilities to God, to one another and to the rest of creation (Gen. 1.26–28; cf. Gen. 2.15–16 & 9.6). All creation begins with God’s speaking in Genesis 1, but it is human beings who continue to be called by God in the chapters and books that follow after it in the canon of Scripture and are invited to respond in faith, hope and love. We live in God’s world, and wherever we go, God is present, and God is at work, calling us to fulfilment by sharing in that work through our own work in the world. Work in this sense is not limited to what helps secure our livelihood or fulfils a publicly acknowledged role but includes all kinds of purposeful activity. Such work is intrinsic to our creation in the image of God and is inseparable from the making of human societies.28

From the beginning, however, the human race has listened to other voices and turned away from God. It belongs to our creation in the divine image that human beings have the capacity to respond to God’s address with love and obedience, or with suspicion and disobedience. We have not held fast to the first of these paths and yet our original calling as human creatures remains: to live before God in the time of God’s earth, with its days and seasons; to be persons in relation who form families, communities, societies, nations, and networks of international cooperation; and to reflect the divine image in our work, caring for the earth, labouring for life in partnership with other living creatures, and bringing renewal to societies through participation in human cultures that interact with one another in their complex diversity. In the manifold activity that belongs to human beings as creatures made in the divine image, we are to witness to the one God who brought all things into existence and offer our worship, drawing all creation with us into the chorus of God’s praise.29

In Christ, the original calling of humanity in creation is restored, not taken away in order to be replaced with something superior or less material: to bear the image of God in the world, living under God’s reign, and serving as a royal priesthood for creation. For Christ is the one who brings in the reign of God, and in whom all things now hold together. He is the one who has become our great high priest, the saviour of the world. It is in union with him that we can begin to recover our calling to let the image of God shine though the whole of our lives in this world, illuminating the political, social, economic, domestic and cultural environments in which the body of Christ lives and is daily transformed into his likeness by the Holy Spirit’s work of sanctification. As one contemporary writer has expressed it, we are called to be

God’s image bearers for the world, and fulfil the mission of being God’s image bearers by undertaking the work of culture making…. We are called to an encounter with the life giving God, who imparts transformative grace through the Spirit’s empowerment, making it possible to for us to entertain the vocation given to humanity.30

Challenges to theological understanding:
secularization and individualism

In the outline diagnosis offered in the Introduction for why the Church of England has struggled to uphold the participation of all God’s people in all of God’s work, a weakness of theological imagination in envisioning the significance of our day-to-day lives within the purposes of God in creation and redemption was identified as the first of three critical factors. Why might it be difficult to sustain the vision of humanity’s calling that has just been sketched out, given its deep and strong roots in Scripture and in Scripture’s interpretation in Christian tradition? In the Introduction, the effects of secularization in English society over the past century were identified as a crucial part of the context for understanding what is happening here. In order to deepen the diagnosis and begin to outline pathways to healing for our theological imagination, some further exploration of those dynamics is needed.

As was touched on in the Introduction, it has become a commonplace to accept that the origin of the ‘modern’ world is bound up with secularization, understood as the differentiation of distinct spheres of social existence, with their characteristic institutions. The independence of other spheres from the church and from Christian faith has sometimes been coloured by a stance of bewilderment and scepticism – even hostility – towards traditional sources of self-understanding and authority. Even without that, however, resistance to Christian faith as the guiding lens through which all forms of human endeavour were viewed meant that people learnt to live substantial parts of their lives without any reference to Christ, thereby preparing them over time to live the whole of their lives without any reference to him.31 That same process of differentiation also undermined both the plausibility and the attractiveness of a thoroughgoing coherence to the whole of life, such as is offered by Christian faith. Although the appeal of such coherence continues to linger, abstract values are more likely to be upheld as underpinning consistency across the various spheres. For example, a just culture – instead of being conceived in terms of what God has revealed – has become closely associated with the terms ‘equality and diversity’. Instead of coherence being provided for human equality by God’s creative act and the different ways of living a human life as responses to God’s redemptive call, political values abstracted from this narrative offer a new vision to the imagination. These values do not remain abstract, however, but populate institutional life, making themselves visible but occluding the Christian story. To respond to that by offering instead a vision of life’s coherence based on doctrinal truths might seem at best superfluous, at worst distorting or antisocial.

Alongside this dynamic of differentiation, the pervasive influence of a multi-stranded individualism is also relevant here: the idea that we exist fundamentally as separate individuals from one another, whose nature is to seek our own pleasure, exercise our own free will and express our own unique selfhood.32 While some elements of this picture may have points of contact with a Christian perspective, it stands in evident contrast with the theological approach sketched out earlier in this chapter that sees human beings as persons in relation, constituted in and by their relations rather than finally independent from them:

We are made in the image of the God of love, whose very being is a communion of love, and who we are is found in our own belonging in that communion of love. Our identity as human beings is never as atomized, isolated individuals. We are who we are because we are forged and framed out of relationship, from our very first coming into being through the mutual self-giving of our mothers and fathers.33

That is not to say that the individualism that pervades much of our culture accords no value to relationships, but it will always be liable to see them as secondary to the autonomous individual, to be valued for the extent to which they enable the individual to pursue their own pleasure, achieve their own freedom or express their own uniqueness. That tends to place the weight on relationships that individuals are perceived as able to shape for themselves: family, friendship, romantic love. It is here that freedom and the meaning it enables are to be found, by contrast with the ‘given’ texture of social relations encountered in institutions and associated forms of authority, which appear as external constraints. Much has been written over the past hundred years in philosophy and social science as well as theology that brings this to the fore, yet the picture of the self-sufficient individual existing outside of and prior to society and culture has proved remarkably tenacious.34

As will be considered further in the next section, Christians today are likely to feel far less confident than their predecessors from even a hundred years ago about seeing human society and culture as part of God’s creation. Moreover, widely-shared assumptions about these may mean they do not readily regard social and cultural life as integral to humanity’s fulfilment of God’s first commandment in Genesis to fill the earth and to how human beings respond to God’s calling in creation. The differentiation of social space and privatization of religion associated with secularization contribute to such difficulties, as already discussed. Beyond those factors, the individualism that marks our culture encourages us to shrink the zone of theological significance to the drama of the individual soul before God, to individual acts of moral goodness or evil and to the fellowship of the church as a community of those who choose one another to be companions and supporters. Once we fall into assuming that while ‘individual’ human beings are valued elements of God’s creation, our social and cultural life is no more than a contingent product of human history, then we start to give up on the relevance of theology to understanding what is actually constitutive for us as beings created by God to live on God’s earth. We circumscribe the spiritual within the privatized zones of individual religious practice and discrete religious institutions, both of which are kept carefully fenced off from the common spaces of public life.

Creation and kingdom

By way of a pathway towards healing, we need to sustain a theological imagination that embraces the whole of our lives within the sweep of God’s creation: yes, marred by sin to an extent we can only barely comprehend, yet insofar as institutions, cultural artefacts, economic life etc. remain forms of persons in relation, also encompassed by the redeeming work of Christ, to be transformed by the reign of God on earth. Our doctrine of creation needs to underpin our resistance to the message that Christian doctrine is essentially irrelevant to ordinary participation in society and culture. In this way, a vision can be renewed of a coherent human life, made so by Christ in whom all things hold together.

As it came to be expressed by Christian writers of the early centuries, the church is no more and no less than ‘the world, reconciled’: of course it can also be described sociologically as one specialized set of institutions alongside others, but theologically the church is humanity set free by faith in Christ to live in anticipation of the fulfilment of God’s purposes for all creation.35 As such, the church is the foretaste of the whole of human life united in the reign of God, and as human life is intrinsically social life, life in society, the drawing near of the kingdom that Jesus announced from the outset of his ministry must mean restoration of the people of God under the rule of God. Christ’s proclamation of the good news of the kingdom of the one who is creator of all is inseparable from the transforming unity in his body of all peoples, every society and every culture. Anglican tradition has stressed the character of the church as itself ‘an outward, visible, and united society’ expressing the communion of all humanity in God through the saving work of Christ.36

God’s calling of the church, therefore, is inseparable from God’s calling of humanity in creation. God set human beings, as social and cultural creatures, at the heart of creation with a purpose in and for that creation, and God has not abandoned humanity or the purpose that is bound up with it. To sustain that purpose and maintain a witness to what the whole of humanity is called to become, ‘The Church is in Christ like a sacrament or as a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race.’37 The unity of the church should therefore encompass the fullness of humanity in its creaturely diversity, called in the beginning to be fruitful and to fill the earth, generating the rich and continually growing tapestry of cultures that meet together before God in the church’s witness and worship. A need to overcome impoverishment in our understanding of the church was the second factor identified in the diagnosis offered in the Introduction, and the next chapter will focus on this at greater length.

Distinguishing different vocations

Clarifying terms: calling and vocation

God calls humanity, God calls a people for the sake of all people, and God calls each one of us. Indeed, at critical points in the scriptural story, the faithfulness of the community to its calling hinges upon an individual being faithful to his or her calling, as we see in different ways with Abraham, Moses and Elijah, with Mary, the Twelve and Paul, and supremely in Jesus himself. That is not to minimize the extent to which a call may lead to isolation and rejection for the individual who responds faithfully from the community that is failing in faithfulness, such as Jesus experienced, following Israel’s prophets before him, not least Jeremiah.

In the Gospels, we see people responding to God’s call in Christ in different ways, as Jesus asks different things of them. Within the Gospels, some are called to leave behind homes, families and livelihoods in order to accompany him in his ministry. Some remain where they are and provide places to stay for him and those accompanying him, welcoming his transforming presence into the midst of their continuing routines. Others are explicitly told not to travel with him but to go back to their homes and share the good news there, such as the man healed of demon possession in the country of the Gerasenes (Mark 5.1–20). Paul stresses in his description of the church as Christ’s body that each of us receives gifts from God, and none should be singled out as intrinsically superior to others (Rom. 12.3–8; 1 Cor. 12.4–31). Similarly, the varied range of callings for those who follow Christ today should not be turned into a hierarchy but rather affirmed and celebrated.

In responding to God’s call and finding our place among God’s people, we accept commitments that mark us in deep and lasting ways. We can refer to acceptance of such life-shaping commitment as a vocation that we receive from God that enables us to serve others and contribute with them to the common good. Thus understood, a vocation is one way in which we may live out our calling as human persons and members of Christ’s body.

Thus vocation finds its bearings in the dialogue between God and humanity that flows from the saving work of Christ; this is how the word is used in this report. Inevitably, that brings some tension with the influence of individualism as noted in the previous section, which encourages us to think of life-shaping commitments as matters for individuals to choose for themselves based on what will be most conducive to their self-fulfilment. The doctrine of creation, in profound contrast, teaches us that we are God’s handiwork, redeemed through Christ to fulfil the purposes for which we were made: ‘For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life’ (Eph. 2.10). Vocation is then always response to another, and it concerns both the discovery of what has been given to us as well as the exploration of what may unfold before us. It is inseparable from recognizing and embracing the truth of our being as creatures called to glorify the divine creator in the specific circumstances of our lives, which include the relations with which our reality as persons is interwoven – intimate, social and ecclesial relations.

Vocation as it is being presented here forms a crucial part of how we respond to God’s call, for all who are able to consider commitments of this kind. Characterized in this way, vocation is a theological and spiritual category that is relevant across many different situations and circumstances. There is a challenge here for people within those groups that have tended to regard vocation as their special territory, including clergy, but also to those outsid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Vocation: Being Social Creatures
• 2. Ministry: Understanding the Church
• 3. Discipleship: Looking to Jesus
• Conclusion: Kingdom Calling
• Afterword
• Notes
• Copyright