Vocation

Not long ago, I heard a philosopher share some interesting thoughts on the subject of vocation. We kill vocation, he said, when we assume that it is something that comes from within us. His point was that vocation is something that comes from outside of us, something that “calls us out”, as the Latin root for the word suggests. This was in my thoughts today as a gentle man told me the story of the Anglican congregation he attends in the neighborhood of Vancouver where I am staying. He showed me a picture of the first church building, which was built over one hundred years ago in a lower income part of the city where many factory and shipyard workers lived. The parishioners had scant resources, so it was hard to pay the bills. That changed, however, when congregational leaders perceived a call from God to jack up the church building, put it on skids, and move it about one half mile away to a neighborhood of growing affluence. Within a short time, people of means started attending worship, including a local tycoon who had a made his fortune in the sugar business. With his generous help, they tore down the old church building and constructed a new one that looked much more like the ones they had left in England. But of course, over time, the neighborhood continued to change. People with serious money moved on to bigger and better things, and the people that replaced them proved to be more diverse that anyone could have imagined. A testimony to this today is the presence of one of the largest GLBT communities in all of Canada. When my host explained that the congregation was now about fifty percent GLBT, he said: “At first, we didn’t go to them. They just came to us.” He said the same thing when he talked about the relationship the congregation now has with a group of people nearby who are “following a simple program aimed at freeing themselves from their addictions to drugs and alcohol.” On my walk back to the hotel, I kept thinking about how these people of faith were being “called out” in this latest stage of their journey, and how different that was from their understanding of vocation in the days when they moved the church to it's present location.