Just over sixty years ago, my spouse Ann’s parents, Esther Rose Buckwalter and Ronald Graber, graduated from Goshen College—a Mennonite liberal arts college in northern Indiana—with high ideals inspired by their faculty and by their families. Among their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were many missionaries, pastors, and church leaders as well as others who had asked thoughtfully throughout their lives, “What sort of life’s work is God preparing us for?”

During summer 1952, just after their college graduation as they were planning for their August wedding, Ann’s future dad wrote to her future mother, “We are going to walk down the aisle together and go out to try to make a difference!”1 They were seeing their lives in God’s context, understanding their lives to be directed toward making a difference in the world.

In addition to his family and college mentors, Ron had been among those who had been forever changed by his experiences just after World War II, when as a teenager he had encountered broken people and destroyed homes, schools, and public buildings. While still in high school, he had gone with Brethren Service Committee to Europe in August 1946, taking a three-week passage across the Atlantic on a boat filled with horses destined for those in Poland who had lost everything. It seemed a simple task, but it opened a window onto the world for Ron.

Ron returned from Poland, headed off to college and then medical school, and spent his professional life serving as a surgeon at a small Mennonite hospital in Aibonito, Puerto Rico. He had been influenced by faithful role models, had listened to those he had encountered in his life experiences, and had prepared himself for a life of service.

Experiencing God’s Grace

In my own life situation, two rather traumatic incidents shaped my early years and helped define my sense of self, my perception of God’ grace, and my particular vocational and religious passions.

The first incident occurred when I was in an accident with my grandparents and other relatives. My great-grandmother was killed in the crash, and my grandfather and teen-aged uncle and his two cousins all were ejected from the car, with exotic combinations of broken legs and arms and ribs. Somewhere in the car’s spinning I was catapulted through an open window and then over a fence and thirty feet farther out into a beanfield. Those on the scene first couldn’t locate me until they heard me crying, and when they found me I had only three tiny scratches on my forehead.

Two years later I nearly drowned in a well on my aunt and uncle’s back porch. As a three-year-old, I was curious about the round wooden cover on the porch floor, so I pushed it back and peered into the darkness it concealed . . . and then tumbled into six feet of water. I was drowning. Fortunately, lying on her belly, my aunt could just reach the tip of my middle finger as I stretched it out of the water.
In rural Kokomo, Indiana, it seemed everyone in my community knew about these incidents, so I grew up hearing the dramatic tellings and retellings of these narratives of my early life. I felt a little like the forehead-scarred Harry Potter, who knew from early on his destiny. I know that hearing these stories repeatedly during my childhood and adolescence gave me a strong and passionate sense of purpose and a deep appreciation for God’s goodness.

I now struggle with some of the theological assumptions (the God-assumptions) of that narrative, given the reality that not all children who fall in wells or who fly out of car windows live. But I know that those events gave me an early, embodied sense of a gracious, protecting God—I knew God’s grace in my unbroken bones and air-filled lungs. Hearing about those brushes with death also gave me a commitment to serve that God who, I was certain, had saved me. By my early teen years my passion was clearly for some sort of ministry, broadly defined: I wanted to do something with my life that mattered, something that made a difference in extending God’s reign.

Sensing Our Callings

I begin this book with these personal narratives because I’m aware that many young adults, or those of us who are middle-aged or older, could tell similar tales of the birth of our passions—a developing though perhaps less traumatically prompted inner sense of commitment to a people or a cause or to God, an unfolding sense of our gifts and skills (experienced both within and then also confirmed by others), and a gradual recognition of what we perceive as particular callings or passions.

I also suspect that some reading this book—perhaps many of us who are older—could tell considerably more painful stories of lives unfulfilled, aspirations unpursued, gifts unrecognized, callings unaffirmed, or vocations squelched.
For some of us the demands of life—of making a living, caring for aging parents or children, of tending to our or our companion’s physical or mental health needs, of essential tasks that are part of running a household or living responsibly—squeeze out every ounce of energy we have. Sometimes the press of life reflects choices that are actual expressions of our callings, and sometimes those obligations distract us from our yearnings.

For younger readers, many of you haven’t ventured far into any sort of life calling just yet. Nonetheless, you likely have wondered what you will do with your life, to what and whom you will be committed, where you will expend your primary life energies, what relationships you will form and lives you will touch, and perhaps what sort of volunteer or paid work you will do.

This book hopes to speak to those who already have experienced much of their lives as well as those who are younger, with most of life ahead. Ideally, this book could be used in intergenerational settings in congregations or small groups, with younger people asking questions and older mentors sharing stories and counsel. Or the book might be used by a youth group or young adult small group at a point of vocational discernment, trying to determine what next life steps may be, or how to deal with ethical tensions in the workplace. Older Christians may use the text to prompt their own reflection about life’s meaning for them: how they made the decisions and commitments they did, what paths those choices took them down, and how they sense God’s spirit in those movements of life.

Discipleship and Calling

This is a book about vocation and calling, and it is written from an Anabaptist perspective, or in an Anabaptist key, drawing on the rich resources of the forebears of today’s Anabaptists: Mennonites, Amish, and Hutterites, as well as those in many emerging churches. Anabaptists were among the Reformers of the sixteenth century, occupying what some have called the “radical wing” of the European Reformation.

While Anabaptists drew from the rich history of their Catholic ancestors, they also agreed with many of the church reforms theologian Martin Luther and his companions were seeking to implement. In addition, they pushed for the clear separation of church and state, giving freedom to the church to determine its own policies and practices; argued for adult baptism, so that people could make a conscious, mature choice to be Christian; sought to practice peacemaking; and called believers to an active, lived discipleship.

In the train of those spiritual ancestors, I will be suggesting that the primary calling of all Christians is simply to be followers of Jesus Christ. To be “called” and to be “Christian” are essentially the same thing. To be called is to see all of the world, and to see our lives, through God’s eyes, and to live faithfully as disciples of Jesus. That, to me, is what is most important about the notion of calling. In trying to discern our callings, we need to be able to say, in a way that matters, in a way that changes us and our perspective on the world, “I am a disciple of Jesus Christ.”

To be motivated disciples, we need to discern our passions and link those up with the world’s needs.

When we speak of passions, we think of deep, stirring emotions; intense, driving forces; heartfelt yearnings. We think about being slaves to passion, about passionate pleas, or about sexual passions. We have passion fruit—the name comes from the cross-like seed pattern rather than the aphrodisiac nature of the fruit—and Passion Plays and Passion Week.

Passion has its Latin roots in a term that means suffering, hence the links to Jesus’ final days of life. In its original form, passion also can mean being acted upon, having some genetic or nurtured-in drives or longings that compel us toward something.

I’ve always loved the concept of passion in its many forms. One of the great pleasures of teaching at the college level is being able to observe the passion of college students—passion for causes, passion for justice, passion for learning, passion in new relationships. I’m a big fan of passion; my sense is that even misdirected passion is better than no passion of all.

Passions can be problematic, of course. Some passions cannot or should not be fulfilled. But more often than not, passion is life-giving, empowering, and energizing. Passion inspires those who witness it in others. It opens us to embracing the mundane, and to seeking that which seems beyond our reach.
Not surprisingly, many of our passions are directly related to the ways in which we spend much of our lives—parenting, teaching, managing, healing, studying, hosting, creating, constructing, caretaking. Other passions get squeezed between the cracks of our lives—what we sometimes refer to as hobbies or avocations.

As long as we’re breathing, as long as can make choices, we are still able to redirect our attentions and our energies and our being to our passions. When assigning papers for my classes, I always tell students to only write on topics or questions they actually care about, something that inspires or motivates them or sucks them in. Life is far too short to research and write papers simply because they are assigned. Once during a guest lecture on our campus, a retired faculty member got up and left before the end of the rather redundant and uninsightful presentation. I later asked why she had left, and she said, “Life’s too short to sit through this sort of nonsense.”

I believe God gives those who commit themselves to Christian faith the holy longing to be disciples of Christ. God also gifts each of us with particular abilities, abilities that can be used in God’s service in the world.

Where This Journey Will Take Us

In the first four chapters of this book, we will be examining how vocation or calling have been understood in the Christian tradition: in overall Christian history, with an initial explanation of Anabaptist concerns (Chapter 1); in the biblical context (Chapter 2); for Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other Reformers (Chapter 3); and for the sixteenth-century Anabaptists (Chapter 4).

The next several chapters of the book allow us to address the actual “work” of Anabaptists over the last several centuries (Chapter 5); how Mennonite churches have shifted in their blessings of expanded particular callings (Chapter 6); and historical and contemporary Mennonite perspectives on callings to ministry (Chapter 7).

The final two chapters of the book (Chapter 8 and Chapter 9) offer six vocational guidelines for those seeking to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ.

Each chapter concludes with questions to stimulate discussions in class or small-group settings, with the hope that much of our vocational learning will come from hearing each others’ counsel and stories.

I am grateful to many people for their assistance in the production of this book: to multiple student assistants over the last decade who assisted with my initial research: Nicole Olivia Cober Bauman, Krista Showalter Ehst, Luke Kreider, and Breanna Nickel; to Jeffrey Moore, my research assistant, who meticulously prepared the index; to Mary Lehman Yoder, Albert J. Meyer, J. R. Burkholder, David Schrock-Shenk, Michael G. Cartwright, Paul Keim, and Bob Yoder, who read earlier drafts of the text; to Becky Bontrager Horst, who encouraged me to write and research this text and provided funding through Lilly Endowment monies provided to Goshen College’s Cultivating Authentic Leaders for Life (CALL) program; to Michael A. King, with whom I have worked on several books and for whom I have great editorial appreciation; and to my colleagues and students, whose perspectives always have enriched my reflection.

Questions for Reflection

1. What is your own vocational story, and how does it support or critique what the author is saying in this Introduction?

2. What previous associations have you had with the concept of vocation or calling? What do you know about the concept in your own faith tradition?

3. How might reflecting on vocation be different for someone in high school, as opposed to someone in her seventies or eighties?

4. Is passion a God-given good? What sorts of passions seem to reflect God’s desires for Christian believers? What sorts of passions might be problematic?

5. What are your deep yearnings?

6. What would you add to the statement of faith above, to make it better reflect your own convictions and commitments?