Calling
You have one
I don’t remember the first time I learned the concept of ministerial call. It was probably in my childhood. I attended church on Sundays with my family and went to a parochial school with chapel during the week. Knowing my mom, who was good at being in charge of things and had been a hardcore churchgoer since her teens, she was probably on a “call committee” for new pastors at our church.
In what are known as “mainline” Protestant (which I pronounce protest-ant as a reminder of our collective call to protest), call processes involve a lot of paperwork and middlemen (yes, generally men) and interviews. For the branch of the Christian family tree that ordained me, I could create a profile within three months of graduating for seminary, complete with faith statements and personal details. I also went through an ordination process that involved papers and interviews and open events for the church public. (At the last I was asked how I felt about only ordained clergy being allowed to preside over Holy Communion. I said something like, “You mean how do I feel about the guild retaining power?”) Whole congregations vote on whether to hire the pastor, usually with them in the other room, and then negotiations for pay and benefits package begin.
But my personal experience of call began during a time of drunkenness, loss, and confusion. And no one was involved but me. And my mom, inevitably.
I was in a doctoral program on the sociology of scientific knowledge. I’d earned a Master’s, writing a paper on sick infants in NICUs and how they have agency. But I was stalled. I didn’t have the right doctoral committee, I didn’t know how to advocate for myself, and I was drinking a lot. My girlfriend and I were broken up again. I had no sense of self but I did have a lot of shame.
Surprisingly, I opened up to my mom about leaving the doctoral program. Surprising because I didn’t understand that to be anything other than a failure. She asked lightheartedly what I would do instead. Without though, similar to the Communion moment, I said, “I’ll become a nurse or a pastor.”
The first made sense. Mom was a nurse, two of my three aunts were nurses, nursing was a big topic in my family.
But pastor? I hadn’t been in worship in, oh, a dozen years. And I had lived through the first wave of Christian hate laws against us queers.
Over time this became a story I shared to prove myself to humans and their institutions: Yes! I, a woman, a gay, heard a big “get over here” from God! I know – shocking! But true!
In spite of that, once I scape away the corrupting barnacles of processes and papers, that remains one of my most sacred moments. In the Christian testament Jesus says that wherever two of more people gathered in his name, God is there. Although I’m confident there is no place the divine is not, in that moment it took the one person to ask the question that would let sacredness come in – come into the conversation, come into my awareness.
However churches hire pastors, the call to serve all comes to us all. Some of us just need partners to hear it.
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