A Specific Vocation and Several Callings

When Chris Licht was hired to become the chairman of the Cable News Network (CNN) in 2022, he told friends it was a calling. Despite this positive outlook, it didn’t take long for things to start going wrong. After only a year in his position, Licht was fired after overseeing a series of programming miscues, financial woes, and criticisms against the network. Licht’s 13-month stint as CNN’s top executive raises many questions about vocation and jobs that may prove instructive for Christians.

For starters, Licht said that his job was a “calling”—but what is a calling to the Christian, exactly? Is it the same as a vocation? Should one’s calling be separated from one’s job, or can they coalesce together? Does a disruption like being fired suggest that job was not a calling in the first place? Who issues this call and how do we even hear it? It can seem impossible to know where to begin when it comes to discerning the nature of our work.

Before we examine these questions further, let’s begin with a few definitions:

First, a vocation is a specific calling, or what you were created and gifted to be. As Os Guinness says in his book The Call, “A [vocation] says, do what you are.” A vocation speaks to our unique identity.

Second, a calling is a moral responsibility we have to fulfill a role or do good in a certain manner. These can be short-term or long-term and involve a variety of natures, such as being called to work in general, being called to parenthood, being called to study, being called to care for an elderly parent, and the like. Sometimes a calling summons us to a specific place.

Lastly, a job or occupation is everyday labor for the glory and good of others. Sometimes our vocation is expressed through our jobs, albeit not fully. Sometimes, a job’s primary purpose is financial income rather than a vocation that fits our gifts.

Our Supreme Calling

While Christians have many secondary callings, our supreme (and common) call is God’s command to lifelong obedience. Lifelong obedience springs from God’s gracious primary call to us—a call that is “to Him, for Him, and by Him.” God both demands and deserves our obedience.

Being called to this life of obedience stems all the way back to the age of Adam and Eve. As the Garden’s first workers, they were called to obey the cultural mandate (Genesis 1:26-28)—to spread the blessings of Eden across the world so that all people might flourish. Later on, after God rescued his people from oppressive bondage and inhumane working conditions in Egypt, he called them to obey him completely and keep his covenant (Exodus 19:5). And the incredible sacrifice of Jesus Christ, God’s gracious redemption of us, provides perhaps the most compelling motive to obey. Obedience should be our obsession! This call to obedience supersedes our sacrifices—bodily, financial, or otherwise (1 Samuel 15:22)—and signifies our love for the Lord (John 14:15-24). 

The Westminster Shorter Catechism asks, “What is the chief end of man?” and answers, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever” (1 Corinthians 10:31; Ecclesiastes 12:13). Neither of these things can be done without our compliance with God’s will. It is both a way to bring honor to God and a grateful response to his goodness that can bestow us with a spirit of joy and fulfillment unlike anything else. We steadily grow in this compliance by continually surrendering our hearts to be renovated by God so that we hate the things God hates and love the things God loves. Augustine reflects that undergoing this exercise is to surrender our hearts to God so that he can properly order our disordered loves.

God calls us to perform all our secondary callings under the banner of our supreme calling: obedience to him. Our supreme call is the irremovable thread that stitches all of our secondary callings and our specific vocation together.

Our Specific Vocation

During my time in seminary, one of my professors would often say, “Every Christian has a divine design.” An intrinsic part of that divine design is being endowed with a gift. Even as we are being formed in our mother’s womb, God bestows on every believer a functional gift. This gift has been historically named a “vocation.” This vocation is unique to each person—that is, every believer has been gifted to do something specific, or to undertake some role that is specific to them. For example, God designed my specific vocation to involve being an educator. And because our vocation is an inherent part of our identity. I am internally wired, gifted, and created to be an educator, just as every believer is similarly made to fill their vocational role. (The act of discerning one’s specific vocation will be addressed in the last article in this series.)

However, this raises several questions. For example, can my occupation be my vocation? What happens when I don’t have a job that works in concert with my vocation? Is this specific vocation the same as the calling that Licht spoke about? Let’s take these questions in turn.

Question 1: Can my occupation (job) also be my vocation?

I once told a group of 200 20-year-olds that in my 35 years of working, there was only one instance where my job was a full expression of my vocation as an educator—when I was a professor. Throughout nearly four decades of work, there was only one period when my occupation wonderfully aligned with my vocation. 

Evidence for what one’s vocation should be is sometimes revealed early in life. However, most of us find that discovering our specific vocation involves trial and error, dramatic twists and turns, and unexpected discoveries. Sometimes our jobs may provide clues about this vocation, as our divinely endowed gifts will often express themselves as we work in our occupations. 

Question 2: What happens when I don’t have a job that works in concert with my vocation?

What is the Christian to do if they do not have the privilege of an occupation that aligns with their vocation? One possible way to alleviate this is to consider job crafting. What does this term mean?

After conducting a study of low-skilled and low-paying jobs, Amy Wrzesinewski—the Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at Yale’s School of Management—was surprised with her findings. Before the survey, she hypothesized that low-skilled, low-paid employees like custodians would be the least satisfied with their work. Instead, she was surprised to learn that many were greatly satisfied because of their own job crafting. Wrzesinewski describes job crafting as employees making active changes to their own job designs in ways that can bring about numerous positive outcomes, including engagement, job satisfaction, resilience, and thriving. Job crafters, she explains, cognitively change their jobs by altering how they perceive tasks (e.g., a hospital cleaner seeing his work as a means to help ill people rather than simply cleaning) or thinking about the tasks involved in their job as a collective whole as opposed to a set of separate tasks (e.g., an insurance agent seeing her job as “working to get people back on track after a car accident” rather than merely “processing car insurance claims”).

Question 3: Is this specific vocation the same as the calling that Licht spoke about? 

The truth is that I’m not certain. Truly, only God knows. One thing is certain, however: a sudden disruption in your job, like a firing or a chaotic workplace, does not mean the job was not your divine vocation. Remember that we live in a broken world. As the late Dr. Tim Keller put it, “You should expect to be regularly frustrated in your work even though you may be in exactly the right vocation” (Every Good Endeavor). A less-than-desirable workplace does not negate or change this. 

A Plethora of Secondary Callings

We must also remember that our vocation is not the only calling we must obediently and dutifully execute. In his book God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life, Gene Veith busts the myth of being called to only one special thing. Veith reminds us that because the Lord is Lord over all of life, we have many other secondary callings—these include work, marriage or singleness, parenthood, and responsible citizenry. 

Take the call to work, for example. In our work, no matter what it is, we exercise our supreme calling of obedience. “Work,” explains Sho Baraka, “is simply human activity that produces results. Something is made. Something is done.” We were created and divinely equipped to produce results and to make cultural artifacts like Excel spreadsheets, art, music, film, computers, cell phones, homes, meals, and ink pens. God has not only created us to work; he has provided a divine work ethic to emulate in our various workplaces. In the first two chapters of Genesis, labeled the prologue by many theologians, we are introduced to a working God. As those made in his image, we imitate him by working with our heads, hearts, and hands. All persons are called to work, as all persons are called to contribute to the flourishing of all mankind. Indeed, Adam and Eve’s call was to scatter and extend the blessings of Eden to all mankind. This is why, Tom Nelson, President of Made to Flourish, often says that our work is primarily about contribution, not compensation. 

All work, paid or unpaid, contributes to the greater good of all people. All work, except sinful work, has dignity and worth. This means, of course, that a hierarchy of work does not exist. For instance, work in the church is not of higher value than work under a sink or on an assembly line in God’s economy. All Christians are called to imitate God in working with all their might (Colossians 3:23-25), whatever the field may be. As professor Steve Garber is fond of saying, “Our daily work is not incidental. Rather, our work is integral to the missio Dei.” Contributing to the mission of God (missio Dei) is not only participating in the redemption of fallen and estranged humanity but also the renewal of all things. In other words, our active participation “in the fight against every vestige of evil plaguing mankind is an intrinsic part of our calling.” 

For example, one evil we can rally against is what Arthur Brooks, former president of the American Enterprise Institute, calls the “dignity deficit.” In other words, we are called to cure this deficit by helping the jobless find jobs.

Lastly, we are not only called to imitate God’s work ethic in our various workplaces; but we are called to imitate his work cadence—work and rest is the divine cadence we are called to imitate for our good and sanity (Genesis 1:1-2:3; Exodus 20).

The word “calling” is used in many places in many ways. To the Christian, the word is significant in a way that the rest of culture’s definitions may not fully capture. It indicates a divine purpose to live in accordance with God’s will. It indicates all manner of secondary callings, from everyday work to parenting to being good and responsible citizens. And all Christians have been divinely created and gifted with a unique, specific vocation that we undertake to contribute to God’s good works. Even if we are not keenly aware of our specific vocation early in life, the one who made us invites us to embark on journey toward discovering the gifts he has given.

Photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash

1 See the article on Licht’s firing in The New York Times, originally titled “Chris Licht Is Out at CNN, Ending a Brief and Chaotic Run.”

2 Os Guinness, The Call.

3  Sho Baraka, He Saw That It Was Good.

4 J. Verkuyl, Contemporary Missiology: An Introduction, p. 201.