IB World Religions 3.5.1. Vocation and Group Experience: from Family Life to Consecrated Life Notes

3.5.1. Vocation and Group Experience: From Family Life to Consecrated Life

Vocation as calling

1. Vocation comes from the Latin vocare, to call. Christians use it for the belief that God calls a person to a particular way of life and not only to a set of beliefs.
2. The New Testament word is klesis, calling, and it is used of the whole Christian life. Paul tells the Ephesians to live worthily of the calling they have received, addressing every believer rather than a spiritual elite.
3. Medieval usage narrowed the word considerably. Vocation came to mean entry into the priesthood or a monastery, and ordinary occupations were treated as a lesser path.
4. Martin Luther reversed that narrowing. He argued that a cobbler, a mother and a magistrate serve God in their daily work as truly as any monk, so that the station a person already occupies is where the call is obeyed.
5. Catholic teaching reopened the same ground in the twentieth century. The Second Vatican Council document Lumen Gentium taught a universal call to holiness addressed to every baptised person whatever their state of life.
6. Discernment is how a calling is tested. Prayer, scripture, the counsel of others and plain circumstances are weighed together, and the method set out by Ignatius of Loyola is the best known.

Marriage, family and work

1. Marriage is described as a vocation rather than only as a contract. Catholic and Orthodox churches count it among the sacraments, and Protestant churches usually call it a covenant made in God's presence.
2. Christians speak of the household as a domestic church. The phrase, given prominence at the Second Vatican Council, treats the family as the first place where faith is taught and practised.
3. That happens through small habits rather than large events. Grace before meals, bedtime prayers, a family Bible reading, an Advent wreath or the icon corner of an Orthodox home carry the tradition more steadily than anything at church.
4. Single life is increasingly discussed as a vocation in its own right. Churches that once treated it as a waiting room now describe it as a state with its own freedoms, largely under pressure from single members themselves.
5. Work is presented as a place of calling. Reformed teaching treats ordinary labour as service of the neighbour, and the encyclical Laborem Exercens of 1981 argued that work forms the worker and not only the product.
6. Parents carry the responsibility for handing the faith on. Baptismal promises, godparents and church schooling are the usual means, and churches across the denominations report that this is where they are losing most ground.

Daily devotion and shared prayer

1. Private daily prayer is the base layer of Christian experience. Almost every tradition expects prayer morning and evening, whether in fixed words or free ones.
2. The Liturgy of the Hours, also called the Divine Office, sets psalms and readings at fixed points through the day. Clergy and members of religious orders are obliged to pray it, and lay Catholics and Anglicans increasingly use shortened versions.
3. Protestant churches built their own patterns from the same material. The Book of Common Prayer compressed the monastic hours into Morning and Evening Prayer so a parish could manage them, and the evangelical quiet time of daily Bible reading serves the same purpose.
4. Orthodox households keep a personal rule of prayer before the icon corner. The Jesus Prayer is repeated through the day, and the practice moves easily between the monastery and the ordinary home.
5. Praying in company is a different experience from praying alone. Small groups, cell groups, Bible studies and prayer meetings give members a place to speak, to be heard and to name the sick and absent in intercession.
6. Methodism organised this earliest and most thoroughly. Wesley's class meetings required weekly attendance and an account of one's spiritual state, and modern small group ministry descends directly from them.

Consecrated life

1. Consecrated life is the state of Christians who bind themselves by vows to a community and a rule. Catholic and Orthodox churches have sustained it without a break, and several Protestant churches have deliberately revived it.
2. The vows taken are the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience. Catholic teaching presents them as a way of holding nothing back rather than as evidence of superior holiness.
3. Western orders differ by purpose. Benedictines live a settled life under a rule summarised as prayer and work, Franciscans put poverty at the centre, Dominicans were founded to preach and Jesuits for mission and education.
4. The day is built to make prayer habitual. A Benedictine horarium divides the hours between the office, the slow prayerful reading called lectio divina, manual work and sleep, and it is the repetition that forms the person.
5. Some communities exist for contemplation alone. Carthusians, Poor Clares and Orthodox hermits live enclosed lives of prayer, so that the churches support members whose entire vocation is attention to God.
6. Orthodox monasticism has a different shape. It is far less divided into orders, is concentrated in monasteries such as those of Mount Athos, and produces the staretz, an elder to whom lay visitors come for counsel.
7. Protestants dissolved the monasteries and then rebuilt something like them. The Taize community in France, the Iona Community in Scotland, Anglican orders and Lutheran deaconess houses all live under a common rule, and some are dispersed communities whose members keep the rule in ordinary jobs.

Service and stewardship

1. Service is treated as an act of worship rather than as an extra. The New Testament word diakonia covers practical care and gives the church the office of deacon, whose first task was distributing food to widows.
2. The founding image is the washing of feet. John 13 has Jesus wash his disciples' feet before the Last Supper, and many churches re-enact it on Maundy Thursday.
3. Institutions grew out of the duty. The Sisters of Charity, the Salvation Army, the Catholic Worker movement founded by Dorothy Day, and much of the hospital, hospice and school system in Europe began as Christian service.
4. Stewardship is the belief that what a Christian holds belongs to God and is managed on trust. Churches apply it to money, to time, to ability and now heavily to the environment.
5. Giving is organised differently across the denominations. Tithing, a tenth of income, is expected in many evangelical and Pentecostal churches, while Catholic and Anglican parishes usually ask for proportionate giving with no fixed figure.
6. Christians insist that all of this rests on grace. Service is described as the response to a gift already given, and the churches that argue hardest about justification agree on that much.

Evangelism and witness

1. Evangelism is the communication of the Christian message in the hope of a response. The word comes from the Greek euangelion, good news.
2. The mandate is drawn from the end of Matthew's Gospel. The risen Jesus tells the disciples to make disciples of all nations, a passage the churches call the Great Commission.
3. The denominations go about it very differently. Pentecostal and evangelical churches hold missions and expect personal witness, Catholic teaching speaks of evangelization that includes the already baptised, and Orthodox churches have historically relied on liturgy and presence rather than recruitment.
4. Organised mission built the global church. Protestant missionary societies from the late eighteenth century and Catholic orders carried Christianity outwards, and missionaries are now sent from Nigeria, Brazil and South Korea to Europe.
5. Most Christians describe witness as lived before it is spoken. The saying about preaching the gospel always and using words if necessary is quoted constantly and attributed to Francis of Assisi, though scholars doubt he ever said it.
6. Evangelism is also contested among Christians. Churches distinguish it from proselytism, meaning pressure or inducement, and in 2011 the World Council of Churches, the Vatican and the World Evangelical Alliance issued joint guidance on how it should be conducted.