Calling

Review: Signals of Transcendence

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Signals of Transcendence, Os Guinness. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2023.

Summary: The stories of people who have experienced signs or promptings that there is more to life awakening them to pursue the unseen realities beyond the signal.

Peter Berger has described the experience of a sense that there is “something more” with the phrase “signals of transcendence.” In Irish parlance, it is the sense that the barrier between the seen and unseen is barely there. This is all the more significant in the “world without windows” we modern versions of Plato’s cavedwellers inhabit. Os Guinness contends that such signals still come to us. Will we heed, and then search for the transcendent source beyond the signal.

The signals vary for each of us. Guinness tells the stories of ten individuals who, in different ways encountered such signals. For Malcolm Muggeridge, swimming from shore to end his life, one final glance back at the shore lights filed him with so mich hope he needed to find its source, a search of many years. For Peter Berger, the mother’s assurance that “all will be well” in a world where that cannot truly be promised signals a deeper reality where this is so.

For Phillip Hallie, driven to despair with the horrors of the Holocaust, the unworldly goodness of Le Chambon’s people who rescued 5000 Jewish children, rescued him as well. For Chesterton, consumed with the evil in the world, the sight of a beautiful dandelion set off a “thin thread of thanks” and a search for a worldview that could explain a world of brokenness and beauty, which he found eventually in Christianity.

The signals are different for each of us, contends Guinness. For fashion model Windsor Elliott, it was the sense of emptiness at a glamourous gathering that began the quest for something more. For C.S. Lewis, on the other hand, it was glimpses of joyful longing that caught his attention.

Guinness urges our readiness to hear the call and reiterates in each chapter, “Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.” Yet his last story is that of Kenneth Clark, who experienced “the finger of God” in a church in San Lorenzo yet did not heed the signal until on his deathbed when he was received into the church, as attested by those with him. It’s never too late in this life.

He includes his own grandfather’s story, caught up in the Boxer Rebellion, narrowly escaping alive. He writes with a sense of the preciousness and significance of our lives. While he focuses on the signals of the something more for which we are made, he urges the quest for that something, elaborated more fully in his previous book, The Great Quest.

This is a wonderful book for someone who, in Frederick Buechner’s words is “listening to one’s life” and longing for more. Far from being distracted or thinking oneself crazy, Guinness assures us that the signals are worth heeding and the quest pursuing. He who seeks, finds.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Garden City

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Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human, John Mark Comer. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015.

Summary: An argument that our work is an important aspect of what it means for us to be human, setting our work in the context of the arc of God’s work taking humanity from the garden to the new garden city in the new creation.

I’ve often heard it emphasized that we are human beings rather than human doings. John Mark Comer challenges this truism in Garden City. He contends that what we do is a vital aspect of what it means for us to be human. What he proceeds to do is offer a theology of work within the arc of God’s redemptive purposes. And he does so in a conversational series of chapters that read like blog posts to millenials.

The first part of this book concerns our work. We were created kings and queens, partners with God in ruling over his world. He placed the first humans in a place called Delight–Eden. It’s an untamed wilderness and God bids them “make a world.” So how do we discern God’s calling in this “world-making” calling. He suggests a series of questions: what do you love? what are you good at? what does your world need? what does your world need? does it make the world a more garden-like place? Then he challenges the idea of the sacred/secular split. He observes that in Hebrew, there is no word for spiritual–it’s all spiritual and matters to God, and all may reflect the glory of God. And this leads to working with excellence. Yet work isn’t always what we would hope for it. Instead of ruling over the serpent, Adam and Eve allow the serpent to rule over them. And one of the consequences is the curse that falls on work, which becomes hard, sometimes futile, sometimes frustrating but also drives us to God.

The second part of the book is about rest. We were not made to work all the time. God rested. We rest. God is the anti-Pharaoh. The Exodus restores a day of rest to former slaves never permitted to rest and becomes a day celebrating God’s deliverance. Sabbath is made for us. And it points us toward the future.

The future is the focus of part three. It is not a return to the garden but an advance to the garden city of the new creation. Following N.T. Wright, Comer writes about life after heaven, life in the new creation in God’s new garden city as resurrected people. Comer discusses the hope that it will not all burn up, that the works done to God’s glory will endure into the new creation–a motivation to God honoring excellence. And greatness in this world is turned upside down. The giving of a cold glass of water may outshine seemingly heroic acts. The big thing is answering the call of the king.

I mentioned the conversational character of Comer’s writing style. But this is not theology-lite. Comer offers as substantive a theology of work, of rest, of calling, and of our destiny as I’ve read in far more abstruse works. He advances ideas and gives us space to ponder and absorb them. He is one who allows a few words to do the work of many. This is a “back list” book and I have noticed from his website that he has several he has published since. Because of this book, I’ll try to read them if I get the chance.

Review: Calling in Context

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Calling in Context, Susan L. Maros. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2022.

Summary: A work on vocational discernment that recognizes that this process is shaped by our context, our social location.

In her work as a professor of leadership in a Christian seminary, Susan Maros came to a realization as she worked with students on discerning their callings. The ways that she had learned to discern calling in her White evangelical context were not necessarily the ways calling was discerned in other racial, ethnic, and cultural settings. This led to a process of examining her preconceptions about calling.

In this book she shares her learning. To begin with, she discovered that calling took different forms in scripture. The call of Abraham, Moses, and Nehemiah were each unique. Furthermore, calling unfolds over a lifetime, even when punctuated by particular calling moments.

Social location is a critical factor in how people experience calling. Social location includes racial, ethnic, and cultural background, socioeconomic status, and gender. These shape what opprtunities are most accessible and the ones considered “off-limits.” It also affects how we “hear” a call-an inner sense, a prophetic word, the counsel of community.

The last part of the book begins with understanding how we engage power, including understanding our own power and that of our community. Part of this is discerning how power works in social systems. The journey is a long one. Maros commends establishing sustainable rhythms of work and rest, community, companions, and lament. Underlying the discernment of calling is the recognition of and living out of purpose.

The principles and insights developed in this book are illustrated throughout by calling stories of a variety of ministry leaders representing various racial, ethnic, cultural, socioeconomic, gender, and age. Maros both illustrates from and draws insights from these stories, which form an integral part of the book. All of this comes together in a message of hope in the God who meets all of us in our social locations and bids us into lives of purpose under his grace.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Finding Your Yes

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Finding Your Yes, Christine E. Wagoner. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2021.

Summary: An exploration of what it means to listen for God’s invitations and say “yes” to them.

One of the questions I often dealt with in student ministry was how one knows God’s will. Christine Wagoner, in Finding Your Yes, suggests that one of the key aspects of this is listening for God’s invitations, and that implies that God is even more interested in guiding us, at times, than we are to be guided.

The book is divided into two parts. The first is “Getting to Yes.” She begins by confessing that “yes” has often begun with “no.” She illustrates this with the story of how she kept saying “no” to writing as well as to teaching a woman’s group in her church and how Jesus pursued her until she said “yes.” She discusses all the “not me” obstacles we erect to those invitations, and how Jesus can shift our perspective, as he did with the woman at the well. She addresses the places of inner resistance, particularly our fear of failure. She tells stories of people who began with small “yesses” and how these led into bigger things. And she discusses how we grow in our yes through partnership and debriefing.

The second part is “Staying with your Yes.” Yes doesn’t automatically lead to a promised land of fruitful life. Sometimes “yes” involves waiting, as it did for Abraham, or recalibrating, when a reality we’ve said “yes” to, like motherhood, is not being fulfilled. Sometimes we say “yes” and life seems to fall apart. Were we mistaken? Sometimes “yes” takes us to a place of pain. Some of this is complicated by lies of the enemy: “this will destroy you”, “if, as a woman, you keep growing as a leader, you will never get married.” She talks about how we sometimes say “no” without exploring the possibility of yes and sometimes have a “no” concealed in our “yes.” I did find myself wondering in this chapter about discerning when God is inviting us to say “no” in order to say “yes.” Finally, she concludes with the joy of a life of saying “yes” again and again.

Wagoner shares a lot of her own experiences of God’s little and bigger invitations, her struggles to find her way to “yes” and then to live into those “yesses.” She writes as a woman leader, single until approaching forty. Her story may help other women who struggle with what saying “yes” to God may mean in terms of marriage and family, and where the use of one’s gifts defy traditional gender role expectations. But the basic message of the book speaks to men as well as women. God’s invitations come to all of us, and we all find ways to try to deflect them, or struggle within ourselves to say “yes.”

As we approach the new year, this book may be helpful as we consider what God may be inviting us to say “yes” to in the coming year. The questions at the end of each chapter are great to talk over with a trusted friend. As Wagoner reminds us, we often grow into and through our “yesses” with partners on the journey. Wagoner’s book can also be a partner in the journey of finding your yes.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Power Women

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Power Women, Edited by Nancy Wang Yuen and Deshonna Collier-Goubil, Foreword by Shirley Hoogstra. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2021.

Summary: Fourteen women who are both mothers and academics write about how they navigate these callings as women of faith.

Women in the academic world face a unique challenge. The biological clock and the tenure clock are synchronized. The critical years for child-bearing and for career advancement coincide. One’s faith community and cultural background further complicates this challenge with sometimes conflicting values around parenting and career advancement. Many women choose one over the other. Others, like the women in this volume, believe both callings to be important for them, and write about the ways they have cared for their families and continued to pursue their academic callings. Through all of this runs an underlying theme of continue to nourish their own souls and to practice good self-care.

The contributions are organized into four parts: navigating academia, navigating motherhood, navigating multiple callings, and navigating support. In the first part Maria Su Wang describes how she carves out time for research with young children, sharing some of the scriptural reflections that have shaped her choices. Stephanie Chan offered a unique perspective on the synergy of parenting and work (lullaby and syllabi) and how each may enrich the other. Teri Clemons talks about the misperceptions that exist about maternity leave and its importance, including how much time bonding with a child and recovery can take. She urges women (and men) to avail themselves of all the leave institutional and state policies allow. Yiesha L. Thompson closes out the section discussing the unique situation of adjunct professor moms. the special pressures and choices they must make, and ways administrators may offer appropriate support. .

The second section on navigating motherhood begins by asking just what is meant by being a “good” mother. Christine Lee Kim discusses the mixed messages mothers must negotiate and identifies good questions to identify those messages and describes her own process of working through these. Ji Y. Son identifies the double whammy working moms face of being disadvantaged both at work and home and suggests a recategorization that gives women grace by considering herself a “female dad.” Jean Neely describes her struggle with the imposter syndrome and how thinking of God as loving mother as well as father has transformed her spiritual life and how being a mother has deepened those insights.

Part three could be intimidating in its discussion of navigating multiple callings. Jenny Pak describes the juggling acts of the multiple callings of pastor’s wife, mother, and professor. Jennifer McNutt takes it a step further. She is a pastor, professor and mom of three. Yvana Uranga-Hernandez describes taking on homeschooling as a professor mom. For all, these are only possible as they reflect the singular pursuit of Christ and have the support of spouses, extended family, and the wider community.

That sets up the discussions in part four, navigating support. Deshonna Collier-Goubil speaks of her experience as a young widow of assembling a support network. Joy Qualls describes the choice she and her husband made for her to be the primary breadwinner while he managed the household as a stay-at-home dad. Doretha O’Quinn draws on her mentoring expertise to discuss how professor moms may mentor each other and also gets very practical about her own practices of self-care.

The chapters mix personal narrative and academic research. They are honest and practical. Their experiences demonstrate a variety of ways women have approached navigating the callings of mom and professor. While they are amazing in how much they accomplish, worthy of the “power women” label, their stories also reflect the importance of good institutional policies, including leave and tenure policies that do not disadvantage women, and the value of support from spouses, extended family, and a wider community, and lots of grace! This is a valuable work for men to read, to understand how they may be appropriate allies.

The women in this volume represented significant diversity of ethnicity, academic discipline, and life experience. What is missing are women in STEM fields and more women from secular universities (only one contributor is). That said, there is so much wisdom that may be extrapolated into these situations. I’ve worked with many graduate women who wonder whether it is possible to honor God as they pursue both motherhood and academic callings. These narratives offer a resounding “yes” as well as honest and practical models of how that is possible.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

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The ministry with which I serve recently hosted a conversation with four of the contributors to this work that may be viewed on YouTube.

Review: Called to Create

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Called to create

Called to Create, Jordan Raynor. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2017.

Summary: A view of creative, entrepreneurial work as a good calling from God, and the challenges and opportunities of pursuing entrepreneurial work for the glory of God.

We celebrate them when they are successful–the Steve Jobs, Elon Musks, and Oprah Winfrey’s of the world. They are risk-taking entrepreneurs whose creativity brings new products to the market, or whose artistic work is of a character of excellence and success that it gains wide notice. The author of this work extends the idea of entrepreneur “to anyone who takes a risk to create something new for the good of others.”  These include tech entrepreneurs, but also small business owners, artists and writers, nonprofit founders, chefs, and many others. The author, himself an entrepreneur, explores whether the pursuit of such work is honoring to God, or somehow “second class” to more “noble” forms of Christian service. Clearly, he believes the former to be true.

The book addresses four “C’s” of Christian entrepreneurship: Calling, Creating, Challenges, and Charge. He integrates biblical principles with the stories of forty men and women entrepreneurs in a variety of fields from J.R.R. Tolkien to the founders of TOMS shoes and In-and Out Burgers. What I appreciated was the combination of rich theological insight (rather than cliche’) and substantive examples.

In the section on “Calling” he begins with God as the first entrepreneur as maker of all things and the source of all creativity. I appreciate that he considers the incarnate Lord as a carpenter who for twenty years revealed God’s creative and entrepreneurial spirit. From this he outlines a theology of work as intrinsically good, and finally discusses how we discern calling as we understand what we are passionate, gifted for, and have the greatest opportunity to love others by doing.

“Creating” begins by looking at why we create–is it to make a name for ourselves as did the tower builders of Babel, or like Bach soli Deo gloria (for the glory of God alone). Then there is the question of what we create, and here the two factors are products that show something of what God is like and products that love others. It could be children’s stories like those written by Lewis, or the beer brewed by the Guinness family, less alcoholic than gin, and safe to drink. Finally, the question is how we create, and the key here is excellence in product and putting people before profit, which the author found exemplified in his study and interviews with Chick-fil-A personnel.

“Challenges” begins with the relentless pressure entrepreneurs face to hustle and the issues of trust and rest, including sabbath, that are essential for staying focused on their callings. A reality of entrepreneurship is failure, yet often it is hushed up rather than transparently acknowledged and learned from, where it becomes a source of hope and boldness. Finally, he addresses the continual need for mental renewal that he believes comes through communing with God, partners, and others (for example, the Inklings).

The last part was perhaps the most unexpected for me. “Charge” begins with the call of entrepreneurs to make disciples through first loving people and then teaching the word. Perhaps the most moving story was that of Alex Clark, a Chick-fil-A manager who hires Jenny, before discovering she is a felon on probation, but sticks with her and develops her professionally to the point where she manages a store, but also comes to faith, and embraces a calling to do what Alex did with others. He talks about the use of profits– given away, reinvested to grow the business, and invested to help others called to create. He concludes with a chapter that focuses around a shared speaking engagement between Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal) and N. T. Wright that explores the idea of the new heaven and earth, and thinking about our work passing into the eternity of the New Creation.

In my work, I’ve had the chance to interact with entrepreneurs in business, in the world of ideas, and in the arts. Often, I’ve discovered that they have felt that the church looks a bit askance at them, or only views them for what they give to the church in time or money. This book is an encouragement to these people that their work matters to God and the pleasure they take in entrepreneurship may just be the favor of God upon their lives. This is also a book pastors desperately need to read, as it may stretch their imagination about the ways God might call the people who sit under their teaching Sunday by Sunday. Do we see Peter and Andrew simply as the first disciples, or as hard-working self-employed entrepreneurs? Is Lydia just Paul’s host, or an enterprising businesswoman in purple goods? Do we affirm just the hours people put into the ostensible ministries of the church, or recognize the ways they reflect and bring honor to their Creator in their work every day?

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.