From the perpetually best-selling manual for job hunters comes this: "Vocation or Calling implies Someone who calls, and . . . the concept of Mission with relationship to our whole life lands us inevitably in the lap of God."
So writes Richard Nelson Bolles in an appendix to his What Color Is Your Parachute? a book that has enjoyed phenomenal success since 1970. He continues: "Your first Mission here on earth is . . . to seek out and find, in daily-even hourly-communication, the One from whom your Mission is derived."
Dick Bolles has found his "Mission," including over thirty-seven years in ordained ministry, half of it in Episcopal parishes. When he was let go from a cathedral staff, the victim of a budget cut, he learned the hard way about security and contentment. He retains a strong interest in fellow clergy, however, remarking, "I originally wrote Parachute exclusively for ministers, and four million other people happened to buy it!"
What does this experienced vocational counselor and friend of pastors have to say about the pastoral call and career? Where do call and ambition, and parish exigencies and altruism meet? LEADERSHIP wanted to know, so Marshall Shelley and Jim Berkley ventured to his home in Walnut Creek, California, where Bolles warmly provided some answers.
How were you called into the ministry?
After I got out of the Navy at the end of the Second World War, I went to M.I.T., firmly convinced I was going to be a chemical engineer. I attended Saint Paul's Cathedral in Boston every Sunday, and on Theological Education Sunday one year, Dean Taylor of the Episcopal Theological Seminary preached about the number of churches-something like nine hundred-that were closing that year because they didn't have even a lay minister.
The sermon perturbed me because I knew that graduating in chemical engineering from M.I.T., I could receive about the highest starting salary of any discipline. But I thought, I'm an illustration of why these churches are closing!
I'd been raised as a Christian in the Episcopal church and had accepted Christ as my Savior and read the entire Bible when I was 14. I told my minister back home about this disturbing sermon, and he suggested I visit a seminary with him. That night as I thought about it, I decided, Who cares what the seminary looks like? I've got to become a priest. It's an obscene culture that values engineers but is closing nine hundred churches. So although I felt inappropriate for ministry-I was, and still am, intensely shy-I knew I had to do it.
So I transferred to Harvard to get a broader pre-seminary education. And while at Harvard I was a member of both InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and the Student Christian Movement. Neither group could understand how anyone in his right mind could belong to the other group. I roomed with the treasurer and the president of the InterVarsity chapters and we studied the Bible and prayed every night.
I was also involved in the March on Washington and heard Martin Luther King, Jr., give his memorable speech. I've had a traditional evangelical background as far as the Bible and my attitude toward the faith is concerned, but also a heavy commitment to social action on the other hand.
For instance, I was a counselor at the Billy Graham Crusade in Madison Square Garden in 1958, when very few Episcopalians were involved. I've enjoyed my life in the church because I love puzzling people.
In your early ministry, what gave you a sense of accomplishment?
After serving three mission congregations, I was called to St. John's Church in Passaic, New Jersey-the tenth largest church out of 150 in the diocese. I was 31 years old, wet behind the ears, and obviously a poor choice, so they called me. I served there from 1958 to 1966.
It was a white congregation near two other congregations, one black and one Italian. I went to the other two to suggest uniting the three. The Italian congregation was easy, because they had no minister, and the elderly members remembered the founding priest, who they said looked like me. When I'd switch to Italian for the sentences of administration while serving them Communion, they were happy to have a priest again.
But the black congregation wasn't sure it wanted to merge. I used to take a swing through campuses each year in October and visit the college students from my parish. I was near Virginia Seminary in Alexandria, and I remembered the son of the founder of the black congregation attended seminary there, so I dropped in on him. We hit it off, and he asked me what I thought of the congregations' merging. I told him why I'd taken the initiative to do that, and he looked at me and said, "You don't know that I was going to Passaic tomorrow to oppose this merger, but as a result of this talk, I'm going to speak for it."
There was a lot of divine intervention in that merger. We were the first consciously integrated church in New Jersey.
What ambitions did you have entering ministry?
For some reason, I've been remarkably devoid of ambition in the church. Seminary classmates told me they figured I would be first to be bishop among my classmates. I said, "You can hold your breath until you turn blue, and you will never see that day!" I had no desire to climb the traditional career ladder through the church.
Tell us about your move to Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.
I was called to be the canon pastor, the staff member, under the bishop and dean, directly responsible for pastoring the cathedral congregation. About two years later, I was fired because of a budget crunch. I received a call from another parish, but I turned it down.
After a period of unemployment, I was appointed the provincial secretary for college ministry in the nine western states, supervising college chaplains. I loved that, because nobody was trying to tell me what I should do. Nobody had the foggiest notion what the job was! (Laughter)
So you did become a bishop, the bishop of campuses!
No, not a bishop. Never! (Laughter)
One day the bishop took me to a luncheon of clergy and lay people from a number of surrounding towns. I watched him try to guess with what degree of affection and familiarity he should address each person, and sometimes misguess. I said, God, if you love me, spare me ever, ever having to do this!
What did you find most satisfying about pastoral ministry?
Two things. First, helping people change. Once a man who'd had an affair and left his wife and children came to see me, because he didn't want to see his own priest. I helped him end the affair and got him to start courting his wife again. They got back together and were so grateful.
Something like that is rewarding, because so often the ministry is like the drip of water against the stone: you know it's making ridges, but it's taking such a long time for anything to show up.
Second, preaching. I once heard a preacher comment that he never met a man who went into the ministry to preach, and I thought, Well, you have now! He was saying in the old days, many went into the ministry to preach, but now they want to be pastoral counselors or business administrators or whatever. Not me. I love preaching.
But you gave it up.
Not exactly. I still have a "congregation." I love my work because it affects the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, and affecting lives is what I offered myself to God to do.
I have a theory about Parachute that I only whisper because I'm afraid I'll be committed. I think it's the instrument of the Holy Spirit masquerading as a job-hunting manual.
What part does ambition play in your ministry now?
Frankly, it is ironic that I, who had little ambition, gained such influence, while others, who would kill to have this kind of effect, may still be seeking it. I don't think you find something by going directly at.
When the Navy trained us to spot airplanes at night, they said the center part of your eye is blind at night. If you try to look directly at the sound at night, you never will see the plane. If you look to the right or the left of the sound, you'll see it out of the part of your eye that isn't night-blind. Ambition is like that.
People who pursue ambitious goals often are some of the most frustrated people in the world. And those who succeeded oftentimes have been ruthless in achieving it and have left bodies scattered over the landscape.
But for every one of the achievers-even the honest ones-there is an enormous number of people who years ago offered themselves for ministry and have never come close to achieving their goals. So we have to offer ourselves to God to do whatever he wants us to do, and let the ambition go by the way.
God has a tremendous sense of humor: the people who don't want influence get it, and the people dying for it don't get it. For instance, I'm still shy, yet I have to get up before groups as large as six thousand people. I pray desperately that the Holy Spirit will speak through me, and yet I know when I'm up there I'm ill-equipped to do much on my own.
In What Color Is Your Parachute? the appendix on finding your mission is practically a gospel tract. Why did you add that to recent editions of the book?
For years I hadn't been particularly vocal about my faith because when I first wrote the book, I feared people would say, "Oh, he's a minister! What does he know about job hunting?" But once the book became popular, I didn't have to worry about that. So I started talking about finding your mission. I was amazed-I discovered huge hungers that had little to do with the choice of career. People were seeking meaning, which comes from a sense of calling, which comes from knowing the Caller.
So I began giving talks on how to find your mission. After one recent talk, a woman came up and said, "I just got back from the death of my mother. This morning a friend called to ask if I wanted to go to a lecture by the author of Parachute. I wanted to decline because I was too covered with my grief, but then I said to myself, Maybe God wants me there. And so I came. There wasn't a thing you discussed that didn't fit my situation. Thank you." I run into that again and again.
Experiences like that made me think that lecture needed to be heard by other people, so I translated it into the form it appears in that appendix.
How do we know God's call for our ministry? Can we chase what we enjoy and assume that's what God wants?
God's call isn't something he sends while we sit around being passive. Frederick Buechner, in Wishful Thinking-A Theological ABC, says, "The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."
Too strong a view of the fallen nature of man causes us to assume that what we delight to do is probably a sin. If a non-Christian doesn't enjoy selling manure, he naturally thinks, Maybe I should get into something else. But Christians, and especially pastors, tend to say, God must have put me here for some reason. So they end up baptizing inertia. I don't think inertia necessarily is divine. Rest-inertia-is supposed to be a part of the rhythm of life, not the definition of life.
Does a pastor wrestling with vocational problems differ from any other executive?
I can't generalize. Pastors run the gamut from those who try to imitate the austerity of John the Baptist to those who think they're chief executive officer of a multinational corporation. The one who's eating locusts and honey has very little to do with the CEO in a secular corporation, but the pastor at the other extreme is virtually identical to a secular executive. Generalizations about the clergy and their secular parallels are self-defeating.
Okay, but don't clergy looking for new positions face problems that business people never encounter?
I'll tell you a story that on the surface has nothing to do with your question but actually has everything to do with the answer. A Pennsylvanian who'd read Parachute wrote once, saying, "You get fat off the misery of other people. I read your book, and it's worthless. I tried using it to get this job I wanted, and I was turned down."
On a whim I called a friend in Philadelphia and asked him to call on this guy and tell him, "Dick Bolles sent me." He did and found the man wanted to be the librarian of the one library in town and was turned down. I corresponded with the man afterward, and about seven years later he wrote, "I'm more convinced than ever your book doesn't work." When I wrote to ask why, he said, "The new librarian left, and when I applied again for the job, they turned me down again!"
He hadn't done any job hunting in the interim; he'd just groused about my book. He knew what job he wanted, and if they didn't give it to him, that proved the book didn't work!
Now the application: The minute you choose only one possible employer, you'll probably be stymied, because you have absolutely no control over his whims. You may remind him of his Uncle Jake, and he's always hated Uncle Jake and wouldn't hire you if you were the last person on earth. Well, the problem with most pastors' job searches is that in defining their vocation, they have essentially defined only one possible employer, namely the church. There's no way out of that bind without beginning to think, I can do ministry for God in places other than the parish. As long as pastors expect to remain within the church, they must get used to the predicament of my friend in Pennsylvania.
So what does a pastor unhappy in his position do?
First, it's important that you look at the gifts God has given you. Stewardship is more than something you talk about on canvass Sunday. You need to inventory your gifts so you can be a good steward. Then ask, Where does God move my heart to use these gifts? And with what circumstances, what particular kinds of problems, what groups of people? People find they have many more gifts than they supposed.
We've had many pastors do that inventory and then look at the opportunities to do ministry in the world God has made rather than just within the church God has made. Isn't that what John Wesley did? He went to the coal miners and marginalized people outside the institutional church.
Does that exercise usually lead a pastor away from parish ministry?
Not at all. Often parish pastors feel trapped in their role until they realize they're free to do any number of things.
An Episcopal priest who's a writer attended one of my two-week workshops, and I asked him why he was there. He said, "Dick, I have to write a book every year, and I don't want to have to write a book every year."
Then a year or so later he visited me, and I asked him, "What's happened since the workshop?"
He said, "I'm still writing a book each year, but the funny thing is, I enjoy it now. I was doing it before because it was the only thing I could think of doing. But at the workshop, I got a vision of all the different types of ministry God could call me to. I decided that among them all, the one I like the best is writing. Now I do it because I want to; then I did it because I had to."
Pastors trying to be intelligent servants of God should first identify the gifts God has given them. I don't mean only their talents and skills, but also their fields of knowledge, their yearnings, and what issues stir them.
What's an effective way of doing that?
Pastors sometimes use umbrella words to describe what they do, and they put them in the jargon of their own profession. Take preaching. There is no such single skill as preaching. Rather, preaching includes various skills. So I ask preachers to describe what they do when they preach.
One person might say, "I really love to take large theological concepts and show their practical application in daily life," which in secular language is "showing the practical applications of theoretical ideas."
Another might say, "I love persuading people. I love holding a congregation's attention. I love the sense that you can hear a pin drop when I'm at my most eloquent." That is "the ability to communicate and arouse enthusiasm within others."
Let's try another skill: the ability to talk with people and help them articulate their deepest fears.
Take that out of church jargon, and that would be called counseling or mentoring. All of this is essentially a translation ability.
We had a skillful career counselor once working with a black teenager from the ghetto. She couldn't get him to tell her anything he enjoyed doing. She said, "You want work? Well, let's find what you enjoy."
"I don't enjoy doing anything."
She said, "What do you do all day?"
He said, "I sit in front of the TV."
"Tell me how you do that?"
"Well, I turn it on and watch, and if I don't like the program, I turn the dial to another one," he replied, gesturing with his hands. "If I don't like that one, I turn to another."
She said, "Oh, you're dramatizing. You're using your hands. Do you like to use your hands?"
"Yeah, I do."
So as a result of his describing that one thing, she began to get him to see a bunch of jobs he could do with his hands, and enjoy.
In a like manner, we have to find out from this person who enjoys translating the feelings into words exactly how he or she does it: What do you do when you're through? Do you like to help the person see concepts in a larger context?
Or a person realizes he or she loves language. It never occurred before that the love of language and this ability to counsel well is the same skill. The principle is that when you were enjoying yourself, you were using the skills God gave you that he most likes to have you use.
Let's say a youth director is great at building ministry programs. What, in secular terms, are the skills being used?
The abilities to define goals and then to figure out the practical steps to work toward them. By the way, that's not a common gift. Lots of people are good at finding goals but don't have the slightest idea of how to work toward them, and many of them are in high positions in government! (Laughter)
The person good at building ministry programs has a bunch of skills at work: motivating, planning, and so on.
The skills a person has in doing a particular activity often work like the muscles in the arm. Merely moving the arm requires different muscles working with each other and sometimes in tension with each other. Skills are like that. Only when the skills are inventoried do we begin to see how they interact with each other.
What did you find when you inventoried your own skills?
I love to make ideas more effective by organizing them, shaping, perfecting, developing, and building into them systems that help people achieve their fullest possibilities. Look at almost anything I do, and you can find that motivation running like an underground river beneath the soil.
The definition of an ideal job is the intersection of many things: my skills, the fields of knowledge I most love, my spiritual interpretation of life, the kinds of people and things I most like to work with, and the setting in which I enjoy working. All these strands meet in what I'm doing today.
When we inventory our strengths, how can we be unbiased? Have you ever met a pastor who says, "I'm a terrible preacher"?
Most of us would go into a mammoth depression if we thought we were performing poorly the essential skills of our vocations. A lot depends on how many skills we think we have. If I think I have only three skills, naturally I'm going to tell you I do at least one of those three-and maybe more-very well, because my whole self-esteem is resting on them.
But if I inventory my skills and discover I have forty skills I'm good at, then I can rest on the forty and not depend on any one for my self-esteem.
We've discovered two steps toward better self-esteem. The first is to inventory talents and skills with at least two other people giving feedback. Second, go out and do "informational interviewing," saying to knowledgeable people, "These are my gifts and talents. Help me understand the different ways in which these gifts and talents are used in the secular world." The very act of talking to other people raises self-esteem, as options become apparent.
Let's consider a pastor who's been in a pastorate for eight or ten years. The initial excitement is waning, and he wonders where else he might have an effective ministry. What advice would you give?
Pray. Moving within the church is the most difficult movement in the professional world. The typical pastor I run into is frustrated, and it's the same theme again and again: "I've been here too long, and I don't know where else to move. I can't seem to get myself seriously considered anywhere else." That's true across all the denominations, except those with bishops who assign people, and in those denominations, pastors are frustrated because they don't like where they're sent.
What can pastors do about it?
I come back to it again-they have to sit down and take inventory. I reiterate this because it's the first step toward anything. We need to put one foot down and move the other foot in front of it. Having inventoried our gifts, even if we end up staying in that parish, reinvigorates our ministry. We see finally what we love to do, and we can call in others in the congregation to take over parts we don't like.
Have you seen this principle in practice?
When I supervised campus ministers for eight years, I once went to a university where six pastors of different denominations worked in a house built by the Lutherans. I was called in because they weren't working well together, and nobody could offer a solution. I prayed for wisdom, as I always do before I enter any new situation, and sat down with the dozen or so staff.
I found they had worked together more than five years. So I asked them each to write down the names of the other people, and under each name, to put down what gifts God had given this person that he or she most delighted to use. Then they went around the circle and explained what they wrote about each person. They each missed every other person in the circle! (One person got all of them right-the receptionist.) They had worked together for five years but hadn't the slightest idea what was going on with the others.
The minister they'd targeted as loving administration was of course the Lutheran, whose denomination owned the building. But he said, "I hate administration. If somebody shows me one more burnt-out light bulb, I'm not going to be responsible for what I do with it!"
The Presbyterian across from him said, "I love administration, but I thought I'd be stepping on your toes if I said that." So they reapportioned the responsibilities among themselves, and then each one began doing what he or she delighted in. It was a revelation for them. That's what can happen in a congregation.
Sometimes pastors, because of the discouraging odds of receiving a hoped-for call, feel they have to jump at whatever call comes their way.
That's a big mistake. Too many unhappy clergy have lived by that credo. There are worse things than not getting a call to an appropriate place, and getting a call to an inappropriate place is one of them.
The fact that a call is extended doesn't make it necessarily an appropriate place for ministry. The key to vocation is not blind obedience: going wherever God leads us because the more we dislike something, the more it must be God's will. When someone says something like that to me, I ask, "Did it ever occur to you the call might be a partnership in which both you and God agree on something?"
There's a difference between vocation for a dog, which is obedience, and vocation for a human being, which, from everything we see in the New Testament, is cooperation. It's God and the person agreeing where to go.
Of course there are cases where someone drags his feet and later says, "Yes, I see why God sent me here." But God doesn't treat people as robots. I find that concept of vocation mindboggling, and every week I see the destructive consequences of it in people's lives.
How should a pastor prepare for an interview with a prospective church?
First, pastors need to have a clear understanding that their vocation is to live consciously in the presence of God, to have the Holy Spirit transforming them into the image of Christ every day. They primarily are called to be a certain kind of person, rather than to do certain tasks.
Then they should determine where what God most needs done and what they most delight in doing intersect. That intersection likely will open up a number of different jobs or works, both within the church and without.
If pastors go into an interview with that clearly in mind, then it becomes obvious that they aren't doing what I think is the single greatest obstacle to getting a job in the church: groveling, saying, "I'll be anything you want me to be and do anything you want me to do if you'll just give me the call." That's the antithesis of their true vocation.
What should pastors keep in mind during the interview itself?
We know what makes for a winsome interview. First, the candidate should talk half of the time about himself and half about the position. If candidates don't talk at all about themselves, people think they're chameleons who are willing to be whatever the parish wants them to be. And nobody wants a chameleon. They want somebody whose behavior they can predict.
The second half of the conversation is about the parish. The successful candidate wants to get the committee to talk. Research has discovered that people most likely to get hired stick to this 50-50 ratio of talk about the candidate and about the church.
The second wise course in interviewing is never to give an answer that's shorter than twenty seconds or longer than two minutes-unlike this interview! (Laughter) I'm famous for fifteen-minute answers to half-minute questions, but in a job interview, that's death. Nobody wants to listen to a monologue. People want succinct, quick answers.
What is contentment in ministry?
Contentment in ministry is the same as contentment in any job. It comes from standing constantly and consciously in the presence of God so that he can transform any task into something meaningful. I read of a checker at a Safeway store in Oakland some years back. Her job wasn't ideal, but she had figured out ways to transform that job. She'd tap out a rhythm you could almost tap dance to as she rang up items on the cash register. She'd offer recipes to customers. She had a jar of cookies at her side to hand out to kids. And to beat the monotony of bagging the groceries, she played a game with herself, figuring out the cleverest way to fit the most items into the bag. She made packing bags an art.
People often see vocational contentment as a happy match between what you have to do and what you enjoy doing. But there's no such permanent match. When you define contentment as an ideal match, which I did for years, you're subject to the fact that it's like passion: it often doesn't last long.
But when you define contentment as the ability to let God transform your job, then you'll find contentment.
Transform it into what?
Transform it so that it is fun or meaningful for you. The checker loved rhythm, so she turned the typing of the keys into a rhythm. She loved helping people, so she helped people rather than simply bag their groceries. She loved figuring out things, so she used that skill in packing bags. She imported her delights into that job.
Our primary interaction during the work day is between us and the Holy Spirit. Every day can be a surprise then. We never know, for example, when the person who irritates us at 11 o'clock has been sent by God. That's the transformation of work.
Is there room for vocational ambition in the ministry?
Everything depends on who the person is. If I'd see ambition in certain individuals, I'd salute it, because it might be the first time they've considered themselves worthy of a greater work for God. But if I'd see that ambition in others, it may appear consistent with their pattern of being secular corporate raiders in parochial dress. If that were the case, I'd pray that they'd jettison their ambition.
Pastors who make their ambition a driving force, who feel compelled to take one larger parish after another to justify their ministries, ought to take note of Raymond Lull, the first missionary to the Arabs. He labored his entire lifetime with only one convert, and yet by doing that, he laid the foundation for the missionary movement throughout the Middle East and Africa.
None of us can evaluate the fruits of our ministries, and so ambition in ministry is a nebulous concept. Maybe the work you're doing right now is the greatest work you could be doing for God.
But most people want to go higher and higher.
Phillips Brooks said there are two kinds of explorers: One has to go over the mountains to take possession of the new frontier he's never seen before. The other kind of explorer becomes familiar with his or her own land and digs deeper and deeper into it. Brooks said the higher ambition is entering into the deeper possession of what we already have rather than going out to acquire something new.
Some Christians seem to need to go out and acquire more and more prestige or power. Others enter deeper into the character God has given them and pay more attention to the kind of people they're becoming.
I wonder: shouldn't ambition for the latter be held with at least as much esteem as the former? We don't have to always go on to bigger and better enterprises.
To what extent ought we derive contentment from our vocation?
Vocation ought to be third. The first and greatest enjoyment anyone can have is being alive in God's creation, being in communication with him and used by him.
The second source of happiness is the relationship with one's partner. Years ago a woman in my congregation told me her husband had announced he was gay and was leaving her. She said, "All my life I've been ready for some younger woman to come along and compete with me for my husband, and I was determined to be more feminine, more charming, more patient than she could ever hope to be and outlast her. But I never dreamed my competitor would be another man. I have no idea how to compete!"
There are ten thousand pastors' wives (and now, husbands) who could say that same thing, except instead of man they'd say ministry. They always have to play second fiddle to their mate's work. How does a wife (or a husband) fight it? The vocation of pastor ought to come third.
I think a lot of our clergy's dis-ease in their vocation comes from the fact that they haven't addressed contentment in their relationships with God and in their marriage; they're trying to make the ministry give them what they are intended to find in their primary relationships.
The ultimate contract for ministry is a contract between the soul of the pastor and God. And from the pastor's side it says, "I am grateful for all you have done for me in Creation and in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, and I offer back all the gifts you've given me for use in your service."
That is the true vocation of every pastor, and every Christian.
Copyright © 1990 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
