The God Who Calls

Everything in this document descends from a single claim about God. There are two ways of choosing a person, and Scripture is unusually insistent about which one God uses.

The first is selection. To select is to choose on account of attributes, to prefer someone because of what they are. We select constantly, and rightly: we hire the strongest candidate, we pick the sound fruit, we admire what is fitting and able. Selection sorts by qualities and settles on the one that fits. There is nothing wrong with it in its place. But notice what it makes the bond depend on. In selection, the worth of the relation rests on the qualifications of the parties, and if the qualifications were different the choice would fall elsewhere.

The second is election, in the old theological sense of the word rather than the political one. To elect is to choose in a way that precedes attributes, binding oneself first and letting the relationship do its work afterward. Election does not sort. It sets its heart, and then it goes about making the beloved into what the love requires.

The God of Scripture loves and chooses by election, and goes out of the way to say so. When God chooses Israel, the reasons are named precisely in order to be ruled out: “The LORD didn’t set his love on you, nor choose you, because you were more in number than any people; for you were the fewest of all peoples: but because the LORD loves you” (Deuteronomy 7:7–8). The reasoning closes on itself. They were loved because they were loved, and that closed circle is grace.

The pattern holds wherever God chooses a person for a work. When Samuel is sent to anoint a king and does what any of us would do, looking at the tall and impressive eldest son, he is stopped with a sentence that could stand as the motto of this whole document: “Don’t look on his face, or on the height of his stature; because I have rejected him: for I see not as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). One after another the qualified sons are passed over, until someone remembers the youngest, out with the sheep, not thought worth calling in from the field. He is the one. Paul makes the same point about the church as a whole: “God chose the foolish things of the world that he might put to shame those who are wise. God chose the weak things of the world, that he might put to shame the things that are strong… that no flesh should boast before God” (1 Corinthians 1:27–29).

Wesley knew this about God and said it in exactly the place where it matters for us. Arguing about who may preach, and tracing the offices of priest and prophet back through Israel’s history, he observed that the priesthood ran by birth while prophecy did not, and that prophets turned up in the wrong tribes and the wrong families with some regularity. His explanation was one clause long: “For in this respect God always asserted his right to send by whom he would send.” That is a statement about God before it is a statement about ministry. The freedom to send is God’s own, and it is not surrendered to any system that the church may build for recognizing the sent.

Our own Discipline, to its credit, says something very like this: “God’s call has many manifestations, and the Church cannot structure a single test of authenticity” (¶ 304.1). That sentence is true and it is costly, and we will need to ask later whether the paragraphs that follow it behave as though it were true.

God does not call the qualified; God qualifies the called

Now the move on which everything else depends.

If God chose ministers by selection, the order of events would be obvious: a person would first become the kind of person fit for the work, and God would then choose them for it. Qualification would precede call. This is, I think, how most of our processes are actually built, and it is worth noticing how natural it feels.

It is not how the call narratives run. In them the order is reversed, and reversed so consistently that the reversal is plainly the point.

Moses is called and answers, “I am not eloquent… I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue.” God does not dispute the assessment. God says, “Who made man’s mouth?… Now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth, and teach you what you shall speak” (Exodus 4:10–12). Gideon is called and answers, “my family is the poorest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father’s house.” God does not offer a second opinion about the family. God says, “Surely I will be with you” (Judges 6:15–16). Isaiah sees the LORD and cries out that he is a man of unclean lips, and the seraph does not argue; the seraph brings a coal from the altar and touches his mouth with it. Only then, with the lips that were unclean and have been made clean, does he hear “Whom shall I send?” and answer, “Here I am. Send me!” (Isaiah 6:5–8).

Jeremiah gives us the form entire, and it is worth reading as a whole:

“Before I formed you in the belly, I knew you. Before you came out of the womb, I sanctified you. I have appointed you a prophet to the nations.” Then I said, “Ah, Lord LORD! Behold, I don’t know how to speak; for I am a child.” But the LORD said to me, “Don’t say, ‘I am a child;’ for to whoever I shall send you, you shall go, and whatever I shall command you, you shall speak. Don’t be afraid because of them; for I am with you to deliver you,” says the LORD. Then the LORD stretched out his hand, and touched my mouth; and the LORD said to me, “Behold, I have put my words in your mouth.” (Jeremiah 1:5–9)

Four movements, in order. God calls, and the call reaches back before the man existed, which forecloses any possibility that it rests on what he has become. The called man protests, and his protest is an attribute test: I am a child, I cannot speak, I am not the sort of person this work requires. God overrules the protest without denying the facts of it. And then God touches his mouth, and what was true a moment ago is no longer true. The words are in him because God put them there.

That fourth movement is the one our theology of ordination has lost. It is not encouragement. God does not tell Jeremiah that he has hidden gifts, or that he will grow into the work, or that his sense of inadequacy is a good sign. God supplies what was missing. The touch is the giving of the very capacity the man correctly said he lacked.

So the sentence I would put at the center of any Methodist theology of ordination is this: God does not call the qualified. God qualifies the called.

This is not a pious formula. It is a claim about the direction in which divine action runs, and it has immediate consequences. If the call itself confers the fitness for the work, then fitness is evidence of the call rather than a precondition of it, and everything the church does in examining a candidate is a matter of reading evidence rather than administering a gate. It means that a church which sorts candidates primarily by attributes they brought with them has arranged its life around selection while confessing a God who elects. And it means that the church’s own act in ordaining is not the conferral of a status on someone who has met a standard. It is the church recognizing a work God has begun, and asking God to continue it.

Two guardrails belong here, or the claim will be heard as something it is not.

The first: election is free in its ground and exacting in its end. God’s choosing owes nothing to merit, and God chooses for something: for holiness, for covenant, for a work. Israel is elected without qualification and held to account without mercy. To say that the ground of a call is grace is to relocate judgment, not to abolish it. The test moves from the front of the process to the fruit of it, and, as we will see when we come to Wesley’s three marks, a fruit test is considerably more demanding than a credential.

The second: none of this makes preparation unimportant. Isaiah’s lips had to be touched, and Jeremiah’s mouth had to be filled, and neither man was left as he was found. The question is never whether formation matters. The question is whether formation is understood as the shaping of someone God has called, or as the accumulation of the attributes that qualify a person to be considered. Those two things can look identical from outside and are opposite in their theology.