The Test of the Call: Grace, Gifts, Fruit

Principle

The church tests a call by three marks: grace, gifts, and fruit. Where these three concur in a person, the church has sufficient proof that God has called them, and the church’s task is to recognize that call rather than to add further conditions to it.

Background

In 1744 the Methodist preachers met in conference, and among the questions they put to themselves was how to tell whether a person who believed they were called to preach actually was. The answer they gave has been in our books ever since:

Q. 50. How shall we try those who think they are moved by the Holy Ghost to preach?

A. Inquire, (1.) Do they know God as a pardoning God? Have they the love of God abiding in them? Do they desire and seek nothing but God? And are they holy in all manner of conversation? (2.) Have they gifts (as well as grace) for the work? Have they (in some tolerable degree) a clear, sound understanding? Have they a right judgment in the things of God? Have they a just conception of salvation by faith? And has God given them any degree of utterance? Do they speak justly, readily, clearly? (3.) Have they fruit? Are any truly convinced of sin, and converted to God, by their preaching?

As long as these three marks concur in any one, we believe he is called of God to preach. These we receive as sufficient proof that he is “moved thereto by the Holy Ghost.”

Three features of that answer deserve attention, because we have kept the vocabulary and lost most of the structure.

First, the questions are addressed to the church, not to the candidate. The instruction is “Inquire.” Someone else is meant to look, and to report what they see. Notice how different this is from asking a person whether they feel called. The conference is not gathering intentions; it is gathering evidence.

Second, all three marks are retrospective. Grace, gifts, and fruit are things that either have appeared or have not. Even the second mark, which sounds like aptitude, is stated as observed performance: has God given them any degree of utterance, do they speak justly, readily, clearly. Nobody is being asked to predict.

Third, and most striking, the marks are declared sufficient. “These we receive as sufficient proof.” Wesley’s conference did not treat grace, gifts, and fruit as a floor beneath additional requirements. It treated them as the whole of what the church needs in order to say that God has called this person. That is a remarkably confident sentence, and it is confident precisely because it rests on evidence of God’s action rather than on the church’s assessment of potential.

The third mark is the one that needs no defense, because it is the test Jesus gives for exactly this problem. Warning about false prophets, “who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves,” he does not tell the disciples to examine credentials or to interrogate intentions. He gives them one instrument: “By their fruits you will know them. Do you gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles?… A good tree can’t produce evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree produce good fruit. Therefore by their fruits you will know them” (Matthew 7:15–20). It is a retrospective test, and it is offered as sufficient. Wesley’s conference did not invent the third question. It read the Gospel and asked what the Lord told the church to look at.

The same instrument appears where the appointing is done. “You didn’t choose me, but I chose you, and appointed you, that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain” (John 15:16). Chosen, appointed, and sent to bear fruit, in that order, with the fruit as the end rather than the entrance requirement.

Now set our own practice beside it.

The three marks have not disappeared from the Book of Discipline. They have been redistributed, and the pattern of the redistribution is the thing to see.

Fruit survives at the beginning. When a district committee examines a candidate, it may require information “for determining gifts, evidence of God’s grace, fruit, and demonstration of the call to licensed or ordained ministry” (¶ 310). At that stage, close to the congregation, among people who have watched the candidate work, the church still asks Wesley’s question.

Fruit survives at the end, in the paragraphs governing what happens when a minister’s effectiveness is in question. There the church asks whether a plan of action has “produced fruit that gives a realistic expectation of future effectiveness” (¶ 334.1c; ¶ 360). Even here the fruit is instrumental, valued for what it predicts rather than for what it shows, but the word is present.

Between those two points, at the moment when the church actually ordains, fruit is gone. The standing formula for what the community affirms in a candidate is “gifts, evidence of God’s grace, and promise of future usefulness” (¶ 301.2; and see ¶ 304.4, ¶ 332). Grace remains. Gifts remain. In the place where Wesley’s conference asked whether anyone had been converted by this person’s preaching, we ask whether they show promise of future usefulness. Our teaching documents have absorbed the same phrase; This Holy Mystery quotes it when describing what the community affirms in those it ordains.

That phrase has its own long history among us, and no one inserted it in bad faith. The problem is not that the words are new. The problem is what they do at the place where they now stand.

A test of fruit looks backward at what God has done. A test of promise looks forward at what the church expects. And a forecast can only be made out of the materials available for forecasting, which are the visible attributes of the person in front of you: their education, their articulateness, their age, their availability, their poise in an interview, how much they resemble the ministers we have found useful before. When the church replaces evidence with prediction, it is not being more careful. It is doing the one thing Samuel was expressly stopped from doing. Man looks at the outward appearance. Promise of future usefulness is an attribute test wearing the vocabulary of discernment, and it arrives at exactly the moment when the stakes are highest.

The same substitution has happened inside the Historic Examination itself, which is the other place Wesley’s questions survive. Those questions (Have you faith in Christ? Are you going on to perfection? Will you keep the General Rules? Will you visit from house to house?) are genuinely Wesley’s, and they are put to candidates for full connection to this day. But every one of them is addressed to the candidate, and nearly every one asks about resolve. Will you. Are you determined. Are you resolved. The half of Wesley’s examination that asked the church to look at the person and report what God had done there is not in the paragraph. We kept the interrogation of the candidate’s will and dropped the church’s inquiry into the evidence.

There is one more sentence worth putting beside Wesley’s “sufficient proof.” Our Discipline says that in all votes regarding license, ordination, or conference membership, “the requirements set forth herein are minimum requirements” (¶ 304.4). Wesley’s conference said three marks suffice. We say our requirements are the least that may be asked. Those are different theologies, and the difference is not subtle. One believes that God’s action in a person is enough and the church’s job is to see it. The other believes that God’s action in a person is a starting point on which the church may build whatever further conditions seem prudent.

Something should be said for what recovering the third mark would cost, since it is not free. Fruit is the hardest of the three marks to game and the hardest to bureaucratize. It cannot be earned by attending anything. It cannot be certified by an institution. It requires that somebody who has watched a person’s ministry over time be asked what came of it, and be willing to say. That is slower than reading a transcript, and considerably more uncomfortable, and it cannot be delegated to a form. But it is also the only one of the three marks that is equally available to everyone God calls, which is why its loss falls hardest on exactly the people our system already screens out: the bivocational, the second career, the person rooted in a place, the one who could not move to a residential campus. A person who has been converting sinners in a small congregation for a decade has fruit in abundance and, quite often, no promise of future usefulness that our instruments can detect.

Practice

The three marks should be asked at every stage at which the church makes a judgment about a call, and asked in the form Wesley’s conference used: as questions put to the church about the candidate, answered from evidence.

Boards of ordained ministry and clergy sessions should ask, of every person presented for licensing, commissioning, ordination, or admission into full connection, whether grace, gifts, and fruit concur in this person, and should be able to say what the fruit has been. Where the three concur, the church should be slow to withhold what it has been given sufficient proof to grant, and should be able to state its reasons in terms of the marks rather than in terms of unmet institutional conditions.

The Historic Examination should be restored to its full form, with the church’s inquiry standing beside the candidate’s promises. The bishop is already directed to explain the historic nature of these questions and to interpret their spirit and intent (¶ 336); that is the natural place for the conference to be reminded that it is not only receiving promises but reporting evidence.

Candidates should be formed and examined in settings where fruit can actually be observed, over a period long enough for it to appear, and those who have watched them should be asked directly. A process that can be completed entirely through documents and interviews has no way of applying the third mark, whatever its paperwork says.

And wherever the phrase “promise of future usefulness” governs a decision about a call, the church should ask itself what it is actually measuring, and whether the answer is the candidate’s usefulness to God or their resemblance to the ministers we are used to.