The Pilgrim’s Protest

By Collin Cornell

Presumably the Apostle Paul did not spend his Sunday afternoons writing poetry; nor, I expect, did he daydream of moonlighting as a playwright on the side of apostleship. His life was characterized by a passion so strong that he described it even as a compulsion; he was a man “under obligation” to preach the gospel, set apart from birth for that end, and he took every opportunity, in season and out, to do so. He did not wrangle with the prospect of pursuing a different course in life.

In contrast to the Apostle’s vocational assurance, however, is the tension CIU students often experience. One of my friends recently remarked that she wished she had eight lives to live, so various are her interests and gifts – interior decoration, conference speaking, biblical languages, homemaking, etc. Her diffuse ambition is far from rare here. “I might be a missionary,” many upperclassmen will say, “or maybe something else. I don’t know.” At their introductory chapel, the majority of incoming students cited missions as a dream job; that same majority also stated other life goals, like teaching, or dancing, or skateboarding, or dairy farming. For CIU students, the relationship between these interests is complex and ambiguous: are they exclusive, complementary, successive, hierarchical?

The struggle for some students does not lie in deficient Christian commitment. As dissimilar as they are to Paul in their directional uncertainty, they share deeply in his apostolic desire to invest their single, passing lifetime in proclaiming the gospel; for that reason they have come to a school whose express purpose is to know Christ and to make him known. Their disquiet arises from the perceived tension between their longing to participate to the fullest in God’s redemptive mission and the particular bent of their personalities. “How can God best use my one life for the gospel?” and “What do I enjoy doing?” or “What am I good at?” are questions which do not always coalesce easily into a single answer.

CIU graduates who struggle with this issue come to stasis in a number of ways. Some will become full-time, professional Christian missionaries. These will leave behind or halfheartedly follow their other interests: they will be the missionaries with Nietzsche on the shelf or an easel out back. They bank on the future fulfillment of their other desires and say things like, “I will have all eternity to paint or write creatively or grow a garden.” Some from this line of thinking might even forfeit their human desire for a family in the interests of better propagating the faith. Other graduates will combine professional Christianity with their other interests: they will found rock-climbing ministries, sports ministries, Christian theater schools. These are the worship leaders and youth pastors, who at once remain under the auspices of official Christianity and yet fulfill their love of music or mountaineering. Still other graduates, comprising perhaps the minority at CIU, will live out their lives as unofficial Christians making disciples in so-called “marketplace ministry,” guided solely by the bent of their personalities into their particular offices. Since they want to be housewives, they become housewives; since linguistics fascinates them, they become linguistics professors, and they spread the gospel from those stations. The route by which unsure CIU students settle into vocations depends on their view of God’s mission and themselves in relation to it – and multiple perspectives exist at CIU, some of which are more implicit than others. However, I suggest that all the viewpoints at CIU can be clustered into two broad constellations based on their fundamental attitude towards interests other than making disciples: those views whose attitude is sympathetic and those whose attitude is suspicious.

The sympathetic perspectives on campus emphasize the continuity between the way God created us and the way he intends to use us in the kingdom: Jesus made the fishermen into fishers of men. Today, he makes those who love humanities into richly impacting professors and those who desire to be housewives into godly mothers and wives. Such paradigms criticize the missions movement for the chasm it opens between natural, created interests and spiritual pursuits. Some students experience confusion when, after dedicating their lives to making disciples, they are unable to shake their bent for music or philosophy or athletics. Proponents of this more holistic view claim that this dismay results from overlooking the Bible’s endorsement of the earthy parts of life. While we emphasize the Great Commission of the New Testament, we forget the primeval mandate of Genesis 1, when God blessed man and commanded him to multiply, rule over creation, and tend the garden. God’s original – and, importantly, continuing – purpose for man is familial, creative, and laborious. We violate God’s intention by denying these inborn desires and dedicating our attention solely to the second, spiritual Commission. Under this view, following our artistic, scientific, philosophical, and familial interests will not encumber the gospel, but will in fact make us richer and more attractive witnesses of Christ. The trick remains in harmonizing the two commands; the number of stalled missionaries and missionary kids’ grievances testifies to the difficulty of reconciling creation and kingdom concerns.

In opposition to the views affirming natural interests, those oriented towards suspicion marshal some formidable claims. First among these is Jesus’ statement that whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for Jesus’ sake and the gospel’s will save it. Having one’s cake and eating it, too, is no option for Jesus’ followers:
appeals to the creation mandate may only rationalize our comfortable dreams and our reluctance to sacrifice for the gospel’s expansion. Just because a desire, a relationship, or a station in life is God-given and natural, does not guarantee that God will not demand we relinquish it. God’s mission supersedes the bent of our personalities; in God’s book, the “man of the soil” builds an ark and the “slow of tongue” becomes a prophet. CIU students are appropriately discomforted: as expressed recently in chapel, some believers are indeed outside of God’s will because they have given insufficient priority to God’s heart for world evangelization. Instead, they have merely allowed their natural interests to play out, without reference to kingdom concerns. They have become lawyers and small business owners because that is where their talent lay, rather than because they evaluated where they could best make disciples. If other pursuits constitute possible distractions, then students justly sideline and scrutinize them.

In the end, we must accept a limited affirmation of created interests from the sympathetic views: commitment to God’s mission does not vaporize the innate bent of our personalities as thespians, musicians, or mathematicians. We are not blank slates awaiting a standard missionary imprint; rather, God composes our individual personalities. But if we are to obey Jesus, then all our interests and traits must be held contingently and subserviently. We must let God dictate the most fruitful use of our gifts and bents, instead of allowing them to dictate our course. The tension is delicate and persistent; a person who becomes a professor out of a conviction that God can use him best in that vocation to reach godless college students looks the same as someone who becomes a professor out of intellectual lust. In no station or stage of life will the temptation to idolize our created gifts abate, for the New Testament gives us no “safe” callings. In this, as in all cases, it does not prefer one external form to another – missionary over musician or pastor over professor – but demands inward obedience to Christ in all our diverse vocations. And its pages address all manner of folk: masters, slaves, Roman officials, husbands, wives, and children, as well as elders and apostolic delegates like Timothy or Titus.

Surely if we are as united in purpose and as various in vocation, we can’t be too far amiss.