Introduction: Calling in Context ¹

How do churches discern and incarnate God’s calling in their communities? And how do contextual considerations – even societal disruption and change – invite us to re-imagine the vocation of the local church? Regent Exchange, an educational research initiative at Regent College in Vancouver, BC from 2018-2024, accompanied a group of local churches in Cascadia, a region that includes British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon, known for its rugged individualism, secular pluralism, and love of the outdoors.²  Within the uniqueness of this social, cultural, temporal, and geographic context, Regent Exchange set out to explore how these congregations perceived God’s call. Our overarching question asked, how do churches discern and incarnate their vocation (in context)?³ We were also interested in how churches navigated unexpected change and its implications for their collective understanding and expression of vocation.⁴

Re-envisioning Vocation

In recent years, the language of “mission” has come under scrutiny due to its unfortunate historical connotations of colonialism along with a tendency to reduce mission to verbal evangelism done by only a few professionals. In particular, scholar-practitioners of integral mission have suggested that this perspective has “impeded a holistic understanding and witness of the gospel…which involves the whole Church, embodying God’s kingdom in word and deed in every aspect of life on earth, as she dwells in and expands to and from all corners of the earth.”⁵

Understanding the church’s vocation as a communal endeavor, one which ultimately redirects the church in mission to the world back to the One who calls, is key to a more comprehensive concept of vocation.And, just as the notion of “mission” may be misconstrued, so too the language of calling is frequently ambiguous or misrepresented. Authors William W. Klein, professor emeritus of New Testament interpretation at Denver Seminary, and Daniel J. Steiner, leadership coach with Trailhead Coaching, assert that “[a] limited or anemic understanding of calling robs the church of the contributions of all God’s people to God’s mission in the world.”⁶ And while it is beyond the scope of this brief article to develop a full theology of calling, nevertheless, understanding the church’s vocation as a communal endeavor, one which ultimately redirects the church in mission to the world back to the One who calls, is key to a more comprehensive concept of vocation.⁷ It is the Caller who initiates, and God’s people are to respond as “the Called ones.” 

Living in response to God’s call is fundamentally a dialogical and praxiological process of continual discernment, prayerful reflection, learning, and acting together as a community of believers. And rather than reducing missional engagement to an evangelistic project or program of activities, a more robust understanding of the church’s vocation may invite congregations to re-imagine their collective calling in fresh ways, recognizing the process of discerning and incarnating God’s call as an ongoing journey. In this way, vocation can be understood as part of the Missio Dei — an opportunity for churches to actively engage in God’s transformative vision for the world in ways that are most appropriate for their people and place.⁸

Invitation to a Journey

A journey motif, an especially apt metaphor in the Pacific Northwest, known for its outdoor hiking adventures, framed our curricular exploration of vocation as a collective endeavour. This approach invited a re-envisioning of the church as a whole-life learning community. In this perspective, learning is a holistic process — one that extends beyond the intellectual accumulation of head knowledge. Rather, whole-life learning encompasses growth in mind, heart, soul, and strength, and is necessarily connected to the growth and formation of both individuals and communities. A vision for the church as a learning community, “could transform our imagination for Christian discipleship from a highly individualistic pursuit to a shared one rooted in our particular congregations.”⁹ Such a vision would reinforce our collective calling to engage “in the participatory life of a community” rather than viewing church as “simply an experience to be passively consumed.”¹⁰  

With the emphasis on the church as a learning community, and the conviction that calling is best explored together, Regent Exchange employed a cohort model with team-based learning and peer groups or communities of practice.¹¹ Church learning teams composed of individuals from each church helped to contextualize curricular content, facilitate communal discernment, and ensure that there were feedback loops in communicating the team’s learning back to the wider congregation. Leaders were drawn from church staff along with more informal yet influential leaders within the congregation. Further, these church learning teams were assembled into cohort groupings with approximately five or six churches in each cohort. As much as possible, the three cohorts were intentionally diverse in denominational affiliation, size, location, and socio-cultural-ethnic make-up. Such diversity within the learning communities offered a rich resource for learning and discerning God’s call from a variety of perspectives. And the ongoing network of a small group of churches allowed for a cross-pollination of ideas, stimulating creativity, fostering innovation and building connections — even across ecclesial traditions.

The learning journey curriculum employed an iterative cycle of listening and discerning together, then responding through a creative process of designing and implementing “calling experiments” or smaller initiatives, either within the congregation or their local communities, which then resulted in new learning and further opportunities to respond to living out God’s call in and for their place.¹² An adaptive praxis-oriented approach to evaluation encouraged church teams to pause for “learning moments” in the action-reflection cycle.¹³  Consequently, churches approached the design and implementation of their calling experiments with opportunity to learn from their mistakes – often changing their strategies to better respond to the questions people were actually asking, or in response to an unexpected disruption — from the loss of a team member to navigating the far-reaching implications of a global pandemic. 

Key Findings

Research data was drawn from a variety of sources including Regent Exchange team learnings from both formative and summative evaluations, final learning reports from individual churches, a formal research inquiry with focus groups, interviews, and observations, and participation in a larger multi-site research initiative in partnership with the Lilly Endowment.¹⁴ Overall, we found that walking alongside fourteen church learning teams clearly illustrated how the particularities of context impact the diversity of ways God calls congregations to witness and contribute to the flourishing of their communities. Developing an awareness of contextual characteristics and dynamics was crucial in helping churches recognize and articulate their identity and inspire them with the confidence to discern, design, and implement experiments that flowed from this understanding of God’s call.Through our guided discovery process, churches learned to do the ongoing evaluative work necessary to better understand themselves and their environments, including their distinct social and geographic locations. Developing an awareness of contextual characteristics and dynamics was crucial in helping churches recognize and articulate their identity and inspire them with the confidence to discern, design, and implement experiments that flowed from this understanding of God’s call. Factors that contributed to discerning vocation in context included learning in community, response and adaptation, shared participation, and the value of accompaniment.¹⁵

Learning in Community

Throughout the life of this initiative, “learning in community” became a key feature of the Regent Exchange learning journey. Relational learning happened in both church learning teams along with the cohort-wide peer groups that met on a bimonthly basis. Peer groups consisted of one to two representatives from each church learning team allowing for cross-fertilization of ideas, reflective listening, and prayer. Our findings discovered that a deeper understanding of God’s call often emerged through these formational connections. Fellowship, encouragement, and relational support, along with new insights and understandings were identified as significant outcomes of team learning. And these small groups provided a safe space outside of everyday commitments for team members to critically reflect on new discoveries in dialogue with others, together discerning how God might be leading their church to respond. 

Response and Adaptation

Throughout the learning journey, churches encountered various challenges unique to their congregations: external challenges, such as an unexpected relocation of their church building, or internal challenges, such as changes in church leadership, lack of support from leaders, and diminishing engagement from the congregation. Faced with these obstacles, the churches learned to take an approach of listening to the changing needs of people in their congregation and their respective communities. Cultivating a posture of listening helped church teams to pause, reflect, and regroup. Likewise, it created a space for teams to discern together the best strategies for adapting and responding to the needs of their congregations and communities. As a result, churches exhibited greater reflexivity and resilience in their capacity to adapt, collaborate, and innovate, even as new challenges continued to emerge throughout the implementation of their calling experiments. 

Shared Participation

Team-coaching and ongoing dialogue were essential ingredients to facilitating participation in church learning teams. As team members shared their vision with the rest of the congregation, they were able to gain additional support and ‘buy-in.’ Sharing responsibilities within the team offered an opportunity for various members to exercise leadership, strengthening ownership, and ultimately building relational solidarity and cohesion. In particular, it was found that collaborative, yet decisive leadership played a significant role in facilitating each team’s journey together throughout this initiative.¹⁶

Accompaniment through Guided Discovery

Perhaps one of the most significant learnings that emerged out of this initiative was the value of accompaniment through guided self-discovery. Our highly intentional curricular process, including cohort gatherings, peer-groups, coaching, and reporting requirements, aided churches in identifying and understanding the gaps in their capacities and helped them become more realistic about ministry plans. Churches reported that Regent Exchange acted as a “catalyst” for their congregations in (re)discovering their giftings. This community-directed learning approach empowered teams to work with what they had, drawing upon their distinctive gifts, people, and existing resources, and together discern the ways in which God might already be at work in their church and their communities. 

Conclusion 

Our exploration of calling with churches in Cascadia offers a fresh perspective on mission through the lens of vocation. As Christian congregations respond collectively to God’s call through a process of listening and learning from and with their respective communities, they embody God’s reconciling work as Christ’s ambassadors within their unique contexts.¹⁷ Fundamentally, this approach is deeply relational and formational. It requires a commitment to grow together, listening for how God may be working in and through our ever-changing circumstances. Yet, what can we learn from this initiative? What might be the implications for not only ministry practice, but for ministry education? 

Our highly intentional curricular process, including cohort gatherings, peer-groups, coaching, and reporting requirements, aided churches in identifying and understanding the gaps in their capacities and helped them become more realistic about ministry plans.The dynamic nature of calling invites churches and ministry organizations to embrace a collective journey of faith, anchored in the misso-Dei — envisioning themselves as a learning, growing community rather than only a group of individual Christians.¹⁸ Accompaniment through a congregational coach or intentional learning curriculum or program can serve as a catalyst to help ministry communities consider how they might discern and respond to collectively to God’s call in light of their own contextual realities. Reading together such texts as Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good; The Stories We Live: Finding God's Calling All around Us; or The Innovative Church: How Leaders and Their Congregations Can Adapt in an Ever-Changing World accompanied by reflective conversation can also stimulate churches and organizations to consider new possibilities for ministry practice.¹⁹

As well, in an age of excessive individualization, when theological institutions are grappling with the consequences of a progressive “unraveling” (as Ted Smith terms it), a renewed focus on the collective implications for calling invites creative and even transformative curricular possibilities for both students and institutions.²⁰ Moreover, an iterative approach to program design could allow for experimentation, ensuring there are intentional feedback loops and meaningful collaboration with key stakeholders. Dr. Tod Bolsinger in his work on adaptive change says that in our present world we can’t ‘skate to where the puck is going’ (a hockey idiom attributed to Wayne Gretzky) because there are actually 14 pucks. So instead of trying to predict the future, it's more important to prototype and try small things, and not to ask, "did it work?" but rather "what did we learn?"²¹ 

Regent Exchange was designed on the premise that faith communities have much to offer theological schools, but this requires institutions to embrace a learning-centred approach from “the inside out” to foster greater mutuality between their constituency and educational programs. Community and church-based research initiatives that employ ethnography and other qualitative modes of inquiry could offer real-world experiential learning opportunities for theological students with potential to enhance theological, missional, and vocational understanding and practice — learning with and from local churches as together we respond to God’s call in light of the particularities in which we live. 

References

Ammerman, Nancy and Roman Williams. Called to Lives of Meaning and Purpose: Learning from the Initiative. unpublished report for the Lilly Endowment, 2023.

Bolsinger, Todd. Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory. Lisle: Intervarsity Press, 2016. 

Cahalan, Kathleen A. The Stories We Live: Finding God’s Calling All around Us. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017.

Cormode, Scott. The Innovative Church: How Leaders and Their Congregations Can Adapt in an Ever-Changing World. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020.

Ho, Claudia. Lessons from Regent Exchange: Small Grants Church Learning Initiative, unpublished report for Regent College, 2025.

Kaemingk, Matthew Kaemingk, “A Postcard from the Pacific Northwest,” Comment, September 1st, 2014, https://comment.org/a-postcard-from-the-pacific-northwest/  

Klein, William and Daniel Steiner. What Is My Calling? A Biblical and Theological Exploration of Christian Identity. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2022. 

McEwen, Rhonda and Gustavo Santos. “Calling, Context, and the Church: From Belonging to Witness.” CRUX 60, no.1 (2024, Spring): 9-16.

McEwen, Rhonda. “Regent Exchange: Churches for the Common Good Program Report.” Unpublished program report(s) for Lilly Endowment, Called to Lives of Meaning and Purpose Initiative, Regent College, Vancouver, BC, 2023-2024. 

Quinn-Patton, Michael. Developmental Evaluation: Applying Complexity Concepts to Enhance Innovation and Use. New York: Guilford Publications, 2011.

Rivers, Prince. “Navigating Change” with Tod Bolsinger, Alban at Duke Divinity School podcast, April 4, 2024, https://alban.org/2024/04/04/tod-bolsinger-navigating-change/

Sherman, Amy L. Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2011.

Smith, Christopher. “Addressing the Evangelical Mind-Body Problem: The Local Church as Learning Organization.” Christian Scholar’s Review 47, no. 4 (Summer 2018): 353-362.

Smith, Ted A. The End of Theological Education. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2023.

Stott-Bediako Forum https://infemit.org/sb2024/

Todd, Douglas. Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia – Exploring the Spirit of the Pacific Northwest. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2008.