Interview with Os Guinness

OG:  Well, The Call has always meant a tremendous amount to me personally.  The issues and the themes in The Call are the things that I wrestled with almost since I came to faith.  I've had a tremendously wonderful response to it and I still do.  Hardly a day goes by that I don't get a letter or email from someone to whom The Call has been a tremendous help.

BMC: What take-away do you want your readers to get from reading The Call?

OG:  Well, my hope is that they would see, on the one hand, that following the call is the very heart of the gospel and that it would give people a vision that the whole of life is part of answering that call of Jesus.  One of the great challenges of our day is to turn so many millions of Christians, still over 85% of Americans, into disciples who are engaging the whole of life.  It's an odd thing; you've got tiny groups like, say, the gays who are only 2% of Americans, but have an influence out of proportion to their numbers.  Whereas Christians are a huge group, yet are pretty uninfluential.  The trouble is not that we aren't where we should be.  Of course, there are spheres where we don't have enough Christians, in the university world, for instance, or the media.  But the real trouble is not that we aren't where we should be.  It's that we aren't what we should be where we are.  The truth that makes a difference there is this notion of calling.

BMC: You rightly observe that there is no call without a Caller.  With so many voices calling out, how does one discern the voice of the Caller?

OG:  Well, let me say first why I stress that there is no calling without a Caller.  After the Reformation the notion of calling began, for the first time in centuries, to be applied to work as well as spiritual things. But, slowly, vocation became identified with occupation.  Soon, vocation became another word for occupation and the notion of calling became secularized.  Today many people talk about your calling and your vocation when they are really talking about your work.  Many of them are atheists and people who don't know the Lord at all.  So, properly understood, there is literally no calling without a Caller.

Now the second part of your question.  Calling, of course, is very close to identity.  And that's why it's precious that the One who knows us better than we know ourselves, loves us.  If you follow His call, you discover who you are and you discover your identity.  It should be ideally taught when people are early teenagers through to their mid to late twenties.  Those are the years when people discover their identity, meet their spouses, discover their gifts to work, and so on.  If they are taught to look to the Lord in those years, they will really know who they are.  I said to my son from the age of twelve onwards, "C.J. (Christopher), you are not me.  You are quite different from me.  You've got your own gifts and that's what you need to discover, so you don't become like me."  And so parents, teachers, sports coaches, and mentors are very, very important in helping young people really to discover who they are.

BMC:  When you think about this area of calling, what are some of the misconceptions that you think have been most pernicious in their influence?

OG:  Well, I think the main one is that calling is something spiritual and that if you are really called then you are minister, a missionary or an evangelist. That is a terrible trap that dates back to the dualism that Eusebius of Caesarea introduced to the church around 325.  It was an absolute disaster. It's what Martin Luther attacked when he said the farmer out in his fields, if he's doing his work by faith as a matter of calling to the Lord, it is just as high and holy as a pastor in the pulpit.  Why?  Because there is no higher/lower, there's no sacred/secular, there's no full time/part time.  It's everyone, everywhere in everything.  And that, I think, is the basic misconception that people have.

There's another distortion too, and that is that there's a difference between what you may call the ordinary call of all Christian believers and the special call of some. In the ordinary call, we've all been called. There's not a Christian without a calling and that calling is to follow Jesus, which means to grow like Him, to live His way and to share His faith and make disciples of others.  That is a full time calling. There are those, a minority, to whom God speaks to with a special calling through a vision or a voice. Now the trouble is that those stories are so dramatic that, when they are told by preachers and others, the experience of the minority becomes the expectation of the majority.  And people think, if I haven't seen a vision and I haven't heard a voice, then I'm not called.  But we're all called, we are followers of Jesus and it's a full time challenging life to live a called life.  So, we've got to say to people, 'Don't sit around waiting for it, a vision or a voice.'  Because a lot of people do nothing because they are just waiting for it when they've already been given their task to do.

BMC:  That's really good.  So, how do you help a guy who may be in a secular occupation and yet wondering if they are really serving the Lord in the way he should and feel "the call" to move into ministry in some way?

OG:  I talk to people almost every week who are wrestling with these issues.  I first make sure they have the correct understanding of calling because a lot of misconceptions are floating around the church today.  So, good teaching is where they have to begin. 

The second thing is for them to really consider the giftedness that God has given them.  Are they good with their hands or with their mouth?  Are they good leaders or are they organizers - whatever it is.  We are all wired a certain way.  You get down to the notion of giftedness or an even better modern term, passion.  What is it that makes people come alive and be most like themselves when they are doing it?  Well, that's the core of giftedness and, therefore, the core of calling.  Now, I've got to immediately say, in a fallen world, not everyone can find a job that fits their giftedness.  It's a privilege that we in the West with a prosperous, open, mobile society can, by and large, choose a job that fits. Many people in the world today just have to do whatever it takes to put bread on the table.  Calling can take something dreadful and menial - Paul talks about slaves working as unto the Lord - and give it dignity because it is being done for the audience of One.

BMC: Have you observed any specific challenges that men, in particular, have in discovering their calling?

OG: Yes.  One of the little mantras of the modern world, even when it is unsaid, is that you are what you do.  You can go any social gathering and you will be asked, "What do you do?"    You are immediately pegged as a lawyer, a lobbyist, or whatever it is.  But Christianly, we do what we are.  Calling is deeper than what we do.

Another challenge is for husbands and wives to have a mutual sense of calling.  All too often, calling is what the man has and the wife and the family have to go along with it.  That's pretty sad.  You've got to have a mutuality, the husband understanding the wife's gifts and calling and vice versa.  Sometimes one comes first and sometimes the other comes first.

BMC: When did you get a sense of your calling and how would you describe it?

OG:  Well, I came to faith many years ago in 1960.  In England, during that time, it was expected that if you were "all out for Jesus", you were a missionary, a minister or an evangelist.  I certainly wanted to be all out for Jesus.  My parents were missionaries but I knew it wasn't my gift so I didn't pursue that.  I did have a comic experience of trying to be an evangelist.  I took a mission in northern Ireland, in the town where Ian Paisley, the very right wing protestant leader lives.  On the first night of the mission I happened to read from the Revised Standard version of the Bible.  That was in the days before a lot of the versions like the NIV were used.  The local Paisleyites were so shocked that, every night at the mission after that, they picketed the meeting because I was not reading from the version that St. Paul used, the King James.

So, my time as an evangelist was not very effective. I thought, 'Well, I have one option left: to be a minister.' So, I spent six months ministering in a church.  One day I went to a gas station and I talked to the gas attendant. I realized as I got back in the car, he was the first non-Christian I had spoken to in two weeks.  It occurred to me that as a minister I was in a womb to tomb Christian culture and it wasn't me.  I loved the world, you know films, philosophy and engaging with all that sort of stuff.  Then, in the midst of my frustration, someone introduced me to William Perkins' treatise on calling.  It's a very old fashioned book, written in 16^th century language.  But it opened my eyes to this notion of calling and it was precious to me.  I spoke on it for 20 years before I wrote The Call.

BMC:  And so, in a lot of your writings, you seem to be a gap bridger between the secular culture and the Christian culture.  Would that be a fair assessment?

OG:  Yeah, those are your words but I like it.  As I put it, I'm part apologist, I make sense of the gospel to the world, and part analyst, I try to make sense of the world to the church. And I live happily between.  Sometimes you get flack from both sides and that's all right.  That's my calling.

BMC:  Did you have someone in your life to help you discern your calling?

OG:  No, no I didn't.  I did live with Francis Schaeffer for four years at L'Abri but this wasn't a particular theme of his. I broke through to this through my own reading somewhat painfully and then gradually discovered it.

BMC:  So it seems like a lot of occupational trial and error for you to get your sense of calling?

OG:  Absolutely.  When I finished at L'Abri and went back to London, I was actually invited to be the minister of Westminster chapel, which was Martin Lloyd Jones' church but at time was not doing terribly well, because I preached there one Sunday.  I sweated blood that weekend thinking 'Lord, is that what I'm called to do?  This is awful.  It's not me at all.  I've been freed from this.'  Then, when I felt the liberty to say no, I've never looked back.  I've felt freer ever afterwards to know what my calling is and what it isn't.  I'm not called to be a minister.  It's a privilege occasionally to preach in a church but that is not me at all.

BMC:   You have had a wonderful opportunity to be surrounded by so many influential thinkers.  As you look at the people who influenced your life, are there any role models that stand out? 

OG:  Well, a lot of my heroes are no longer living; great Christians like St. Augustine, one of my favorites Blasé Pascal, the French scientist and apologist, or William Wilberforce who was a close friend of my great, great grandfather who founded the Guinness brewery.  People like that.  Certainly, growing up I knew many of the great preachers of the time, like Martin Lloyd Jones, John Stott and I lived with Francis Schaeffer.  My ideas have been far more shaped by Peter Berger, the imminent social scientist who is now at Boston University, I owe him the world in terms of the content of my thinking.  So my heroes range from people alive now like Peter Berger right back to St. Augustine.  I just thank God for all these great men and women.  I think each of us needs our heroes. 

BMC: Thanks again, Dr. Guinness, for taking time with us today.