While on a long flight, I finished listening to my favorite pieces by John Coltrane then opened some music I had recently downloaded but not yet heard. It was a recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons,

played by Joshua Bell and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. The piece, intense and passionate, has been very important to me over the years. I hadn’t noticed that this recording included a short video excerpt of Bell and the orchestra during a recording session, playing an especially dramatic passage. When I opened the file, the video suddenly began to play.

Surprised, I was at once so fully captured and moved by what I saw and heard that it was like I fell into a trance. When it finished, I was breathless. I immediately wanted to ask the flight attendant if I could use the microphone so I could tell everyone that my life had just been changed. In those three short minutes, I watched and heard what human flourishing means.

On the video, all the musicians, dressed in street clothes that reflected their individual backgrounds and personalities, added their particular instrument and part to the symphonic whole. Each was essential. Each was doing in that moment something very few others could do but that he or she did exceptionally well. Bell, one of the finest violinists in the world, conducted the whole, while also brilliantly playing his exquisite part of Vivaldi’s piece. The flourishing was in both the parts and the whole, the individuals, and the community.

I have just watched this short piece again, as I’ve done so many times since that moment on the plane. Each viewing stuns me with wonder at the human imagination that created the piece; the artistic skill, gifts, emotions, and discipline that made playing it possible; the community in diversity that made room for each person to be so significant and needed; and the brilliance and leadership of Bell as he both conducted and played.

 

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01.  Human Flourishing

This is an expression of human flourishing, which is always about the one and the many, about the realization and expression of what is life giving and creative, of what is unique and what is common, of what is passionate and meaningful. These features of human flourishing are found across cultures and time. They’re formal and informal, public and private, common and exceptional. This flourishing happens at home, within families, on the athletic field, in business meetings, in classrooms, in communities of care, in the midst of joy but also of pain, in the context of poverty but also of wealth, in whatever the language or medium or context in which it occurs.

The God made known in Scripture and incarnate in Jesus Christ desires flourishing people in a flourishing world. This is God’s intent and commitment, and God created humans to flourish by co-laboring with him in that endeavor. Sadly, the narrative of the Bible includes how God’s divine desire is subverted by the very human beings God created as partners to reflect God’s image and steward creation. Even more, however, it tells the long story of how God relentlessly pursues us in faithfulness and love. God shares with us, out of the flourishing communion of Father, Son, and Spirit, the overflow that is our hope and salvation.

You and I are to be the tangible evidence of God’s intent for and pursuit of the world today. You and I. Together. The church. This is our calling as followers of Jesus. We are to fulfill the calling of all humanity and thus point to the true purpose of human life. The Word made flesh in Jesus Christ should show through us. We are meant to be primary evidence of the flourishing love, grace, and truth in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.

This is why Jesus says his disciples are to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. The unique and authoritative witness of the New Testament centers on Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, and then in the gift of the Holy Spirit. As the Son returns to the Father, he hands the unfolding ministry of the kingdom of God to the people of God (Matthew 28; John 21).

Though the kingdom is God’s work by the Spirit, we are not spiritual manikins—a form without life. We are meant to be active, willful, fruit-bearing agents of that kingdom. The Spirit enables us to live both as ourselves (in honesty and humility) and beyond ourselves (in love and sacrifice). All of this is far from plain in our world. This is why revelation is needed and why our living enactment of that revelation is part of God’s purpose.

 

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02.  A Biblical Call

Call is a word that has many associations, so let’s be clear what it means here.

The heart of God’s call is this: that we receive and live the love of God for us and for the world. This is the meaning of the two great commandments, that we are made to love the Lord our God with all we are and our neighbors as ourselves. The Bible as a whole, and Jesus in particular, reveals what such a life looks like. Our call is loving communion with God and God’s world. It encompasses our identity, our community, and our activity.

Who are we? We are God’s chosen people, members of a community set apart for God’s purposes:

 

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:1–3, ESVScripture quotations marked (ESV) are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version^® (ESV^®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.).

 

We are people who live in the abundance of God’s love and grace, poured out in Jesus Christ:

 

[I pray] that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:16–19, ESV).

 

Why are we here? We are here to love God and to love our neighbor:

“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:36–40).

We are here to live in the world as agents of God’s love in Jesus Christ:

“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven (Matthew 5:13–16, ESV).

 

God’s call encompasses the foundational purposes of our lives and also guidance for life’s concrete work and activity. Calling isn’t just a category for those who pursue some form of recognized ministry; it’s about God’s desire for all of our lives as ambassadors of God’s kingdom. This is our primary call. This primary call for all of us leads naturally and secondarily to God’s call for each of us.

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03.  Not Primarily a Burning Bush

Only once does God’s call come from a burning bush. Only once does God speak, even to Isaiah, “on a throne, high and lifted up” (Isaiah 6:1, ESV). God’s primary call is for us to belong to and live for the flourishing of God’s purposes in the world. At the same time, God may also call in ways that include direction in relation to such things as jobs, gifts, relationships, and more. So, God’s call encompasses the foundational purposes of our lives and sometimes provides guidance for our concrete work and activity.

As a result, people ask many questions about how their lives relate to the world. What are our lives in this world about? What are we to make of being human? Why are we here? Is there a reason we are alive, and, if so, how do we know what that is? These questions can be brought on by beauty and joy, but also by the daunting facts of our own lives or of the world around us. We look around in doubt, in pain, in suffering. These are human questions asked throughout history by those inside and outside the church.

Today, in a staggeringly complex and diverse world, the overarching biblical narrative that includes creation, fall, redemption, and fulfillment has frequently been rejected and denied. The issues seem too many and the evidence too little for them. The secular, street-level view seems the most reliable: humanity is here on its own.

Are we alone in the universe? No god; just us? Do we simply face an empty universe, live a mere biochemical existence, experience what we call pain or joy, and then die? Do we see a world with exquisite natural beauty and think of it as mere materiality with no greater meaning? Do we look upon billions of people who suffer daily at the hands of bullies and tyrants and weigh it only in terms of social conscience or utility? Do we find in apparent acts of self-sacrificing love only the evidence of instinctive, evolutionary social welfare?

And we also ask, “Is there hope?” Is there any reason to think that the trajectory of human suffering and injustice or social entropy can actually be stopped or reversed? Is there hope that the world of poverty, violence, and injustice will change? Is there hope that our own personal life issues might actually give way to new life, that our downward spiral can be reversed?

These questions may sound philosophical, but they’re personal and practical. In real words and real deeds, God’s people are sent as God’s reassuring response to these questions. But that can be evident only if we live honestly and fully before God and our neighbor.

The first and second commandments—to love God and love our neighbor—are our calling. They guide the enactment of life as God intends it to be lived. We find our lives by losing them in these particular ways. We lose our lives, and gain them too, in the action of laying them down in worship and love.

The people of God, by the power of the Holy Spirit, are meant to be the hope of the world, the model for all humanity and the apologetic—the living defense of the faith—that God is present and that God’s loving purposes will come to pass. This is the vision and the intent as Jesus portrays it.

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04.  Cindy Bunch in Conversation with Mark Labberton

Cindy Bunch: What is the connection between our own flourishing and our neighbor’s?

Mark Labberton: Some of the primary words of the Bible—love, peace, justice—are relational words. When relationships are divided and someone suffers, our collective life suffers. We can’t exercise the most basic meaning of the Bible without thinking of our neighbor. Everything referenced in Scripture in regard to my flourishing connects to my neighbor’s flourishing.

Sociology makes this less visible to us because we are committed to social realities that delineate or distort our natural, intended relatedness. We become blind. Our social experience protects us from the reality of our neighbor’s suffering. It doesn’t affect us. A pragmatic sort of social apartheid is the result. We become blind to the suffering of others.

 

CB:     What has helped you to understand this connection for yourself?

ML:    My friend Gary Haugen spent months as the head of the United Nation’s investigation into the Rwandan genocide. Eight-hundred thousand people were slaughtered in twelve weeks. He spent months taking daily body counts, making a toll, and seeking to understand this horrific tragedy. He told me, “When I returned from the Rwanda investigation, I sensed God calling me to do something to help victims of violent oppression.” Gary went on to explain his founding of International Justice Mission (IJM).

“So let me get this straight,” I reflected back to him. “First, you spend six months digging through corpses where neighbor slaughtered neighbor in one of the most hellacious genocides of the late twentieth century, and then you decided to start an NGO [non-governmental organization] to help the victims of violence? Is that right?”

“Yes,” said Gary.

Ever so slightly breathless at this moment, I said, “I think if it had been me I would have admitted myself to a mental hospital.”

He looked at me with his clear, compassionate eyes, and simply said, “I understand that, but that wouldn’t help anyone.”

“Oh, I get that! I am not saying it would do any good! I am just saying that is what I think would have happened. Rwanda would just have overwhelmed me. I would be catatonic.”

A pause followed. Gary quietly said, “The thing is, that would make the problem about you.”

The moment is one Gary and I have revisited many times. Out of it came great claims and great questions. It was a tectonic shift God has used to help me understand what it means that we are called to follow Jesus Christ as the unique person we are within the community of God’s people for the sake of the world.

 

CB:     What prompted you to write a book about calling?

ML:    What it means to be human is that someone is addressing us. Calling describes God’s relationship with humanity and with the community of faith. It would be hard to mention a theme that would be more central to our humanity. Having already written about worship [The Dangerous Act of Worship], which is the most targeted sense of our calling, I wrote this book to broaden my exploration of that calling in every dimension of life.

A great deal of church life has encrusted discipleship with a thick layer of institutional and social practices that have to do with how we live in the church. The problem is that we don’t remember that how we live in the church is meant to relate to wider community. People look at church and see dull, deadly institutionalism, not a compassionate, humble, loving community. But our calling is about what it means to be Christ in the world. When we look at the current crisis in denominational life, what we see is not an institutional crisis. We have a discipleship crisis.

 

CB:     What is the most misunderstood aspect of calling?

ML:    That calling involves some sort of unique personal direction of God to do a given task. We go there immediately. When we do, we are looking for a sort of needle-in-a-haystack answer to the question, “What am I going to do?” That arises out of the culture, privilege, and individualism in which most of the people who will read this live. That is fairly indulgent. How do I have God’s job description? The overwhelming sense of call in the Bible is about our call to people, not to an individual purpose. Because Scripture tells us something we don’t want to hear, we keep looking for another calling.

 

CB:     What is the calling of every believer?

ML:    The core of calling is to be a part of a community of people who follow Jesus Christ. We are disciples. “We” is our primary identity. I share my calling because of my role in my community. We are together one body. But we have become a whole bunch of individual disciples, rather than a community that goes out. As we follow calling, we become more and more like our neighbors.

 

CB:     When you reflect on calling and leadership, what kinds of leaders are you trying to form?

ML:    One of the advantages of being a president in a multi-denominational seminary with more than 120 different contexts represented is that we are together not because of one church form. We are together because our essential calling is unity. When we look at differences, we recognize they are important, but we desire to acknowledge that what we hold in common is much more important than what we see differently. We need to cultivate that kind of ecumenism. We need to move people toward unity of body. One of the great riches of this context is the revelation that no tradition sees the gospel completely on its own terms. The differences in the body of Christ help us to see the richness.

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05.  Practice Flourishing

• Hearing and living God’s call typically develops over time in community. These ideas are offered without any intention of implying that a call is automatic, uniform, or forced. The process is more likely nuanced and unexpected. But as with spiritual disciplines, God honors our intentionality, and hopefully these practices are invitations into deliberately seeking, reflecting, discerning, and practicing God’s call—individually and with others.
• Where do you experience human flourishing? Music? Art? People? Athletics? Education? Choose a creative medium to help you reflect on the flourishing that’s already evident in your life or on your hope for the flourishing God desires for you, those close to you, and the world.
• Consider the following:
  Make a “flourishing collage” using photos, art, words, or another medium. Browse at a newsstand to find photos that remind you of contexts other than your own in need of flourishing.
• Assemble a “flourishing playlist.” Which songs help you experience flourishing, and which remind you of the long road of answering that call? What global or countercultural music could remind you of other areas of the world longing for flourishing?