In 1 Samuel 3 we find the young Samuel lying down in the temple tending a lamp near the Ark of the Covenant. Just as the night is breaking into day, a voice rings out three times calling Samuel by name. Twice Samuel fails to recognize the voice and twice the priest Eli poorly counsels Samuel. The third time, Eli, the one whose “eyesight had begun to grow dim” recognizes that Samuel is being called by God and encourages him to respond.
We often think of this story as the “Call of Samuel.” Some scholars have suggested that it is really a story of the Ark of the Covenant. Both are valid readings. However, I wonder if this story is as much about Eli as anyone else, as much about an established religious leader’s insight into the situation. In the midst of social, political, religious, and economic upheaval Eli is able to “perceive” the rarely heard voice of the Holy One. He has to fight through his dimming eyesight, he needs to clear his sleepy head, he has to move past giving literal answers to Samuel’s question, “Is it you that called me?” But when Samuel wakes him a third time, Eli breaks through those impediments, he listens more deeply, and he instructs more wisely as he helps a young person discern a call from God.
Educators, elders, ministers, and members are the Elis in today’s Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Eli remembers his own responsibility and call to nurture Samuel’s calling, to be wise ears, hearts, and eyes that accompany the young boy on his journey of faith. So too, as a baptismal and covenant community of care we promise to nurture the baptized in faith and life and to help each other discern God’s call and equip one another for service, the living out of this call.
Like Eli, we too live in the midst of turmoil and change. On many occasions I have listened to church leaders talk about feeling overwhelmed and consumed by current congregational, theological, ecclesiological, political, social, economic, and personal crises. It is easy to forget about God’s promised future. As church leaders, we could spend all our time focusing our attention on membership loss, stewardship lethargy, and theological differences. We would not be alone.
Apathy is another option. Eli could have uncaringly laid his head back down a third time, withdrawing from Samuel’s recurring question. We, too, can withdraw and wilt, unintentionally or in full knowledge of the gifts and promises that are among us. This is not unlike retreating from contemporary controversies and daily debates to smaller theological and ecclesiological worlds filled with people like us addressing only those issues we think important.
Before our sight or insight is dimmed completely, we have the opportunity, a responsibility, to help others hear a call from God in their lives. What does it take to live into this opportunity? It takes energy, intelligence, imagination, and love. Most of all it takes imagination, the kind of imagination that Walter Brueggemann calls prophetic and Craig Dykstra describes as pastoral and ecclesial. Imagination opens a world, not of fantasy, but where people make ethical decisions and imagine new realities for themselves and others. It sees beyond the present and beneath the surface and into the Body of Christ God is raising up. It is the kind of imagination that is conscious of the context, courageous in the face of fear, and creative enough to hear where God is calling us next.
How do we prepare for where God is calling us for the decades to come? How do we insure that the leaders of tomorrow’s church hear God’s voice, even the church a dozen years from now? We start by looking in our church school classes and youth groups. Since 1999 the average age of seminarians has been going down. This means that the number of students younger than thirty years of age is going up — a break from recent trends. A pastor age 25 to 27 is not as unusual as he or she would have been ten and twenty years ago.
This is no time to sleep, to lay our heads back down and assume someone else will help young persons discern a call from God later in life. If we wait, they will make their vocational/occupational decisions based on other factors.
It is time to be awake and alert. The next generation of church leaders and pastors is growing up fast. If we begin to imagine the mission of a church for the next decade, we need to start now by helping young people hear if they are being called to ministry of Word and Sacrament, educational ministry in the church, or any other call by God, including education, medicine, law, farming, and many, many, many more!
I staff the General Assembly’s Committee on Theological Education, a committee of elders and ministers elected by the General Assembly who sit alongside seminary presidents. Ours is a mission that reaches into the future, imagining a church filled with leaders equipped to serve the body of Christ “… for generations to come … ”. When the Committee is at its best, it sees beneath the surface and beyond today and imagines the Church that God is forming for the future. The PC(USA) emphasizes “Growing the Church Deep and Wide.” I have to believe that the depth and width of the Church will be measured by the “depth” of its leaders and the “width” of the number of congregations, communities, and seminaries that form them. When it comes to forming pastors, it will take “seminaries and churches together” to carry out the Eli ministry put before us.
For the last three years, my family and I have been a part of a new church development in Louisville. My favorite part of weekly worship is a time we call “Sacred Space.” For a few minutes during worship children are invited forward to gather around a story cloth, to listen to a Scripture story retold, and to sing and pray. The time concludes with an interactive prayer of thanksgiving. The leader lights a candle and reminds the children, “It is your turn to talk to God.” One by one, she stares into their eyes and offers them the candle. Each child reaches out his or her hand to touch the lit white candle.
My two-year-old daughter can’t wait for the candle to come to her as she reaches out, stares in wonder, and proudly thanks God for something. But right now it is my eight-year-old son who surprises me with his prayers. In the past, like so many of the others, he has thanked God for favorite toys, school, teachers, sports, and occasionally has moved my wife and me to tears when he thanks God for one or both of us as parents, or his sister. Just a few weeks ago he really amazed me again — he thanked God for “imagination.”
“Imagination” for him is where intelligence and creativity meet. Now it is our privilege and responsibility to teach him that imagination, at its best, includes faith and a deep and courageous way of seeing into the gift of new life in Christ that we thought was dead, is alive!
The leader of Sacred Space reminds the children that if they speak their prayer out loud, others can hear it and join them in their prayer. Like our PC(USA) seminaries, may we join our children and all God’s children in their prayers for a society and church that they cannot yet imagine … but that God can.
Lee Hinson-Hasty is coordinator of Theological Education and Seminary Relations for the General Assembly Council Committee on Theological Education.
