The Call to Preach
The divine call to preach is a special message that one receives, and it is different from other divine calls. Some people receive a call—i.e., have a vocation to be a servant of God in a manner that does not involve preaching or caring for souls in that manner. Some are called to be brothers or sisters, contemplatives, or laborers in the vineyard (Matt 20:1-16). There are many types of vocations, and preaching is a special type of vocation that must be tested and tried and affirmed through the assistance of one’s spiritual advisors. This paper will analyze what it means to be called to preach and show how the characteristics of this divine call can be discerned.
A divine call in most cases is more than just a message that one receives and immediately responds to. It is more like a process, or an evolution, that one goes through in order to come out as the person God wants you to be. This can be seen in the examples given in the New Testament. Christ called His disciples to follow him (Matt 4:19) but that did not mean that they were necessarily prepared for the task that lay ahead. They had some talents—for example, Peter was a fisherman and Christ used that skill to His own purposes, saying, “I will make you fishers of men” (Matt 4:19). Others were despised, such as Matthew, who was a tax collector—yet Christ called him as well. This sort of unexpected and unlooked for message may not have an earthly explanation, or maybe it has something to do with the internal character of the human and the store of goods in the soul. This hypothesis aside, none of the disciples who were called to follow God demonstrated any outward signs of being individuals who would lead a church, let alone the early Church founded by Christ. In fact, the ones who expected to be approached by God were those who would ultimately be responsible for His crucifixion: the High Priests of the Temple.
What Christ did with His disciples upon calling them was what all those who here the call from God must undergo: a time of training, a time of testing, a time of action, a time of prayer, a time of fasting, a time of growing and developing, and a time of anointing. They must be directed, guided; they must be prayerful so that they can grow in the Spirit. It should be remembered that of the original 12 Apostles, one of them would not go on to preach—and his name...
It must be discerned throughout the process of responding to the vocation. The discernment additionally cannot be performed alone. One must be guided in the process by a spiritual leader, who can examine the development of the recipient of the call to assess whether the attributes are there for preaching, whether the natural evidence exists for the individual to be a preacher. The spiritual leader will look for signs, such as the disposition of the soul of the individual, the individual’s character, whether there is patience, interest, desire, ability, knowledge, social and emotional intelligence, and so on. The preacher is a kind of leader who must not only possess a skill with words but be inclined to take the commanding position at the front of a congregation. Moses, for example, was called to deliver God’s message to Pharaoh and to the Israelites—yet he was not called to be a preacher because he lacked the physical skill needed to speak well publicly. He was a very poor public speaker and that is why God appointed Aaron to be the mouthpiece for Moses: Aaron, not Moses, was thus called to be the preacher (Ex 6:28-7:7).
The example of Moses and Aaron shows the extent to which physical skill and ability plays a part in being called to be a preacher. Even if one has the ability to speak, one still has to find one’s voice (Hooks, 1986). That voice has to be both human and divine. It has to be guided by the Holy Ghost, yet capable of reaching the ears of men. The preacher acts, in this sense, as the mediator between God and men hearing the words that God wants said in his heart and mind, and then saying them in the ways that will allow them to be heard by the people listening. When the Apostles were visited by the Holy Ghost, they were given the gift of tongues, which allowed them to speak to various people whose own languages were not the native languages of the Apostles. In other words, the Apostles had to be able to translate their speech into that which could be understood by those in the world they encountered.
Then, again, it must also be understood that the Holy Ghost did not descend upon the Apostles until after they had spent a long time with Christ,…
