Last week, I co-taught an online workshop with The Equipping Group titled “Should I Plant a Church?” People logged in from Austin, Los Angeles, and Charlotte. My friend Ben Connelly took motivations and fit. I took calling.
Back in January, I wrote about why the Church plants churches. That piece pressed on the corporate question. Why does the body of Christ multiply? Why does Austin, with something like three out of four residents disconnected from the life of a church, need new expressions of faith to be born rather than just preserving the old ones?
This is the follow-up that post was always going to need. The move from we to I. Should I plant a church? How do I know if God is actually calling me to it? And it’s a question I have wrestled with personally in multiple seasons.
This post is an opportunity to share the frame I taught in the workshop. I don’t know where you’re at, but maybe this can help you discern a calling, or help walk with someone who is.
Three Words for Calling
The New Testament uses one English word, “calling,” to carry several different meanings. The older Reformed writers sorted these out with more care than we usually do. Their distinctions are worth recovering.
The first is the general calling of God. This is the public, outward summons of the gospel itself. It is the voice of Scripture preached, the invitation of Christ offered to anyone who has ears to hear. The general calling goes out to every person who sits under a sermon, reads a passage of Scripture, or hears a friend talk honestly about Jesus over coffee. It is the wide call. Jesus himself names the breadth of it when he says, “Many are called, but few are chosen” (Matthew 22:14). This is the call of Christ to come.
The second is the effectual calling. This is the inward work of the Spirit that actually draws a person into union with Christ. The Westminster tradition calls this call effectual because, unlike the general call, it accomplishes what it sets out to do. It is not a wide invitation. It is a specific summons. Paul puts it this way:
And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.
(Romans 8:30)
If you are in Christ today, it is because this calling landed on you. The general call came to many. The effectual call saved you.
The third is the particular calling. This is the one most of us mean when we talk about calling in ordinary conversation. It is the specific shape of a life. Writing at the turn of the seventeenth century, the Puritan pastor William Perkins published a long piece called A Treatise of the Vocations, in which he distinguished between the general calling of Christianity, which every believer shares, and the particular calling, which belongs to each believer in the specific station God has assigned. For Perkins, a particular calling is a specific life ordained and imposed by God for the common good. It might be the calling of a minister or a magistrate, a father or a master, a teacher or a tradesman. Paul says it simply: “Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him” (1 Corinthians 7:17).
Said simply. The general calling is the call of the gospel to all. The effectual calling is the saving call to the elect. The particular calling is the specific work God has shaped you for.
Church planting sits inside that third category. It is a particular calling. Not every believer is called to plant a church, any more than every believer is called to be a father, a nurse, or a teacher. The question this post is trying to help you consider is not whether the gospel has been offered to you or whether the Spirit has saved you. The question of this post is whether God has shaped you for this particular work in this particular moment.
And the particular work of church planting itself takes many shapes. A house church on a cul-de-sac. A neighborhood fellowship in a fast-growing suburb. A multi-ethnic congregation in a city center. A church expression on a university campus. A large gathered church downtown. The form can vary widely, but the calling remains similar. The question is not whether you fit a single image of what a church planter looks like. The question is whether God has called you to help plant some expression of the body of Christ in a specific place, at a specific time.
Three Questions to Ask
Once you know you are asking a question of particular calling, the next move is to learn how the Scriptures and the wise old voices of the church have taught us to discern it. Calling is not just about passion. It is about obedience, confirmation, and timing. I taught three questions in the workshop. Each one is necessary. None of them is sufficient to determine calling on its own.
Internal Desire
Do I want to do this? Do I carry a burden for a particular people or a particular place?
Internal desire sounds like the softest of the three questions, but the New Testament treats it seriously. Paul writes to Timothy, “The saying is trustworthy: if anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task” (1 Timothy 3:1). The word aspires there implies a reaching. God gives desires. He also shapes them. The church planters I respect most will tell you not to plant a church until you have a deep burden for the people and the place you are going, because that burden is the only thing that keeps you in the work on the days you want to quit.
Desire alone is not enough. It can be shaped by envy, restlessness, or the wrong kind of ambition. A desire to plant a church because you want to be the pastor of your own room is not the same as a burden for a specific group of people who are far from God. The test for desire is specificity. A vague wanting is not a calling. A named burden for a neighborhood, a population, or a pocket of the city is the beginning of one.
Ben opened our workshop by naming five motivations that can masquerade as calling and should actually slow a person down. Pride. Avoidance of conflict somewhere else. Unhealthy restlessness. A love of adventure for its own sake. Martyr syndrome. Each of those can, from the inside, feel like the beginning of a burden. None of them is. If what you are calling desire is really an urge to get out of where you are, to prove something, to escape a hard season, or to build a platform, the move will not hold under the weight of the work. Test the desire before you follow it.
External Confirmation
Do the people who know me well affirm this desire? Do they see the giftedness the task requires? Do they believe it is wise?
A particular calling is not something you discover alone. It is confirmed in the people God has placed around you. Proverbs says it plainly:
Without counsel plans fail, but with many advisers they succeed.
(Proverbs 15:22)
The Puritans pushed hard on this question. They were rightly suspicious of a man claiming a particular calling without the witness of his church, his family, his friends, and the leaders over him. They would have said something close to this: the Spirit who is calling you is the same Spirit who dwells in the body of Christ around you, and he does not typically speak one thing to you and a different thing to them.
External confirmation has three layers. The first is affirmation of the desire itself. Do the people who love you and have watched you for years see this longing as something God is working in you, or as something you are trying to talk yourself into? The second is affirmation of giftedness. Do the people who have watched you lead, teach, shepherd, evangelize, and bleed for others believe the particular gifts this work requires are actually present in you? The third is affirmation of wisdom. Do they believe this is the right next step for you, your family, and the people you already carry?
When the Antioch church sent out Paul and Barnabas, Luke is careful about how the confirmation came.
While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off.
(Acts 13:2-3)
The Spirit spoke. The church laid hands. Both things happened, and both things were confirming.
Opportunity
Is there a pathway to actually pursue this calling? Is there a team to send with me? A way to provide for my family? A place to go? A role that fits my gifts?
Opportunity is the question the idealist skips, and the church planter in year three wishes he had taken more seriously. A calling that cannot be lived out is not yet a calling. Paul writes to the Corinthians, “For a wide door for effective work has opened to me, and there are many adversaries” (1 Corinthians 16:9). Notice the two things. The adversaries are real. The door is also real. Paul is not forcing a door God has not opened.
Practically speaking, opportunity is where the calling stops being a feeling and starts being a plan. It is the team that would go with you. The sending church that would stand behind you. The provision would cover the first three years of your family’s life. The role that fits the shape of the gifts God has actually given you. God is concerned with how the work gets done, and he is not unconcerned with whether your kids eat.
Ben taught this in our workshop with a simple Venn diagram. Convictions. Giftings. Mission field. A healthy church plant lives where those three circles overlap, and the planter does not carry the circles alone. The team carries what the planter cannot. No single leader has every gift the work requires, and the sooner you accept that, the sooner God tends to bring you the people he means to send with you.
When God is calling, he usually provides the pathway. Sometimes the pathway requires waiting. Sometimes it requires laying groundwork for years before the door opens. But the door does eventually open. If the door will not open, that is information, too.
Three, Two, One, None
Here is the rule of thumb I offer anyone wrestling with these questions.
When all three are affirmed, you can walk forward with a measure of confidence. You have the desire, the people around you see it, and God has opened a pathway. In wisdom, I generally counsel walking forward with freedom.
When two are affirmed, slow down. Walk cautiously, or stop and wait. Two questions answered usually mean God is doing something real, but the shape of it is not yet clear. Desire without external confirmation can be a presumption. Confirmation without opportunity can be premature. Desire and opportunity without external confirmation can be zeal outrunning wisdom. In each case, the two you have are not enough to move on yet. Keep praying, keep listening, keep talking to the people who know you.
When only one is present, or none at all, consider that this may not be a particular calling for you. That sentence is not an insult. It might be the most merciful word you hear in this season. A man who builds a ministry on a desire no one else sees, with no open door in front of him, is building something that may well eventually break him and the people he loves. A church whose leaders do not confirm you, and for whom no door has opened, is not your church to plant.
Refusing the calling you do not have is as good as accepting the one you do.
The Calling That Holds Every Other Calling
The longer I am in this work, the more I think the question of particular calling is finally held inside the question of effectual calling. If Christ has actually called you to himself, you already have what the particular calling requires. You have his presence, his Spirit, his promise, and his people.
Paul presses this exact pastoral note in Ephesians:
I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called.
(Ephesians 4:1)
The calling he means is the effectual one, the saving work of Christ on a person he has drawn to himself. The walk he means is particular. Everything else that comes out of your life, the vocation you pick up, the city you move to, the work you say yes to, and the work you say no to, is downstream of the fact that Christ has called you.
If you are in Christ, you cannot lose your calling, even if you never plant a church. And if you are not in Christ, no particular calling is going to make you more his than he has already made you his.
Ask the three questions. Weigh them honestly. Listen to the people around you. Look for the open door. Walk forward with confidence where the Lord has made it clear, and walk slowly where he has not.
And then keep your eyes on the One who called you in the first place.
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