How do you know God is calling you to the marketplace?
The marketplace Christian sees their work as a mission field. Do you?
The question, “How do we know God is calling us to do something,” is one many Christians have wrestled with for decades, and we have not always wrestled with it well.
At one end are passivists. Believers who think that God calls people through a dramatic personal encounter so clear and unmistakably divine that it sufficiently casts out all doubt and breaks through every hesitation. And until that occurs, we wait.
On the other end is a pragmatic dismissal. A sense that calling is simply a spiritualised word for career preference, and that you identify it by trying various things and observing what produces the most satisfaction or earns you the most socio-economic advantage, then you commit to it as the one God wants for you.
Neither extreme is particularly helpful, and both have produced Christians of a paralysed faith (the waiters), and the suspicious who approach their jobs without a zeal for excellence until they find the successful one. Both senses equally lack a genuine spiritual significance.
Calling means two things
Os Guinness, whose book The Call is arguably the most thorough treatment of vocation among modern Christian books, makes a helpful distinction.
There is a primary calling, that is the universal call of every human being to know, love, and follow God, and there are secondary callings, the specific contexts and roles we play at home or at work, through which our primary calling is expressed. Simply, our primary calling gives us direction while our secondary calling gives us form.
It is natural for the primary things to lead the way and for secondary things to follow, so our vocation only needs to follow God.
Another lesson to take away from the book is that our primary calling can be secular (happening in ordinary ways), and the secondary work can be spiritual (done for God). The form only needs to follow God’s direction.
To be even more practical, if you’re wondering whether God has given you a specific directive in business, you need not wait for a spiritual encounter to convince you before taking action, because that is procrastination.
That’s not to say that God never gives us a specific move to make, especially in rare dilemmas, but not all matters in business require such a spiritual experience of specificity. Moreso, having the wisdom of God is itself directional, as He guides us unto all things.
The more productive question about our secondary calling is: given who I am, what I carry (the Holy Spirit), how I was made, and what I have already observed about where my presence in the world produces the most fruit, where is my investment of life most aligned with what God is doing?
Having said that, we must also note that there is no reason to believe that any living person is without a calling, as both our primary and secondary callings indicate that we are purposeful beings.
In the rest of this article, I will use the word vocation instead of “secondary calling” because it is more fitting for business and work.
Factors that determine our vocation
Frederick Buechner’s suggestion is that the place God calls you to is the intersection of your joy and the world’s need. Joy because God cares about the feeling of satisfaction and enduring happiness we get from long periods of creative work. Afterall, He also observed His creations and called them “good.” Only after He had done a succession of good works did He rest. So God cares that we do excellent work and find satisfaction in it. So, which work gives you this feeling of joy, not just happiness, which is short-lived, but joy?
And when you think of that work, how does it meet the needs of other people? Not your need but theirs. For which activity do people appreciate you, even when they pay for your service? You may also answer this question about what needs your meeting before answering the question about joy; the order doesn’t matter. What matters most is whether you derive joy from the value you give other people.
The mistake many people make is starting with money. People often chase businesses they think will yield the highest returns, but forget that before that sector or line of work became profitable, some pioneers made sacrifices to establish the field, and sometimes those pioneers earn the bulk of the money. Secondly, profitability is never guaranteed in any area of business throughout human history. Just think of all the established businesses, like travel and tourism, that took a hit during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Having said that, I must add to Buechner’s two ideas other non-negotiable factors that should determine your vocation.
The first is the presence of genuine competence that consistently creates value for other people. God cannot call you to incompetence, especially persistent incompetence. So your calling cannot be in an area of business or work where you may be considered a sluggard, because that will spoil any witness to the gospel you make.
I don’t mean that whatever God calls us to will be easy. From Scripture, we can count many key characters whom God used to accomplish things they didn’t think were possible.
So whatever area of work God wants to use you in, He will require growth, a willingness and ability to face real discomfort, and if God is calling us to do something significant at work or in business, we will typically undergo the longest seasons of development before the full fruitfulness of the gift is visible.
But there is a difference between the discomfort of growth and the frustration of operating in a domain that is just outside your field of competence. The marketplace Christian who consistently produces work that others find valuable, solves real problems, and creates valuable outcomes is almost certainly operating within their domain of vocation.
The second necessary factor is conviction. John Calvin taught that the gifts God distributes in creation are the fingerprints of a purposeful God on the lives he has made. Think of the millennial or Gen Z who would not work for a tobacco company or refuse to invest in a company involved in fossil fuels because of their convictions about global warming.
Marketplace Christians also are unable to separate their deepest convictions about such things as justice, stewardship, and human dignity.
The third factor is the evidence of fruit over time. Jesus told his disciples that a tree is known by what it produces. The marketplace Christian who is genuinely operating in their calling will find, over time, that their work produces outcomes that exceed what their talent alone would predict.
When pursued faithfully over time, vocation tends to produce a particular kind of compounding return that is recognisable to those who are paying careful attention.
The fourth factor is confirmation, which is either direct or indirect. The fact that someone pays you for what you help them achieve, or that you even grow through your work and have joy, is an indirect form of confirmation.
But the most trusted direct confirmation usually comes from the community of other believers, marketplace Christians who can tell that God wants to work through you in a certain vocation.
Because just as Paul’s calling was confirmed by the church at Antioch, and Timothy’s gifts were recognised and named by a community of elders, the marketplace Christian who senses a calling to a particular arena should be testing that sense against the observations of people who know them well.
Therefore, if you feel God is calling you to a certain vocation, test yourself against these conditions:
Do I derive joy from that activity?
Am I meeting the needs of my clients/customers?
Am I competent in that line of work?
Does the business conflict with core aspects of my faith?
Have I consistently produced good fruit over time in that field?
Have other marketplace Christians confirmed my calling in that business?