Animate support for vocations

I REMEMBER BEING APPOINTED promoter of vocations and simultaneously being assigned to the Provincial Care Center. This is the place where our elder brothers in assisted living find the special care they need as they complete their active ministries and take up a ministry of prayer and limited sacramental duties. Barely at the threshold of middle-age, I wondered: “Do they know something that I don’t know?! Are they trying to tell me something about this ministry and what it is going to do to me?” Later, the provincial explained that he was encouraging some younger brothers to come to the center so that the elderly friars would not feel “warehoused.” Hence at 40 years of age I became “junior” again and took up my place in the chapel with brothers double my age or more.

Now I realize the wisdom of letting people interested in our life glimpse the end at the beginning. I recall bringing a candidate to visit with the elderly friars. What the candidate, now a priest (Father DePorres Durham, O.P.), realized was that the men he was interacting with at the Provincial Care Center represented over 1,000 years of lived religious experience. He was touched by their cheerful sense of humor, perseverance, and lifelong fidelity—all of which he found contagious. He later admitted that he initially thought it was strange that his first invitation to a Dominican priory would be to visit the “retirement home.” In his words, “I just figured that you were a brand new vocation director and therefore very green.” But after spending a wonderful weekend with the faith-filled, joyful elderly religious, he thought that his vocation director was not so short-sighted after all!

In fact, my eldest brothers have now become a significant part of our vocations ministry. They are the “poster children” to those discerning for the order’s vitality, credibility, and continued flourishing.

In A Theology of Ministry, Dominican author, Thomas O’Meara, O.P. notes that: “New Testament ministry is not simply organization and work but the activity of the Spirit in coworkers.” This is a truth vocation directors need to remind themselves of again and again. From the very beginning of their term in the vocations office, they are exposed to various ministerial needs and opportunities in which they can collaborate with others. Vocation directors have the opportunity to learn right from the start what it means to be animated by the Holy Spirit so as to animate that Spirit in others for a ministry that in truth is a collective, not individual, charism. Recognizing and making vocations ministry a communal effort, in word and deed, goes to the heart of what is best in our Catholic tradition. The hearing of the call is legitimized when affirmed by the larger church community, and the invitation to answer that call follows naturally as a communal responsibility.

In everyone’s best interest

Entering into my seventh year as a vocation director, one of the most frequent and disconcerting questions other vocation directors asked me was: “How do you get your community interested in your province’s vocation ministry?” Too often the approach in some religious communities, according to those in charge of vocations, is an attitude of “total concern, no involvement” or “That’s your job.”

To my mind, communities that take themselves and their mission seriously should be eager to aid the vocation director in any way possible. If we truly don’t want to bring people in merely to turn off the lights (not the most attractive image), religious provinces and congregations have to take ownership of vocation ministry as not only a province-wide priority, but a communal stewardship they are entrusted with collectively. One person may be officially running the office with the overall responsibility for the direction of vocation ministry, but the entire community must be a part of recognizing the call in others and inviting them to courageously embrace it. To be fair, sometimes we vocation directors can treat the ministry like our own turf, and when we do, we limit its effectiveness significantly. Like other ministers, we have to step back from time to time to examine our professional posture and be sure we are leaving our egos at the door of the ministry’s needs.

“Doing more with less” makes sense here, but not from the perspective of the “less is more” adage. Rather it focuses our attention on the nontraditional “more” all around us in the natural constituencies who are stakeholders in the mission of our ministries. These people are natural partners in the effort for successful returns in our usually one-person operations. These stakeholders are first and foremost our own members, our “coworkers” in our particular corner of the vineyard. My oldest brothers at the Provincial Care Center are an example. A variety of other volunteers and lay persons are other constituents who have a stake in our work as Catholic religious, as those we directly serve or as those to whom we give an opportunity to help serve the larger mission. It may be a hackneyed metaphor at this point, but what comes to my mind with regard to effective vocations ministry is that “it takes a province.” The reality is there are people both within and beyond our communities who are true believers in our mission and who could play important roles in helping us carry out our vocations ministry, a ministry that acts for the larger mission at the heart of the church: calling all to participate in building the kingdom of God.

In Redemptoris Missio, John Paul II writes: “The Church’s mission consists in essentially offering people an opportunity not to ‘have more,’ but to ‘be more,’ by awakening their consciences to the Gospel [and thus] opening one’s eyes to the truth of one’s existence.” The same is true of vocation work; it gives everyone, not just the discerning candidate, the opportunity to “be more” in the mission to awaken consciences. A vocation ministry is never one person’s job, but the whole congregation acting as a microcosm of the church fulfilling its mission as a whole: calling, inviting, supporting those who take up the invitation. Inviting others to be coworkers with you in vocation ministry is not merely about leveraging your limited resources, but a recognition, quintessentially Catholic, that God speaks via the larger community, and likewise, the effort to invite into community should be communal.

Great! So how do we go about it? Let’s review some of the basics of vocation ministry (what I call “The Three C’s”) and then provide some suggestions for practical engagement of community members, laypersons, friends of the congregation and family.

Opportunities for action

Sometimes people ask, “Just what do vocation promoters do?” The question generally doesn’t make me nervous except when it is coming from my provincial! The daily work of a vocation office is essentially threefold, and here are the Three C’s: creating interest, cultivating interest, and closing on that interest. 

1) Creating interest

Creating interest in religious life does not mean creating a vocation! That’s the work of the Holy Spirit. What it does mean is making religious life visible as an option for living out of one’s vocation. This is true both in terms of your unique mission as an order and the structure of your vowed life that allows for the fulfillment of that mission.

Creating interest is about inviting potential candidates to come to know you through practical mediums, such as your website, your newsletter and printed information packets, VISION Vocation Guide Network, as well as through opportunities to meet with you, the promoter of vocations.

These opportunities present themselves, however, not only by e-mail, phone, and meetings with you, but in visits to your religious houses, houses of studies, or at encounters during regional vocation fairs, youth retreats, college campus ministry events, and local and national meetings of campus ministers, who often are the first to hear of a student’s vocational interest. Thus, the promoter of vocations will often attend meetings of groups that support the faith of young people in some way and that promote a climate for vocational discernment—groups such as the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) and the Catholic Campus Ministry Association (CCMA). In all of these standard tasks of vocation directors, you can relinquish any concerns or assumptions about exclusive turf by involving a whole host of volunteers, especially community members, young and old, in formation and out of formation. Specifically this might occur if you try some of the following ideas.

Consider your other houses and ministry sites potential “branch offices” where prospective discerners could be identified and events or visits set up.

Ask those who truly believe in your community’s charism to be unofficial liaisons to the office, to meet with candidates near their geographical area, or simply be a person to personally represent your congregation. These true believers are not only from within your community but friends, benefactors, or discerners open to talking about their experience of your order’s impact on their lives.

Develop an EACH ONE REACH ONE campaign for your congregation or province and hold a raffle to include all those community members who turn in a sheet with a name and contact information of a potential candidate. Hold a campaign as well among your lay friends and volunteers.

Link your vocation website to the websites of all of your ministry sites, whether campus or parish ministries, schools or small not-for-profits where religious work.

Establish a speaker’s bureau composed of community members as well as a variety of volunteers to respond to requests for presentations at high schools and colleges, the local Knights of Columbus, Serra Clubs, and Parents Clubs.

2) Cultivating interest

Nurturing the interest that surfaces through e-mail, referrals from fellow religious or campus ministers, and phone calls or letters to the office is a matter of prompt response to inquirers, as well as attentiveness to the unique journey of the person discerning. Nurturing and nourishing anything starts with respectful and consistent attention and presence. But just as you can’t pressure a seed to grow without causing damage, you can’t and should not pressure a vocation. You can only give it all the light, food, and water it will take, as well as be available and present.

One way of cultivating interest in your community is to introduce religious life in a more direct way through semi-annual Come and See days or weekends. On these retreats, prospective candidates directly experience an  institute through a 24-hour (or longer) immersion into the community’s religious routine and ritual. They learn first-hand what religious life is like from members young and old.

Let those in formation help design and present the talks for the vocations weekend, peer talking to peer.

Consider a presentation by friends or benefactors of the congregation, highlighting the difference a young person can make today as a religious in your particular group.

Spread out individual stories and have them reflect each step of the decision-making process, i.e. “Why I applied to the Dominicans” given by someone in the application process; “Why I became a Dominican” given by a temporarily professed brother or sister; “Why I remain a Dominican,” given by a member in his or her 80s.

  Following the same logic as fundraising fundamentals, make “a move” a month for those seriously discerning your order and “a move” every several months for those interested, but in no hurry to make a decision. These “moves” can be a nice note with a book; a visit; an e-mail from someone your province has touched through ministry of one kind or another and is willing to share this with the seeker; or an invitation to attend a profession of vows ceremony. (A benefactor might underwrite the cost of attending the ceremony.)

Use calendar events such as Vocations Awareness Week and World Day of Prayer for Vocations to your full advantage. These are opportunities to showcase your congregation by having those in formation preach or give reflections at liturgy. Or you can invite volunteers within and beyond to participate in roundtables on vocations or vocation panels. Encourage friends and benefactors to hold and sponsor publicity events, and be sure to notify the local media.

3) Closing on interest

To “close” on interest in religious life after it has been created and cultivated is a matter of helping a candidate come to an informed decision one way or the other regarding the next step toward entering the community or not. This is important to communicate. I once heard it said somewhere that people who like to keep all the doors open spend their life in the hallway. You also cannot keep the door open to vocations stalled at the University of Perpetual Discernment. That drains your time and energy away from other priorities. There comes a point where people in discernment need to step up or step away, at least from active engagement until they are serious about coming to a decision.

Request a summer intern in the office from your house of formation and allow that person to follow up one-on-one with candidates. Give the intern solid speaking opportunities on behalf of vocations as well. That way you multiply the representative “voices” in your vocations ministry.

Develop a Parents Club especially for the parents of those in formation and provide a quarterly newsletter asking their support and help in “getting the word out” and sending names to you. The club could foster communication between parents and friars, especially those new to the order, share your traditions, and give parents an opportunity to better understand and participate in the work, not only of their child’s vocation but in encouraging other vocations through spiritual, moral, and financial support.

Determine what the obstacles are to a candidate’s moving forward and think broadly about who among your volunteers could be an effective bridge to a decision, whether it is to enter or not enter.

Finally, “if you build it, they will come.” In vocations ministry we deal with our own field of dreams: God’s dream realized in our congregations’ charisms and the dreams of candidates, community members, and volunteers to be part of something larger than themselves. If we build the kind of field in which everyone has a place to play and is a member of the team, they will come. All those who believe in you and what you are about will help. They will come and help you and your vocations ministry become larger than your own efforts. But the ministry has to truly welcome and be built around their participation, and they have to be invited onto the field sincerely and with real enthusiasm. At the end of the day, the call of the church is communal. Together, with a vast array of true believing volunteers, we can fulfill the promise that we are about in any vocations effort: “raising up men and women outstanding in holiness,” as this time-honored prayer from a Eucharistic preface captures so eloquently:

...all powerful and ever living God, we do well always and everywhere to give you thanks.

    You renew the church in every age by raising up men and women of outstanding holiness, living witnesses of your unchanging love.

    They inspire us by their heroic lives, and help us by their constant prayers to be the living sign of your saving power. We praise you, Lord, with all the angels and saints in their song of joy.

A version of this article appeared in HORIZON Spring 2009, Vol. 34, No. 3.

Father Andrew Carl Wisdom, O.P. is novice master for the Dominicans, Province of St. Albert the Great and  director of the Society for Vocational Support. A former vocation director, he is author of Tuning in to God’s Call (a vocational discernment book) and Make of Your Life a Gift: Letters of Gratitude.