Forde on Christian growth
“ ‘The calling’ is to serve God. One shouldn’t mistake the idea of [the] calling to be that we receive some kind of mysterious message from God about what we’re supposed to be doing. We are supposed to be serving God in whatever we’re doing. So that the major point of view from this perspective is the idea of vocation. The calling is to serve God in what you’re doing.
“When we ask the question: Aren’t we supposed to improve? Aren’t we supposed to show progress in the Christian life? Aren’t we supposed to grow, etc., etc.? All this language unloads itself on us, which we finally have to shrug off and say: Oh well, maybe I’ll do that when I get time.
“The whole idea in the Lutheran perspective is that the Christian life is the one that unfolds precisely in one’s vocation, and if you are supposed to show any improvement, it’s precisely in being good at your job and taking care of the neighbor through a useful vocation.
“It doesn’t have to do necessarily with all the churchly things we like to talk about. That’s one of our tasks. But it is not [that] one [way] is supposedly the only way in which we serve God. In our vocations we serve a variety of areas, or as Luther calls them: “Stände,” that is, situations or tasks. We’re called to serve God as citizens of the state, as members of the family, we’re called to serve God in our job, and in the church. It’s difficult sometimes to balance all of those but that’s particular to the calling we all have.
“And the progress in the Christian life is progress in becoming as good at these things as you can so that all the talk about improvement, transformation, growth, and so on and so forth centers around the understanding to serve God in one’s daily task.”
From an audio tape, mid 1990’s