BIBLICAL AND ECCLESIAL LENSES AND IMAGES FOR VOCATION MINISTRY

What is required of those entrusted with vocation ministry and religious and priestly formation work in the Church today is to think big, and to cast out the nets into the deep. I remember the famous advice of architect Daniel Burnham to Chicago’s city planners a century ago: “Make no small plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood.” Unfortunately many have made some very small and meager plans for our futures. We must learn how to think big! “Duc in altum!”. Now is not the time to think small, to retreat, to bemoan losses, closures, failures and deaths. Something new is happening in the Church, and especially in the lives of young people who are the new disciples and apostles in waiting!

The Gospel must be proclaimed anew with confidence, enthusiasm, and with gratitude for its proven beauty. Jesus understood his sense of mission in terms of “reaching out and drawing in,” which constituted one fluid movement analogous to breathing. The enterprise to which we are called is far more fundamental than any of our concerns and far more crucial than we can imagine. There must be a priority, urgency, passion, creativity and hope in our vocational work. If diocesan synods, priests’ seminars, Religious Congregational Chapters do not have vocations as a very high priority, then something is terribly wrong with this picture!

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