You Don't Have to Be Ordained to Have a Calling

“Have you thought about ordination?” That’s the first question asked when someone starts showing up differently, serving more intentionally, reading Sunday scriptures on their own time. As if the only serious response to feeling called is to become clergy.

I’ve been asked that question myself, and I know people mean well when they ask it. But the question carries an assumption: that a calling strong enough to be taken seriously will eventually point toward seminary, and anything short of that is still-figuring-it-out.

The Episcopal Church’s own theology doesn’t support that. The Catechism is clear: the ministry of the laity is “to represent Christ and his Church; to bear witness to him wherever they may be; and, according to the gifts given them, to carry on Christ’s work of reconciliation in the world.” That’s not a consolation prize. That’s a job description for a whole life. It’s also worth noting that this definition appears in the same section of the Prayer Book as the ministry of bishops, priests, and deacons. Same page. Same weight.

Think about the worship leader who steps up to lead Morning Prayer Sunday after Sunday when a congregation is between rectors, sometimes for a year or longer. She’s not filling in. She’s holding the parish together through a season of uncertainty, keeping the liturgy alive, giving people something solid to come back to when so much else feels unsettled. She’s learning the Daily Office, preparing the readings, showing up early, staying late. The congregation knows where to be, and they know she’ll be there. That’s not gap coverage. That’s ministry.

Or the Godly Play teacher who has been in the same room for fifteen, maybe twenty years. Godly Play isn’t traditional Sunday school. It’s a carefully developed approach that treats young children as capable of genuine spiritual encounter, trusting them to sit with the story and respond from their own place. A teacher who has given that gift across two generations, who has watched children grow up and come back with their own children, is doing something whose effects reach well past Sunday morning. She was there for the first sacred story some of those adults ever heard. That’s a vocation. It didn’t need ordination to be real.

And then there are the Eucharistic Visitors, the lay people trained and licensed to bring communion to those who can’t make it to church, whether they’re recovering from surgery, managing a chronic illness, or simply bedridden. I know what this ministry means from the receiving end. I was injured once and couldn’t get to Sunday services, and someone from my parish drove to my home and brought the sacrament to me. It was one of the most quietly profound things another person has done for me in my life of faith. That person wasn’t a priest. They were a parishioner who said yes to a calling, showed up at my door, and made the church present in my living room.

The confusion happens partly because ordination is visible in ways lay ministry often isn’t. We have ceremonies for ordinations. We have titles. When a deacon or priest stands at the altar, the role is unmistakable. There’s a collar, a liturgy, a moment of public recognition. When a lay person spends years leading Morning Prayer or tending the same classroom or sitting with the grieving, it doesn’t look like anything special from the outside. It just looks like someone who keeps showing up.

Which is, in fact, what faithfulness looks like most of the time.

The invisibility runs deeper than perception, though. Many laypeople have absorbed the idea that a sense of call is the beginning of a discernment process that might lead to Holy Orders, rather than something that might be answered entirely outside that track. The feeling becomes a prompt: should I be a priest? And when the answer is no, or not yet, or not in that way, the original feeling often gets shelved. It doesn’t fit the available container, so it gets set aside.

In my work on the Commission on Ministry, and now as Director for Lay Vocations and Ministry, I’ve sat with people who described feeling pulled toward teaching, care, leadership, or witness. Their first instinct, almost always, was to wonder whether that feeling meant they should be clergy. Sometimes it does. More often, it doesn’t. The call is real either way. The work is helping people find language for it beyond ordination.

What makes a vocation a vocation isn’t the collar. It’s the fit between who you are, what gifts you’re given, and where you’re placed.

Frederick Buechner wrote that vocation is “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” He didn’t say anything about ordination. The gladness part is deeply personal, and it shows up differently in every person who has it. So does the hunger the world presents. The Godly Play teacher found hers in a room full of children and a set of wooden figures. The worship leader found hers in the rhythm of Morning Prayer and a congregation that needed someone steady. The Eucharistic Visitor found hers at a front door, sacrament in hand.

None of them needed permission to have a calling. They needed someone to name what they were already doing.

That’s part of what I hope to do here. Not to convince anyone that ordination is the wrong answer, but to make room for the truth that it’s not the only one. The church already has leaders, pastors, teachers, and witnesses sitting in its pews. Most of them have never been asked the right question.