Where a Mission Comes From

Five voices behind the three rungs

On the morning of Session 11 you drafted a mission on three rungs, ran your verbs past a stranger, and watched the Clearness Room at work. Five authors stand behind that morning, and each one gave it a single tool. This page introduces them, shows where each tool came from, and points you to the exact pages to read if one of them calls to you. You do not need any of it to write §2.1. Five honest T-shirt reactions will do more for your sentence than five books. Read this after the Field Tests, or on the day a rung will not come.

The Morning in One Table

Here are the five voices in the order the morning used them, from where a mission comes from to how you test it.

1Frederick Buechner: Where to Look

Frederick Buechner (1926–2022) · Presbyterian minister and novelist · Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (1973)

You met Buechner first at Session 3, when the guide closed on his best-known sentence. He wrote Wishful Thinking as a small dictionary of faith words, one short entry each, in alphabetical order. The entry under “Vocation” is about two pages long, and it has shaped more sermons on calling than most whole books.

Read the whole entry and you find the sentence is a tool for sorting, not a slogan. Buechner begins by admitting that many voices call a man to work: what his family expects, what pays, what flatters him. To tell God’s voice from the others he gives two checks. If you love the work but it meets no real need, you have probably missed your calling. If it meets a real need but leaves you bored and drained, you have probably missed it too. Neither circle is enough on its own.

Richard Leider later wrote the same idea as arithmetic: gifts plus passions plus values equals calling (The Power of Purpose, 1997). You took every one of those inventories between Sessions 6 and 8. That is why the morning said a mission is excavated, not invented.

2Richard Bolles: The Order

Richard N. Bolles (1927–2017) · Episcopal priest · What Color Is Your Parachute? (1970) · How to Find Your Mission in Life (1991)

Bolles wrote the most widely read job-hunting book of the last half-century. Parachute began as a self-published manual in 1970 and went on to sell more than ten million copies. Fewer readers know he was an ordained Episcopal priest who wrote it while working in campus ministry. At the back of the book he placed an essay on finding your mission, and in 1991 he published that essay as its own small book.

His claim is that every person’s mission has three parts, and that they come in a fixed order. The first is this:

The second is to do what you can, moment by moment, to make the world a better place, following the leading of God’s Spirit. Only the third is particular to you: to use the gifts you most delight in, in the settings that draw you, for the purposes God most needs done. Bolles points out that the first two parts are shared by everyone. A man who skips straight to the third is building on ground he never surveyed.

3Os Guinness: The Caller

Os Guinness (b. 1941) · author and social critic, born in China to missionary parents · The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life (1998)

Rung 1 asks the hardest question of the morning, and Guinness asks it most plainly. His book rests on one distinction: a primary calling that every follower of Christ shares, and secondary callings that differ from man to man.

He continues: “Secondary callings matter, but only because the primary calling matters most.” In WhyzMen language, rung 1 is the primary calling, and rungs 2 and 3 are secondary. The Galatians Test asks whether your shirt has drifted loose from the primary one.

Guinness also names two ways the idea of calling goes wrong. One treats spiritual work as holy and ordinary work as second-class. The other lets “calling” shrink into a polite word for a job. The second is the retired man’s danger. A mission that reads like a job description for a busy retirement fails the Galatians Test, however good the work is.

4Laurie Beth Jones: The Form

Laurie Beth Jones · author of Jesus, CEO (1995) · The Path: Creating Your Mission Statement for Work and for Life (1996)

Jones supplied the shape of the sentence on your guide page. Her mission statement has three parts: three action verbs, the value or principle you stand for, and the people or cause you serve. Her own reads: “to recognize, promote and inspire the divine connection in myself and others.” It has three verbs, one principle, and a clear “for whom.”

She also gives three short tests, and the morning used all of them. The statement should be one sentence long. A twelve-year-old should understand it. You should be able to recite it from memory with a gun to your head. The last test sounds like a joke and isn’t one. A mission you cannot produce when you are frightened is a document you own, not a mission you have.

5Burnett & Evans: The Test

Bill Burnett & Dave Evans · Stanford Life Design Lab · Designing Your Life (2016), chapter 6, “Prototyping”

Burnett and Evans teach design thinking to Stanford students, and their book applies it to whole lives. Chapter 6 makes one argument: you cannot think your way to the answer; you have to build your way forward. A designer does not perfect a drawing of a chair. He builds a rough one, sits in it, and learns.

They describe two kinds of prototype. A prototype conversation is a talk with someone already living a version of the life you are considering. They call it a Life Design Interview, and its purpose is to hear a story, not to ask for a job. A prototype experience is a small, cheap trial of the thing itself before you commit to it. Both are built to answer a question about the world, not to impress anyone.

What None of Them Can Do

Put the five side by side and they give a mission everything except its source. Buechner shows you where to look. Bolles gives the order. Guinness names the Caller. Jones gives the sentence its form. Burnett and Evans send you out to test it. Every one of them could help a man write an excellent purpose statement that would still be true if Christ were not in him.

That is why the morning ended with the Galatians Test, and why rung 1 cannot be found alone. It tends to be found in a room of brothers asking honest questions, with the One who knit you together doing the drawing out.

If You Read Only One

Going Further

Tags: Mission · Calling · Vocation · Three Rungs · Galatians 2:20 · Buechner · Bolles · Guinness · Jones · Burnett & Evans · Field Tests · Session 11