When God Calls: Temporality in Southern Baptist Calls to Missions

Abstract

Researchers studying religious experience have identified callings as a particularly salient context in which believers describe God’s presence. They have noted standard elements that make up call narratives, along with variation in how recipients articulate both the vertical call, God’s intervention in the believer’s life, and the horizontal call, the community’s response. However, how these standard elements are combined to produce culturally resonant narratives remains underexplored. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Southern Baptist missionaries, the paper describes how arbiters evaluate calls. In (de)legitimating prospective missionaries’ vocational claims, local pastors and administrative staff prospectively anticipate missionaries’ success and tether the call to missionaries’ prior experience. Turning to how missionaries construct call narratives, I identify two distinct modes of narrating one’s calling. I further argue that call narratives’ temporal organization offers a lens through which to explain variation in how missionaries characterize both the horizontal and vertical call. Missionaries marshal their experiences of God’s intervention and of social influence either to accentuate the connectedness of their call to previous experience or to articulate a disjuncture. The findings extend previous research on religious experience by suggesting that temporal claims-making is a key strategy for actors to legitimate private or otherwise unverifiable experience.