Although the developmental theories described briefly in the previous sections have
relevance to the current study, the Model of Faith Development proposed by Parks and
later revised was identified as being particularly instructive in relation to this study’s
focus on vocational calling. Parks addressed faith development by suggesting that
people progress not through age-based or circumstance-based stages but through forms of
cognition (later termed knowing), dependence, and community in which they make meaning of
life. Parks’s form of cognition/knowing was based on Perry’s scheme of
intellectual and ethical development in college students, and it tracks an individual’s cognitive
development from a reliance on outside authorities for knowledge through periods of relativism,
then probing and tested commitment, and finally into a sense of convictional commitment
regarding what an individual knows to be true about faith. Parks’s form of dependence similarly
illustrates how an individual relies early in life on others for how one feels about one’s faith, to a
stage of independence, and finally to interdependence that is characterized by “mutual
nurturance, affection and belonging”. Parks’s form of community progression describes an individual’s journey of making meaning of faith through types of community that are at first characterized by conventional norms such as place of birth or social class, to the self-selection of peers, and, ultimately, to an openness to the “other”.