A FRIEND IN HIS THIRTIES told me he was looking for a new church.
“The senior pastor has retired,” he said.
“Why change churches now?” I asked. My friend had been on occasion less than complimentary of his pastor. I was also surprised his pastor was retiring; he appeared to be at least a decade away from the threescore and five that usually mark retirement.
My friend replied, “My pastor is retiring, but not resigning. He has stopped leading and stopped studying, but he continues to do enough pastoral care to survive. My family and I are in one of the more stressful stages of our lives, and it doesn’t appear the level of our anxiety will diminish any time soon. We need a pastor and a vibrant church, not a curator at the museum of the faithful.”
After our conversation, I thought about my position. I realized my friend’s pastor was three years older than me, and I was forty-nine at the time. I expected close to twenty more years of effective ministry. Would people ever say that of me? Or worse yet, were they already saying that of me? Although our church was growing, I did know of a young family that had left our church to join another—one that had a younger pastor. Their stated reason was that the church was closer to their home, but was that the real reason?
I wallowed in insecurity for several days, but then convinced myself my concerns were unfounded. That incident, however, made me realize that what was said of my friend’s pastor could potentially be said of me. So I began to examine my ministry to look for signs of decline. I was determined to place my soul under a microscope and see if the nearly half century of living and the twenty-five years of serving as a pastor had taken its toll. Was my ministry negatively affecting the people I was serving? When I entered ministry I had to analyze issues such as ambition, giftedness, family, and study habits. Now I needed to reexamine my call under the lens of experience.
I determined to visit with effective ministers well into the second half of their ministry. I wanted to know how others were keeping their sword sharp, their soul strong, and their spirit vibrant. My study would not be academic; my concern was not simply to garner information but to learn how to keep my ministry effective.
Reclaiming motivation
In the early years, my call was almost always interpreted in the context of career. It governed my choice of college, my major, and my lifestyle. Although I never liked to use the term career when preparing for ministry, my experience—and that of my colleagues—was not that much different from that of teachers, lawyers, and business professionals. The “called” attend college, and perhaps seminary, and seek to prepare themselves to do ministry—and make a living for their families like everyone else. I can admit now that making a living was a much greater factor in my preparation for ministry than I would have cared to admit while in my twenties.
Did I major in religion at a denominational school only from a desire to be better equipped? Or was I aware that it would be the first step in the ministerial career track? Was that extra graduate degree solely motivated by a desire to take the quality of my ministry to a new level? Or was it to take myself to a new level of reward and recognition?
Revisiting our preparation for ministry can be painful: some of our original motives might not have been as pure as we thought at the outset. Yet it doesn’t necessarily mean we took a wrong turn. For pastors, there is a relationship between career and call.
When we think about our childhood, we tend to imagine ourselves as cute kids or striking teenagers—until we look at the pictures of ourselves. We easily forget how awkward we were, how big our ears were, that our front teeth made us look like Bugs Bunny, or that we were not spared complexion problems. Yet those pictures don’t invalidate our childhood or our youth. In the same way, revisiting our original call can be discomforting but also confirming.
I can remember the struggle in my soul to pursue journalism and then politics. But God was directing me elsewhere. I remember how I felt—it was agony—when I realized that I had to tell someone that I knew God wanted me in the ministry. As a young man, I exaggerated the grief of giving up my dreams of journalism and politics (I had no real understanding of either career). In my mind, I was forfeiting a Pulitzer Prize or a seat in the Senate. Even years later in ministry, on a blue Monday morning when Sunday’s nickel and nose count had been down, I would console myself with what I could have been. Today I can say, though, that my call to ministry was not an emotional response to a series of unusual circumstances. Nor was it out of fear God would strike me dead if I didn’t become a preacher. My call came with a deep sense of oughtness that I acknowledged to be God’s invitation to ministry. Now as I look back, I can say that all I gave up to follow my call into pastoral work were some late nights writing advertising copy and delivering concession speeches after local school board elections.
Yes, I had given up some career aspirations to serve God in the local church, but revisiting my call helped me to remember that my initial “yes” was not as dramatic as it had seemed. Nor was I as naïve as I had feared. Amid the angst and complicated motivations of a young man in his twenties was the definite call of God.
In addition to serving as pastor of a church, I am an adjunct instructor at a seminary. I often hear students speak about their call to ministry. They tell how some window of opportunity unexplainably closed as the window of ministry opened. Or they speak of emotional experiences—the breakup of a relationship, for example—that pushed them in a new direction. Yet when I hear effective pastors in their fifties talk of their call, there is less emphasis on the emotion and the circumstances surrounding the decision to pursue ministry, and more emphasis on their sense of oughtness and purpose. It was freeing to realize, as I reflected on my initial call, that mine was not primarily to make a living as a minister but rather to do ministry. I am fortunate because I can provide for my family as a minister, yet I know if I had to seek other employment, it would not end my ministry. I would find a place to serve without pay, because my call to minister is more my identity than it is my profession.
Remembering and revisiting the call and the preparation from the perspective of maturity can be affirming. Here are several questions that have helped me in that process:
- When did I first become aware of God’s call in my life?
- What was happening in my life at that time that affected my understanding of God’s call?
- How has my understanding of my call affected the way I conduct ministry?
There were likely factors of which we were not aware then, but that we understand now. One minister told me it was not until recently that he could admit that his parents’ divorce made him more aware of God’s call on his life. He assumed in 1970 that if he went into the ministry he could divorce-proof his marriage, that somehow by serving in the church he was abandoning his life to God and that God would reward him with a strong marriage. His awareness now of this hidden agenda did not negate his call then, but it helped him unpack some baggage he had carried with him into both his ministry and his marriage.
Redefining the call
Recently a fifty-eight-year-old minister told me, “I am not doing what I thought I was called to do, but I am what God called me to be—a pastor. I thought preaching and studying would be my primary duties, but I find I am leading and relating more. I do prepare and preach weekly, but those activities don’t define my ministry. For the last several years, I have felt guilty that preaching was not my passion, but now I see my call was not to a task but to the process of shepherding the church.”
Ministers are always redefining their call. Since the church is a dynamic body, the specific needs of the church are always changing. Ministers go through seasons in which they are primarily care-givers, seasons when they are perceived to be proclaimers of the Word, and times in which they serve primarily as administrators. Although these diverse roles bring variety to a minister’s activities, they can also create some cacophony in the soul.
Ministers frequently ask themselves. Is this what I was called to do?
Several years ago, two retired ministers were honored at a banquet for the contribution they had made through the years. They were asked what advice they would give to men and women who were at an earlier phase of their ministry. The gentleman who spoke first addressed the need to guard study time. He warned how committee meetings, hospital visitation, and counseling appointments could steal time from the task of sermon preparation. He said to avoid interruptions at all costs.
The other gentleman, in his late eighties, agreed sermon preparation was a high priority, but warned against the dangers of preparation: “If you spend all that time in the study and you end up preaching the same claptrap you did before you went into the study, the church may tell you to go to committee meetings and visit the sick because you preach better there than you do behind the pulpit. Remember, there are many ways a minister proclaims scriptural truths.”
Yet the question “Is this what I was called to do?” cannot be answered without first dealing with “What did God call me to be?” During the early years of ministry, when the exuberance of youth tends to make us think God wants us to “save the world for Christ,” we may be so task-driven we don’t see God’s call in terms of “being”—that is, developing our souls.
This past year I returned to a church where I had served earlier in my ministry. The congregation was celebrating its 150-year anniversary, and it was affirming to hear what my family and I had meant to them. But I was amazed at how little they remembered of what I considered to be my major role in ministry. One woman told me how significant my visit was to her after her father died. Another person remembered a hallway conversation I had with him regarding his son. An older gentleman spoke of a talk we had at an evening football game, when he told me about the death of his son ten years earlier. Only one person told me his life had been changed by a sermon, which was titled “Why Jesus Would Not Join This Church.” Although I was familiar with the sermon, I had not preached it. A guest speaker had delivered the message at a church banquet!
The idealistic energy of youth is often framed in the context of tasks. Our youth drives us to answer questions, solve problems, and fix what we think is broken; maturity helps us to determine the right question, discern if there really is a problem, and know if something is broken. An older minister recently told me he spent the first fifteen years of his ministry answering the question “Did God create the heavens and the earth?” only to realize the people were really asking, “Why did God create me?” But this minister did not look back regretfully on the early stages of his ministry. Instead, he used his newfound discovery to rethink ministry strategy.
Ministry in my forties was a time of deliberate and sometimes painful redefinition. Early on I had worked to develop my speaking and writing skills. Yet I was often disappointed at the results, which could be summarized as “more was said than done.” I motivated people, but I didn’t lead them anywhere. When I realized this, I understood better some of my earlier frustrations. The churches generally supported the direction and vision I cast, but I saw few tangible results. I assumed our failure to achieve was either because of their lack of commitment or my ineffective communication.
Now I realize I wasn’t much of a leader; I was weak in helping the churches I served implement their vision. That insight is redefining how I think and go about pastoral work. Recently, God placed me in a situation in which I needed to be more of a leader: I had to move from the role of cheerleader to quarterback. As a result, my preaching and pastoral care changed. My study time and method of exegetical work didn’t change; I continue to work carefully with the text, but my application has changed. Before, I put a lot of emphasis on inspiring people on Sunday mornings; now I see inspiration as only the first step in leading people to service. I involve staff in the process as well as laypeople.
I redefined my call.
Redefining our call is not so much spiritual surgery in which we take a scalpel and scrape away some hidden malignancy; rather, it is a time to bless our past, learn from our mistakes, and look toward the future.
A small town football coach spoke recently at a civic club I attend. He has coached in the same school system for nearly twenty-four years, with little hope of being invited to move into administration or to coach in a larger system. He was asked how he kept his love for his job, even though he was now coaching the sons of players he had coached in the earlier years of his career.
“When I start to forget why I’m coaching,” he said, “I simply spend more time with the players after the games. I need to see the disappointment on their faces after the losses and hear the laughter after they win.
“But if I hang around with spectators, I tend to wonder why I’m in this.”
After many years in church work, it is possible to spend too much time with the wrong people—local church bureaucrats, for example, who sit in leadership positions, content merely to observe the ministry of the church. The best way for me to reenergize my call is to spend time with non-Christians who are searching for God in all the wrong places, new Christians enthusiastically throwing themselves into the life of the church, or hurting Christians who desperately want to find their way back into the fellowship of Christ and his people.
The call to ministry can, after mid-life, be certain. The call can propel you as it once did. Your Ministry’s Next Chapter: The Best Is Yet to Come is about the rediscovery of the call to serve God with passion and focus. The rest of this book is devoted to rediscovering that call in the various spheres of pastoral work.
Copyright © 1998 Gary Fenton
