I wish someone had told me early on I didn’t have to live up to my childhood impressions of ministry. I thought pastors and ministers were synonymous--I didn’t realize all Christians are called to ministry, and I thought pastors/ministers wore black suits, white shirts, and narrow black ties and yelled a lot. So when asked if I was going to be a minister I quickly said, “No, thanks.”

But during high school, ministry just kept coming to me. Though never elected to an official youth-group office, I now see I often guided people in ministry--created opportunities for people care, worked for missions to happen, and helped witnessing to be done.

As a college graduate, I was a trained music teacher who didn’t want to teach. A friend led me to a group of business people who needed a director to start a drug drop-in center in a nearby city. From there, I was recruited to lead a youth group and choir in a small church. I kept saying, “Yes,” when doors opened, but I felt no clear ministry direction.

Vast Vocational Possibilities
One summer I traveled with a music team. During that trip, my “call-to-ministry” struggle reached a pinnacle, causing me to seek out a denominational leader. I asked, “How can I know if I’m officially called to ministry? I’ve never been struck by lightning or heard a voice. I just keep showing up and it keeps happening.”

1. Without question, prayer is the atmosphere where God works. We’re not changing God’s mind. God molds us to live responsively, with eyes wide open to the direction we’re given.
2. Consider ordination—no matter your anticipated ministry role. While Jesus never commanded ordination, I’ve found that without ordination my ministry was greatly inhibited. Ordination gives us a much-needed accountability group, and it opens ministry doors that have no other key.
3. Discover your gifts and passions. God will not call you to minister outside your gift area long-term. In an emergency, we can all mop a flooding toilet but probably cannot maintain significant ministry there without a specific call.
4. Review your experiences, particularly the painful ones. God wants to take the junk of our past and mold it into a Sculpture of Grace. If our painful past is transformed, those scars often provide our best ministry resource.
5. Talk to wise, risk-taking Christians--Kingdom-focused people. Many Christian friends will give us safe (aka non-biblical) advice. Jesus didn’t call us to be safe.
6. Keep your personal Spiritual Formation as your life foundation. I’ve never met a pastor who has lost their ministry because they failed the infant-baptism test. It’s always because they’ve tanked their personal spiritual lives.
7. Remember that your family (whether married or not) is your first ministry. Never sacrifice your family for the sake of your ministry. People will want more of you than you can possibly give.
8. Stay Kingdom focused. After the denominations and local churches have died, God’s kingdom remains. Every part of our call ministry must resonate with that truth.

Hearing from God is what we all desire. We want answers to where God wants us to serve, how to be the best we can be, and what we need to weed out of our lives to make a lasting difference.

In a recent interview with Ministry Mentor, John Ortberg, pastor of Menlo Presbyterian Church and author of The Life You’ve Always Wanted and Everybody’s Normal Til You Get to Know Them, candidly talks about why it’s essential to find your answers by being in community and listening to what God wants for your life. And you may find that God’s hopes don’t necessarily match your dreams.

How do you define calling?
There are different levels. The foundational one is that we’re all called to be children of God and followers of Jesus. If I’m not sincerely devoted to that, and instead pursuing more specific callings, I’ll always be going in the wrong direction. My focus will be on something external, like success or affluence.

How do you discern your calling?
It can happen in different ways. But it’s essential to ask God for guidance and to listen. The best book on that is Hearing God, by Dallas Willard.

It’s also critical that we don’t put the pressure on ourselves or on God to have some kind of pre-determined experience, but simply be open. And if we have a clear sense of direction, then pay serious attention to that. If it’s not there it doesn’t necessarily mean that someone should not be involved in the church.

So don’t expect to make a huge difference by worldly standards?
When it comes to making a difference, I think about Brother Lawrence, a 17-century mystic who worked in a soup kitchen. If you asked people in that day, “Who’s making the biggest difference?” they would have said, "It’s the Pope," or whoever the head of that community was--not the guy working in the kitchen.

Now, hundreds of years later, not many people know who the Pope or head of the community was then. They remember Brother Lawrence.

How do you keep yourself from embracing worldly standards of success?
We need to develop a kingdom perspective. And that means we have to fix our eyes on what is not seen.

Think of Jesus’ story of the widow who gave mites. He says that she made the biggest difference. She gave the biggest gift—even though by worldly standards it was miniscule. Jesus wasn’t saying that just to sound cool. He said it because things like intention and generosity of spirit are real.

But making a difference looks different now. We live in a world that is so concrete that we tend to think of money as real and spirit as not truly real. So we think of what Jesus said about the widow as just a nice saying. Instead of thinking that, though, we should think, She gave the biggest gift and made the biggest difference.

What was essential to making it through the seminary years for you?
A huge thing for me was experiencing God through people. In seminary you are surrounded with others who share similar dreams and hopes for ministry. There’s an opportunity to form relationships that will last a lifetime. And you’ll never likely be in a community with as many like-minded people. So lean into it, and talk about what God is doing in you and what is happening in your heart as you learn together.

How else does community shape you?
Being in community is also a great chance to find out clearly what my fatal flaws are. They always come up in community in ways they don’t when I’m reflecting on my own. When I’m by myself, I tend to say, “I’m really a compassionate guy! I read these things about love and community by Bonhoffer and resonate with them. I think, Yes I really love community.”

But when I’m around a difficult person and all of a sudden Bonhoffer’s words about “You have to be disillusioned to be in community,” I understand I have to give up the dream of community and actually start practicing it with real people.

Looking back, I was remarkably naïve when I first entered seminary.

I expected to encounter students whose hearts were so on fire for God that unity would always triumph over strife. (Those of you already in ministry are doubtlessly chuckling or grimacing - or both.). But this was my blissful state of mind as I left the corporate world. And we all know the old adage concerning the wedding of bliss and ignorance.

The Fallen World of Ministry
My first realization that seminary might not be a (post)modern Garden of Eden occurred during an informal job interview held on campus with a pastor. After this initial interview, he compared the process to a courtship, and explained we were not yet at the stage where we were prepared to go steady. He then remarked he hoped nobody would overhear us and think we were a “couple of queers.”

Shocked by his words, I invented an excuse, thanked the pastor for his time, and hurried out of there. I didn’t mention I had a close friend who was gay, or that “queer” was an offensive term, even from a Christian viewpoint on homosexuality. I left shaking my head.

The incident made me wonder if his views were the byproduct of a (hopefully) past era, or if I could look forward to spending the rest of my life with colleagues who felt the same way. Was he the norm, or the exception?

As if this incident weren’t enough, during a class on evangelism, a classmate, who also happens to be a lay minister at his church, made an inappropriate joke about forced marriages. The comment was so tasteless as to almost be considered misogynistic. This time, my reaction was not so timorous. I lashed out at the student’s insensitivity. The professor was much more gracious in diffusing the situation.

Confronting the Callousness
How can people who are supposed to be the leaders of the church, I wondered, hold such unenlightened opinions in the 21st Century? Worse, How can they feel free to express them in a seminary of all places?

Fortunately, the institution itself does not espouse these attitudes. How, then, could these episodes occur?

I struggled with my emotions. I had gone from the Charybdis of naiveté to the Scylla of cynicism. For a time, I allowed myself to be overcome with a lack of faith over the future of my own ministry. After all, how would I be able to deal with attitudes from within the church I felt did nothing to further the kingdom of heaven?