Continuing our discussion about the disconnect between what you expected when you first sensed God’s call and the reality you experienced when you became a pastor in a church, I want to remind you again of the value of community. Even the prophets with their brilliant insights had to bring those ideas to the community of faith. Not everyone understood them, but enough did that their words found a home in the Scripture of the community. As you work on your new understanding of God’s call in your life, you need to find others, trusted colleagues, spiritual advisers, etc., with whom you can share your thoughts. Individual thinking untested by hearing yourself speak it and others hear it can easily lead to bizarre conclusions.
Second, as you work on this in your life, you may conclude that you are called by God but not to pastoral ministry. There are many other vocations to which God may be calling you. The challenge is to make sure that you are called to something and not just to escape from something. Ministry, in all of its varied forms, is not comfortable and it is important that we maintain our spiritual connection if we are to have the strength to pursue it.
Third, our understanding of God’s call is not a fixed entity but an evolving experience. What God calls you to at one stage of your life may be entirely different from God’s call at another stage. The process that you are engaging in will continue to be part of your life. What is suggested here are some ways to stop and focus on it as you experience different bumps in the road.
It would be a valuable discipline to occasionally pause and seek to describe how you understand God’s call at a particular given moment in your journey. The ToolBox suggets some other ways of doing this.
