At some point in your life, you sense God’s call in your life. It can be a dawning awareness or a specific experience that transforms your life. To be called by God is to have your life transformed from simply living to living on behalf of a purpose that is bigger than yourself. From a faith perspective it is an awareness that God has set a purpose for your life.
While Reformed theology suggests that all people are called or have a God given purpose in their lives, my particular focus is on those who have experienced a call that has led them towards ordination as a pastor. As a pastor in a church, you will experience a number of competing pressures that can easily distance you from the source of that call. Some of the cultural pressures are the desire to please, to survive financially, to achieve success, to be respected, etc. The truth is that none of these desires are wrong in themselves but they can dominate your life in a manner that distances you from the one who called you.
Take a piece of paper and briefly describe your original sense of call. Note how it felt to be called by God. Then reflect on how the pressures of ministry have distanced you from that feeling. What do you need to do to strengthen that sense of call.
If you have developed a trusting relationship with some other clergy, it would be healthy for you to have a discussion about the way that you feel compromised in the exercise of your ministry. If you spend some time reflecting on the temptation story in the gospels, you will realize that Jesus also experienced temptations to compromise his ministry. The challenge is not to avoid experiencing such temptations but to consciously discover what enables you to stay in touch with the one who called you.
