CALLED TO MINISTRY: A Biblical Perspective On Our Work In The Beginning

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Natalie Pope
5 years ago
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1 CALLED TO MINISTRY: A Biblical Perspective On Our Work In The Beginning When you hear the phrase called to ministry what s the first thought that comes to mind? You probably think of someone responding to God s leading to be a pastor or a missionary. Vocational ministry (being paid to do ministry) is a part of God s call, but at McBIC, we ve worked hard to broaden the understanding of what it means to be called by God. Today we re starting a new sermon series: Called to Ministry: A Biblical Perspective On Our Work. I m passionate about this subject, because the result of individuals and of a church family embracing God s perspective on our work, has far-reaching consequences. I m especially passionate about teens and young adults who are students tapping into the understanding that all of our lives including our work matters to God and He has a calling for every one of us. As a pastor, I view Ephesians chapter 4 verses as my job description. It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up, until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. My responsibility as a pastor is to prepare God s people for service. The premise behind that responsibility is that each of us has a calling from God to partner with Him in doing his work in the world. Twice a year (in September and in January) for the past 4 or 5 years I ve preached sermon series on this theme of partnering with God. We ve looked at Bible characters like Moses, David, Esther and most recently, Samson, to see what we can learn from their lives positive and negative lessons about doing God s work in our world. As part of those series we ve also interviewed several dozen people from McBIC and shown videos to you of how this plays out for them in their world. We ve heard from school teachers, business people, stay-at-home moms, students, coaches and others. On a personal level, I ve come to realize that while my role as a pastor provides me with some connections with people in our community, it is in my capacity as a youth sports coach, as a volunteer in community organizations, as a neighbor and as a dad of children in our local school system that I find the most opportunities to build bridges to people who don t know 1

2 Jesus. While I am a pastor of this church (and I love that role and am committed to doing it to the best of my ability), my sense is that God s primary call for me is to the people of our local community. If our Church Board were to decide tomorrow that they no longer wanted me to be McBIC s Senior Pastor, my first step wouldn t be call my bishop and ask him to place me in another church. My first step would be to ask God, Father, you ve placed this community on my heart and I feel like you ve called me to Mechanicsburg, are you changing that calling, or do you have something else you want me to do here? This is where I am today on this issue of calling, but I haven t always been there. Growing up in the church, I absorbed a much different understanding of what it meant to be called to ministry. Being called to ministry meant that God was calling someone to be a pastor or a missionary. Everyone I knew viewed pastoral ministry like this the pastor was paid by the people of the church to do ministry: preach on Sundays (and Sunday nights and Wednesdays), visit sick people in the hospital, make house visits with people, provide counseling for individuals and couples and preside at weddings, funerals, child dedications and baptisms. Pastors and missionaries responded to God s call and gave their lives to ministering, while other people earned money to support their families and to pay for pastors and missionaries to do God s work. My guess is that this is what many of us were taught to believe. My view of a pastor s role and of the role of people within the church began to change when Pastor Ken Hepner became the pastor of this church while I was in college. His 1 st sermon was titled, 2 Pastors and 200 Ministers. The gist of the sermon was that while God called some to be pastors, everyone in the church was called to be a minister. The pastor s job was to equip the people of the church for ministry. I watched Pastor Ken live that philosophy out and saw changes in our church through my college years. About the same time Pastor Ken came to our church I sensed God s call to be a pastor while studying History at Messiah College. Three years as a Bible Major in college and then three years in seminary studying for pastoral ministry, I lost sight of the truth that ministry was for everyone. The concept wasn t reinforced maybe it was about job security for pastors if everyone is a minister, what do we need pastors for? After graduating from seminary and coming back to McBIC to be a youth pastor I found myself thinking that if people were really 2

3 committed to God and doing his work there would be more pastors and missionaries. I accepted the idea that a small percentage of us were truly doing ministry, while the rest of the people were doing things of far less importance. I wouldn t have stated this idea publicly, but I believed it. In my role as youth pastor here at McBIC I had the privilege of working with a number of teens, college students and youth leaders who later responded to a call from God to be pastors or missionaries. As I served in my role as youth pastor and later as pastor of young adults I knew that one of my main purposes was to help young leaders prepare for vocational ministry. Time went on and after stints as youth pastor, pastor of young adults and executive pastor, it became clear that God was calling me to be McBIC s Senior Pastor. As I stepped into the role of Senior Pastor at McBIC, God made it clear to me that He was shifting my focus. Interactions I had with people who were living out their faith in the marketplace and books I was reading helped re-orient my understanding. I realized that ministry can happen anywhere and in fact, people who aren t in vocational ministry often have much more of an opportunity to impact the lives of people who don t know Christ than I did as a pastor. I began to see that my role as pastor is to equip the people of the church for ministry not just within the walls of the church but more importantly, in their homes, neighborhoods, places of work and schools. In his book, Visioneering, Andy Stanley articulated this concept well when he wrote, Our churches are filled with men and women who compartmentalize their lives. They differentiate between the religious and the secular. The religious being all those duties that have to do with God; the secular being their other pursuits. To make matters worse, they underestimate God s interest in their secular pursuits and they overestimate his interest in their religious ones. The truth is, our secular pursuits have more kingdom potential than our religious ones. For that reason, men and women who understand this see no distinction between the religious and the secular. Both their sacred and secular duties are played out on the same stage with the same goal in mind. They see themselves as lights at all times in all contexts. For those unique individuals, every role, relationship, and responsibility carries divine potential. Pp. 225 & 226 One result of seeing this sacred/secular dichotomy is that vocational ministry is elevated pastors and missionaries and those employed by Christian organizations are viewed as having a special, higher calling. Another result of the sacred/secular dichotomy is that marketplace ministry (ministry that happens outside of the church) is denigrated it s viewed as having little if any eternal significance. So pastors and missionaries and those called to 3

4 Christian ministry are giving their lives to doing things that matter, while the rest of you are earning money to support those called to ministry, just putting in time, hoping for a real calling from God or you fill in the blank. It hasn t always been like this. The Latin word for vocation (vocare) a word that we use to speak of our profession or job means calling. Our vocation is the place to which God has called us to minister for Him. A small percentage of us are called to be pastors and missionaries, but the vast majority of us are called to be accountants, stay-at-home-parents, attorneys, students, financial planners, administrators, teachers, engineers, computer programmers, salespeople, and the list goes on. A book that I ve found very helpful on this subject of our calling is Kingdom Calling, by Amy Sherman who incidentally is a Messiah College graduate. Throughout her book Amy has a number of excellent quotes that reinforce the importance of embracing God s calling in our work. I d like to share 2 of them with you today In nothing has the church so lost Her hold on reality as in her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation. Dorothy Sayers At most you will spend about 5 percent of your waking hours in [church]. Ninety-five percent of your life you spend in the world The scorecard is about the 95 percent lived in the world. Victor Pentz Everyone has a calling a plan God has for you and me about how we ll leverage our lives for his glory. God designed each of us with gifts and passions which He wants to see us use in cooperation with Him. So how did we arrive at the place where we limit God s calling to a select few and think so negatively about much of the work that we do? A number of factors play into this faulty understanding of calling, but a key factor is the negative view many of us have about work. As I was doing some reading and research for this sermon series I came across an archived 2012 New York Times article on the subject of busyness. The author was critiquing our ancestors, the Puritans, for their obsession with hard work. He wrote, The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment. (N.Y. Times article June 30 th 2012 The Busyness Trap by Tim Kreider.) My interest this morning isn t in the Puritans though they were very fascinating people I m intrigued by the author s statement 4

5 that God invented work as punishment. I m interested in examining that statement because I believe it s a very wrong and damaging interpretation of what God did in Genesis 1 & 2. Follow along as I read Genesis 1:26-28 & 31: Then God said, Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning the sixth day. And we read more about Adam s work before Eve was created in Genesis chapter 2: The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. Genesis 2:15 and We are made in God s image. He granted us stewardship of creation animals, birds, fish and plant life. And as part of that oversight, Adam was given the task of naming the animals. We re not given a lot of detail, but we re told that everything God created including work was good. Now we know that with Adam and Eve s sin what s known as The Fall, the curse of sin colored all that God had made and that included work. In Genesis 3:18 & 19 we read, Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken. Like everything else in creation, work was cursed after the Fall and became more difficult, but that doesn t change the fact that God created work to be good. The curse of sin which impacted all of creation was profound. Sin brought division between us and God; sin created a breach between us and others; sin negatively impacted our relationship with the natural order of creation; and, sin destroyed our inner peace. God created work to be good. The Fall tainted everything in creation, including work. But as followers of Jesus Christ you and I have the opportunity to bring Jesus redemption to our world through our work. Through work we can make inroads toward reversing the effects of the fall. We can 5

6 reestablish peace with God. We can build unity with others. We can bring Jesus healing to our creation. And we can find personal peace and healing and wholeness. Some of you right now may be thinking, That s a compelling vision for a vocation, but that s not possible in my job. Pastor Layne, you don t know where I work. That s a good point. Some of us are in jobs or school situations where it s challenging to feel like we re given the opportunity to point people to Jesus through our actions and words. Maybe you re biding time, waiting for the next step God has for you. Maybe your job isn t exciting or fulfilling. In the book, Kingdom Calling, which I just referenced Amy Sherman shares the following diagram which she titles, Vocational Sweet Spot. I love this diagram because it accounts for the fact that we may not easily fit our entire lives into the God s Priorities category. But every one of us has passions and gifts and every one of us encounters needs in our worlds. A great question to ask yourself is, Where do my passions and gifts intersect with God s priorities and the needs in my world? That is your sweet spot. As I began working on this message two weeks ago, I thought it would be helpful to have someone share their perspective on what I ve said here who isn t a vocational minister. I ve asked Curt Stutzman to share with us today. Curt is currently the C.E.O. of Messiah Lifeways, a retirement community several miles from here. But he also has experience working on the pastoral staff of a church in Virginia. I ve asked Curt to come and talk with us for a few minutes about the journey God has had him on. Curt Stutzman Thanks so much for sharing with us, Curt. It s one thing for me to say what I think as a pastor who works in a church, but I think it s so powerful to hear people who work in the marketplace articulate their understanding of calling and explain how they live out their faith where they work. Two things struck me as I read Curt s story for the first time, which I believe are pertinent for each of us wherever we work or whatever we do. First, I loved his emphasis on Jesus Great Commandment: loving God and loving others. We can always do that whatever situation we find ourselves in even in places where we feel very restricted about what we can say or do. Secondly, I appreciate how Curt and his wife Kathy don t compartmentalize their lives. They view work, church and ministry as one, not as unrelated pieces. They ve been very 6

7 intentional about seeking God s calling for their lives. At times that has led Curt to work in the church and at other times it has led him to work in the marketplace. And my dual challenge for each of us whether we re students, or working in the marketplace, or stay-at-home parents or retired or working in the church is to love God and love others wherever we are and whatever we re doing. And to recognize that God is concerned about every aspect of our lives work, play, family, church. They re all a part of life to Him and He wants us to seek his direction for every aspect of our lives. As I was thinking about this message over the w eekend I realized that I m especially passionate about students embracing this understanding of calling. I want middle school, high school and college studnets to realize that God has a calling for them a place where their interests and passions intersect with God s priorities and with needs they see in the world. You don t have to be called to be a pastor or missionary to do ministry. In fact, ministry often most effectively happens outside the walls of church buildings. The Apostle Paul s words in Colossians chapter 3 verses 23 & 24 are a great summary for us because they remind us that whatever we re doing, we re ultimately serving God. Paul writes, Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. 7

Pastor Lee Meng Cham 1 CORINTHIANS 15:58

Pastor Lee Meng Cham 1 CORINTHIANS 15:58 Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor