Ordination Testimony

This summer I’ll be ordained to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament in the Evangelical Covenant Church. On Friday I gave the following testimony about my call to ministry to a regional gathering of Covenant pastors.

The best thing about the call to vocational ministry is also what makes this call so hard. In Ephesians 4:11 Paul writes, “Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers.” It’s not the work of ministry that is the best and the hardest part of the call- it’s the One who calls who makes it so personally, comprehensively complex. Christ himself.

The idea of vocational ministry in a general sense was always an appealing possibility. There are pastors and missionaries in previous generations of my extended family. My parents experienced their own, individual calls to missionary service when they were teenagers. Our family life in Venezuela and Ecuador was good and reinforced for me the significance of lives dedicated to equipping to church for works of service.

It was only when I began wrestling with the particular call to plant a multi-ethnic church that I began to understand just how hard this call can be. Again, I don’t mean the different tasks and rhythms of planting and pastoring; rather it’s the One who calls – Christ himself – who has made it hard. As we began planning this new church in 2008, I had no idea that I would eventually be its pastor. As a relatively well-read person, I just knew that a multi-ethnic church planted in predominately Black neighborhood would require a Black pastor. But as the day to launch weekly services approached, and as we exhausted our list of candidates, our sending church decided that if God wasn’t going to provide the ideal church planter, then I would have to do.

As I took my first wobbly steps into this call I began to experience something disturbing: For the first time in my life, my white male-ness was not an asset. Week after week I wondered – with varying degrees of despair – why God hadn’t called a woman or man of color to serve and lead this church. Surely this diverse congregation would benefit far more from a pastor who was from the neighborhood, someone who instinctively knew the joy and pain of being Black or Brown within the context of our racially segregated city.

I’ll never forget sitting in my spiritual director’s office as I expressed my growing conviction that I was the wrong person for this call. This older, African American woman listened as I described my worry, the near-constant sense of being out of place, of wondering whether I’d ever be seen and accepted. She listened and then, when I finally stopped talking, she smiled and said, “This is good. You’re describing how I feel much of the time as a Black woman in a white world.”

I’m sure it sounds ridiculously remedial to you, but it was as though the heavens parted when she said this to me. I realized that my race and gender had conditioned me to expect God’s faithfulness to feel a certain way- like acceptance and affirmation. Yet, as my spiritual director was pointing out, because it is Christ who was calling me, my expectations would need to change dramatically. The call to ministry – if it is modeled after Jesus – must require me to be emptied of power and privilege; it must come to embrace my weakness and foolishness as the locations of God’s display of faithfulness and salvation.

In 1978 Zenos Hawkinson preached a sermon to a people he feared had forgotten God’s faithfulness to them during their times of weakness and need. He said,

If you have come out of the pilgrim tradition of the children of Israel, from Egypt to the promised Land, and have used that magnificent opportunity only to become a Philistine, then take heed. Do you live comfortably behind high walls and bronzed gates, and worship regularly at the altar of Baal? Are you pleased with the prospects of Social Security and a special pension plan, or the apparent security of America’s nuclear deterrent and the overwhelming power of its society and technology? If that provides comfort, then live in fear and trembling, because it will all be taken away from you as surely as the security of our forebears. I proclaim it.

He’s preaching to me. This Philistine culture has formed me to desire its high walls and bronzed gates, to worship at its altars of safe privilege and divisive power. But Christ himself is calling me to something different- to the way of weakness and foolishness.

This is so hard. But it has also been so very good. My wife and I find ourselves woven into a community of people who we never could have hoped to know and love outside of our diverse congregation. Our two sons – both adopted, neither of them white – are growing up in a community that reflects the gifts of their ethnicities. I know friendship with neighborhood colleagues whose acceptance and loyalty still surprises me. And best of all, every impossibly hard thing about this call has always been surpassed by the impossibly good Gospel of Jesus.