My Call to Ministry

If you would've told me five years ago that I would be pastoring a church, I would have laughed. But much of my life is like that, unexpected in the way that grace often is.

I always have a hard time with this question, because my understanding of call goes back to the very beginning of my Christian story. Or maybe that is just very Methodist, since we believe that all bapized Christians are called to ministry.

I was baptized as an infant at Kingsway United Methodist Church in Springfield, MO. My parents, however, were not really into church, so with a couple of exceptions, I was unchurched as a child. I had my awakening to faith when I went to camp the summer before 6th grade, and when I came home from camp, I immediately got involved in the church.

We moved to Virginia when I was a sophomore in high school, which was traumatic but a blessing. As I started to look at colleges, my main focus was the physical therapy program. I knew that whatever I did as an occupation, it would be ministry because of the way that I did it. I felt compelled to help people learn how to walk again, after accidents and injuries, and I figured that I would work in clinics and lower income settings so that I could be in mission.

As I worked my way through college, however, I was miserable with my path. Cellular biology was the turning point; or, at least, that semester was, the spring of my sophmore year. I had a hard time believing that I would be so miserable if I were really following my call. I took one class that year in the religious studies department: Black Religion with Dr. Mark Wood. I loved it! Essays and not scantrons! Reading and interacting with the texts and my classmates! It was like coming up for air if you are drowning.

I began to really discern whether I was going in the right direction. I was active in leadership at my home church as well as the Baptist Student Union on campus. I loved this one class. And yet, in my other science classes and volunteer work in the hospital, I was miserable. I talked with my campus minister, Bill Berry, who had no doubts about my call to some kind of ministry. And I signed up to go on the study abroad trip with Dr. Wood to Havana, Cuba.

The two weeks in Cuba changed my life. When I got on the plane to come back to Virginia I knew two things: 1. I was going to come back to Cuba, and 2. I was not going to be a physical therapist. It's funny to look back on this, because this was not a "mission trip," not a churchy trip at all. But I felt God's presence so strongly in Havana, and I heard God speaking so clearly through the scripture I was reading.

When I returned to school, I changed my major to religious studies. I felt called to be a missionary, to work with people in Latin America or specifically in Cuba as we struggled to be the people of God in the world. After I graduated, I went to Guatemala to study Spanish, knowing that I needed to be fluent for my call, and then to Wesley Seminary. I felt the need to be ordained, though I did not plan on being a pastor.

My sense of call was further refined in seminary when I went to First United Methodist Church in Hyattsville to serve as a pastoral intern. I had never even considered the possibility of being a pastor. And yet, as I served at this amazing church, I discovered gifts that I never knew I had. It was another awakening experience, another great surprise of grace.

When I worked at the hospital in Washington D.C., I told this story to one of my colleagues and she said: "You are just like St. Francis!" St. Francis of Assisi heard God's call to "build my church" and thought that God meant that literally. So St. Francis found a broken down church and began to rebuild it. He later realized that God meant for him to rebuild the whole of the church, not the physical building. I heard God's call to help people learn how to walk, and so I began a path toward physical therapy. It wasn't until later that I realized God was calling me to help people walk in a much different sense, as disciples.

My call story is long because God has transformed me along the way, refining, polishing, and sometimes scrubbing with microbeads. And I don't feel like it is finished. In many ways, I continue to seek God's call everyday and to discern where and how God wants me to serve in ministry.

I do know one thing for sure, I am here only by the grace of God. I am constantly amazed that God would bring me here, that God would care so much for me as to call me to serve and to provide for me throughout my journey. I echo Paul's sentiments, "But by the grace of God I am what I am, and God's grace toward me has not been in vain" (1 Corinthians15:10).