A Month of Gratitude, Day 7
December 7, 2008
Today at North Point, Andy did the last message in his Listen and Learn series. In the message Andy talked about the ways that we hear from God and that God is always speaking, but often we don’t put ourselves in a position to listen to God and hear what He has to say. The message brought to mind a number of questions people have asked me through the years about how I knew God was calling me into ministry and more recently how I know that God is calling me to go to Denver. The seventh thing that I’m grateful for from my time at North Point is the answer to those questions.
When people ask about how I knew I was called to ministry, usually it’s because they’re trying to figure this out themselves. I often tell them that I don’t know how to tell anyone how to get into ministry – all I can give you is my story. I start by telling them that if you had known me in college and you’d asked me what vocations I might possibly pursue during my life, ministry definitely would not have been on the list. Even after college when I was working in the information technology field, I just always assumed I’d be in the business world – ministry was just never on the radar. What I never anticipated was the transformation God would bring about in my life as I came back to church at North Point and the way he began rearranging my priorities.
As I began to open my life to God and offer every aspect of my life, I began sensing him probing around the work that I did. The easiest way to describe it is just a general discontentment with the work that I was doing. At first I thought it was just about my job, but I began to realize that I was spending more and more time volunteering at North Point – on the production team for North Point and 7|22, at Area Fellowship, leading a small group, at Passion events – and none of it felt like work, though I was working really hard while doing it. One day the thought entered my head, “What if you did this all the time?” It wasn’t an audible voice, but I believe that was the beginning of God moving me toward a new career path.
It’s a longer story than I can tell on this blog, but the story that unfolded for me in my path to ministry was that I sought information and opportunities, doors opened, I stepped through, and I did the best job I could with the opportunities I was given.
I took a leave of absence from my job with IBM and did a 1-year project with Mission Aviation Fellowship in Kazakhstan and then Russia. The door opened, I walked through. I came back and decided to take a job working with I/T at North Point. The door opened, I walked through. I decided to move out of I/T and into a pastoral position with our small groups ministry. The door opened, I walked through. North Point grew and I continued to take positions of more responsibility, ultimately overseeing the adult small groups ministry for our three campuses. The door opened, I walked through.
Through most of that journey, I’m not sure I would have described my decision as a “call from God.” It always makes me nervous when people say, “God told me” to do this or that. I guess it’s because that’s the trump card that ends conversation. When you say God told you, who can argue with that? I just told people I was trying to obey God and do the next right thing. Then about four or five years ago, John Woodall asked me when I knew that I was “called by God to be a minister of the Gospel.” I told him that I wasn’t sure if he had and asked what he meant by that. John explained that, for him, he might do any number of jobs in his life that provided income, but he had an assurance that wherever he was and whatever he did, he was first and foremost a minister of the Gospel. I thought a lot about that conversation, and the more I thought about it and prayed about it, it just felt like regardless of what I did for a job, I always wanted to be engaged in building God’s Church. But I was still hesitant to say that God had called me. That was until 2005 when my boss, Bill Willits, came to me and told me that the leadership team was going to commission me. Commisioning is how North Point acknowledges publicly God’s call on those they believe have been called to serve in full-time ministry. As I sat on that stage and heard the voices of my friends and mentors – Andy Stanley, Bill Willits, Louie Giglio, Joel Thomas, John Hambrick, and many others – pray over me and for my life in ministry, it was the assurance I needed to say that I truly was called by God. The internal sense of leading I had felt had been confirmed publicly by the Church.
As I began to feel that same sense of discontentment and urging toward starting a new church in Denver, God used many of those same people to confirm his call for me to Denver. I am so thankful for the way that God works to guide us and give us assurance of his leading. When things don’t go as planned, there will always be doubts and fears that I have somehow mistaken God’s guidance. But my decisions rest, not on my best judgment or insight to God’s leading alone, but on the affirmation of that call from his Body – the church. It is because of this that I have enormous gratitude for the role North Point has played in God’s call on my life.
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