God’s Calling and Denial

I would not say that my discernment process, at least the formal portion of it that was monitored by the church hierarchy, was a positive experience. In fact, I complained about it so incessantly that, as soon as I was ordained elder, I was tapped to serve as a candidacy mentor and to serve on the DCOM. (God has a sense of humor, and so does the United Methodist Church.)

I have numerous complaints about the way our denomination handles the candidacy process:

First: We’re terrified by the knowledge that pastors sometimes “break.” When they do, they tend to do so in spectacular ways. Unfortunately, our denomination has never found a way to deal with at-risk pastors in a constructive way. Rather than intervening mid-career, we’re attempting to find unbreakable pastors by making the screening process difficult. There are no unbreakable pastors. If you push us hard enough (and they keep pushing harder) we’re all capable of “going Jim Jones” on some poor congregation.

Second: Our process attempts to weed out people with questionable callings, psychological problems, inappropriate theological orientations, and a host of other issues. It does not succeed at any of these things. It does succeed at weeding out people who cannot handle extremely high levels of stress. The result is that we’re hand-picking the most tightly-wound, paranoid, pressure cookers on the face of the planet. I’m proud to count myself among their number!

I hope to use this series of articles to cast a vision for a better path.

In my last post, I wrote that being called into the ministry is like being diagnosed with a fatal disease because, in order to accept the calling, we must first grieve. Every time we start down a path, at some level, we must grieve the loss of the paths not taken. The five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression/fear, and finally (hopefully) acceptance/peace. In this article, I want to talk about the first stage most of us deal with: Denial… the refusal to believe the truth.

There was a movie in the 1950s titled, “A Man Called Peter.” It was not about St. Peter, but about the Rev. Peter Marshall, a famous Scottish-American preacher of that era. According the film, when Peter Marshall first heard the voice of God calling him to the ministry as a young boy, he rushed home to tell his family. They were overjoyed that one of their own had been blessed with such an honor.

My experience was nothing like that.

I didn’t tell anyone for a very long time. In fact, God and I had a lot of arguments over it. I had other plans. My dad thought I’d make a great lawyer, and so did I. (I like to argue with people.) Lawyers are people who get stuff done. (This was the ‘80s, and the legal profession had not yet fallen from grace.) I watched “L.A. Law” and everything else on TV that made the legal profession look glamorous. People were proud to have lawyers in the family. But the preachers depicted on TV were comic relief at best and psychopaths at worst. I had ambivalent feelings about my own pastor at that time. I belonged to an independent church. It had many strengths, but the pastor treated it like his own personal property.

When I finally realized that God was not going to drop the subject, I told my parents. They tried to talk me out of it. They loved going to church, but they didn’t want me to be a pastor. They wanted what was “best for me.” When people asked me what professions I was looking at, my parents would cringe and stutter when I said ministry. My friends begged me not to throw away my life. Even the pastors I spoke to would sigh and say, “Well… you still have plenty of time to change your mind.” These pastors clearly were not enjoying their work. That’s too bad… I think this job is all kinds of fun… when done properly.

In short, I didn’t get much positive affirmation. Actually, I got none. Notice that none of the objections I faced had anything to do with real questions of call. They all had to do with societal expectations, stereotypes, and misguided notions about the American Dream. To make matters worse, in that era, many pastors and DCOMs had a strong bias in favor of older candidates. I was told that someone my age simply couldn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. My response: “What do my wants have to do with this? I wanted to be a lawyer.”

Is it any wonder that so many people say no to God? Virtually every pastor I know who entered the ministry mid-career will confess that they actually heard the calling when they were teenagers. They succumbed to societal pressure.

I feel very strongly that young candidates need to be affirmed at this stage. Testing the call of someone dealing with denial is harmful, and yet we keep doing it. Thankfully, we do seem to have gotten better at this. We now make a point of affirming that all people are called by God to ministry of some sort. But we still seem to default to the assumption that most candidates are, in fact, called to something else. Balderdash!

If you’re reading this, and you’re in denial, take heart! You’re not crazy. God is calling you, or you would not have made it to the end of this far-too-long post. The good thing about denial is this: It doesn’t last forever. No one can deny the truth indefinitely.