The Three Legged Stool of Calling

When God speaks, He gives life and direction to His people. To follow a communicative God requires pilgrims willing to listen and respond. It is here that the Lord’s commands become the disciple’s calling. God’s directives become our directions.

The Scriptures unveil a host of commands, which God speaks to His people. Commands such as, “Be holy, for I am holy” or “Come to me all you who are weary” or “Love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.” or “Love your neighbor” and “Go, and make disciples.”

Yet, because God in His creative artistry has uniquely and intimately created each one of us, the question becomes “How do we determine our own unique strategy for living out God’s commands?” Or, said another way, “How do we discern our calling?”

Recently my wife, Nicole, and I have wrestled through our calling to plant a church. The options before us have not been few. Our pros and cons lists have not been short. It has seemed a daunting and emotionally draining task. However, a few older and wiser spiritual sherpas have taken time to guide us, and we’ve found the diagram below helpful in shaping our experience.

Our Calling

For nearly two decades I built a career in the finance world from public accounting, to merger financing, to financial risk management. Nicole has built a career as a hospital pharmacist. We have enjoyed our work and found success along the way. I would not have envisioned my career leading away from finance and towards cultivating a new church community.

It began in 2007, when a trusted friend said, “I think you are going to be a pastor some day.” I outwardly laughed, but inwardly I heard the whisper of God’s calling. Something about his words resonated as prophetic.

Over the next several years God led me into a lengthy pastoral training process under the mentorship of Ed Marcelle. I learned a way of reading the Bible, Lectio Coram Deo, which transformed my discipleship journey.

That journey led from small group leadership, eldership, bi-vocational pastoral ministry, to full-time ministry as an Executive Pastor. Now God is calling me away from that role, and calling my family away from our home and community towards the work of starting a new church. Taking fresh ground in a new place. How did we arrive at this?

Seeing God

And a vision appeared to Paul in the night: a man of Macedonia was standing there, urging him saying, “Come over the Macedonia and help us.” And when Paul had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go on into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.

Acts 16:9-10

Nicole and I had committed to regular prayer individually and together to ask God for direction and clarity. He answered those prayers by speaking through His Word. The Scriptures are alive as the voice of God for our lives today. In November of 2015, the Spirit placed a holy highlighter on this passage for both Nicole and me. God spoke to us independently through this passage, and as we shared that with each other, we heard God calling us to go and help plant a church in Western Massachusetts with our Tribe.

Knowing Ourselves

It is one thing for God to call the Apostle Paul to go and plant the Macedonian church. It is another thing for Him to call me, this Paul, to plant a church. Isn’t it? Perhaps the “Pauls” got mixed up on God’s iPhone. Yet, God has a habit of calling the unexpected. In Genesis, God asks Jacob a self-identity/self-awareness question:

And He said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.”

Genesis 32:27

“What is your name?” Essentially, He is asking Jacob “Who are you?” “How are you identified?” Part of the journey of discerning God’s call is to rightly and humbly understand ourselves and our stories, both who we are and who we are not. We understand this through questions like: “What experiences has God already brought us through?” “How have those prepared us?” “How do we feel that we can do this or that we cannot do this?” “What are the gifts He has given?” “What skills has he equipped me with?” Assessing oneself is not just an evaluation of our abilities, but also our willingness. We tested our hearts and our desires to follow God by asking questions like: “What are our fears?” “What gives us joy?” “What are we willing to say no to?” or “What good things will we leave behind because we trust God has something better?” For us, these questions often required more work with God than the tangible evaluation of our skills, gifts, and abilities.

We found that a clear calling doesn’t necessarily come void of fear of circumstances or doubt in our ability. In fact, I might suggest that calling comes with fear and doubt because it provides the soil for faith and places us in a posture of reliance on Him.

For me, Nicole was an invaluable asset in being self-aware, and vice-versa. We had numerous conversations on our couch, in our car, and at coffee shops as we examined ourselves and our past. We discovered that the highlights of our history, when we lined them up, become a directional beacon illumining our future. In knowing who we were, we saw who we needed to be.

Hearing Others

Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety.

Proverbs 11:14

When Jesus calls us to Himself, He calls us to the community of the Church as well. We treasured the wisdom and insight of others speaking honestly to us. We opened ourselves up to people we trusted, those who knew us and knew our stories. They encouraged us and corrected us with things we needed to hear. They reminded us of God’s Word and how they saw us. Knowing ourselves is good, but we are also blind without the perspective of truthful and gracious peers.

Hearing others started with my friend’s words in 2007. It continued with my co-elders and their wives. It culminated as Nicole and I sat before five other Acts 29 Network pastors and one of their wives and heard God using them to help us have courage and resolve in this calling. Throughout all of this, God has used His people to shape, mold, affirm, and confirm God’s leading in our lives.

We are grateful for this three-legged stool of Seeing God, Knowing Ourselves, and Hearing Others. Finding the confluence of these three has helped us develop a foundation in our calling. However, discovering a calling isn’t just hearing and knowing what to do, but actually doing it. It is the journey of allowing God’s greatness to be preeminent over ours and trusting His goodness to provide us security and rest in the face of the unknown. His directive is now our direction.