Stories of Others Who Have Heard God's Call
Why do we feel called by God to be a minister? It always seems like such a difficult question to answer. I felt like God just kept nudging me and nudging me and then he actually started to be a bit more forceful until I finally said okay, I'll try a course at the seminary. I still didn't think God wanted me to be a pastor. Or was it that I was sure I didn't want to be a pastor? It's hard to tell the difference sometimes.
I think one of the things that finally made the difference for me was when I stopped worrying about how ill-equipped I was to be a minister. I realized I was letting fear keep me from the call I knew I was hearing. Why would God pick me? I don't know the Bible very well. I get my feelings hurt very easily. And running a church seems about as overwhelming a job as I have ever heard of. None of these seemed like good signs that I was the one God wanted. But then I started listening to God and listening to others, also. What I heard was that other people saw things in me that I was not capable of seeing and other ministers shared their fears and I realized that I wasn't alone. I started to wonder if maybe it wasn't about how talented I was as much as how much I was willing to trust God to equip me to serve his kingdom.
I have been in seminary for two and a half years now and I absolutely love it--well, except for the papers and late night study sessions. But the truth is I wouldn't trade a minute of this adventure. Every time I feel lost or scared God seems to know just what I need to forge ahead. It's funny how that works. I still have fears and trepidations about the ministry--probably even more now than before--but I know God will support and care for me throughout this process. I know that God brought me here for a reason and he will take me forward to whatever he has planned. There are days that I really wish I knew what that plan is and then there are days that I'm just glad I don't have to worry about it. I feel truly blessed to be held in God's hand and to be called to this amazing task.
Dawn Alpaugh
Seminary student
God's call came to me through the church, the inner working of the Holy Spirit, and gifts indicating ministry as an avenue of service. It seems that the Lord's hand was on me from birth. My parents, grandparents, and larger family were church people. My father was a minister and my mother was an unpaid Christian education director.
When I was young, members of the church would ask me if I planned to follow in my father's footsteps. They encouraged me in that direction. One summer when I was about 10 my father took an Old Testament course under Dr. Lester Kuiper. The ministers in the group and their families held a picnic at Tunnel Park. I saw them enjoying one another's company and thought maybe being a minister could be fun.
It was expected that I would confess my faith in Jesus Christ and I did so when I was 13. As a teenager I attended four summer church camps sponsored by Albany Synod. The ministers who participated were good sports and Friday evening candle light services provided opportunities to rededicate my life to Christ.
Hope College provided an opportunity to serve on the YMCA board and attend a Student Volunteer Movement Quadrennial. The Holy Spirit continued nudging me in the direction of seminary. The faculty at New Brunswick Seminary confirmed my decision, the Classis of Rochester gave me a license to preach, and the Classis of Schoharie ordained me. I could with integrity say then, and now, that I believed I was called by the church and therefore by the Lord of the church to the office of ministry.
Bob Hoeksema
Retired
I was raised by my parents to be Christian. My mother was the most faithful of the family; she was an unshakable believer in Jesus Christ. Our family went to church nearly ever Sunday; it was not our choice, and it was my mother's expectation, which was never questioned. Through my childhood I participated in Sunday school, youth groups, and all the activities of the church, including picnics, church cleanups, fundraisers, and worship.
At the age of 14 I became a confessing member of the church, which was not an RCA church. I became a member because it was expected of me. I wanted to please my parents, the congregation, and the minister, whom I adored. I really didn't think very much about what I was doing or what I really believed in. I went to the confirmation classes and gave the appropriate, well learned answers, but I really didn't have firm convictions. Frankly I knew the right answers but did not understand the faith. I made several attempts to read the Bible but found it too difficult to comprehend.
By the time I was 15 I became aware of problems within the church. During my younger years I never noticed disagreements within the congregation, power struggles, unhappiness with the minister, the incessant need and subsequent drive to raise money, and perhaps the most devastating reality of hypocrisy within the membership.
Reality struck deep when the pastor, whom I loved, was forced out of the church by disgruntled members. I cried when my beloved pastor packed up his belongings and moved away. I was resolved to leave the church myself. When I went off to college, a place where my parents were not able to control my life, I left the church and did not go back for 15 years. There is no other way to put it: I hated the church and would have nothing to do with it.
In my mid-30s after holding a number of jobs, I found myself questioning my life. Though I had left the church, I had always kept a Bible that had been given to me upon my promotion from the third to the fourth grade Sunday school class. One evening I had an unexplained urge to look at that old Bible. I went to the basement where there were a number of boxes, one of which held the old Bible. I began once again to read the Word, beginning with Genesis. To my amazement I felt that I understood what I was reading. I found it difficult to put the Bible down in order to sleep or to work; I had become consumed with the desire to read more.
I was acquainted with a highly respected elder in the Reformed Church. Though I was not a member of the Reformed Church I asked to meet with him and discuss what I was reading and understanding in the Scripture. We were both amazed, and the elder encouraged me to participate in the life of the church. One Sunday I decided to attend worship services. While trying to sneak out of the church without being confronted by the pastor, I found myself standing before him with my hand extended in the routine exit procedure. I looked at him and suddenly blurted out, "Would you have time to meet with me?" The pastor immediately took out his pocket calendar and set a date to visit me at my home.
I met with the pastor every Tuesday morning for nearly a year. Together we went through every word of the Heidelberg Confession, the Belgic Confession, and the Canons of Dort. I began to understand Reformed theology and became convinced the Reformed Church was the right place for me to be.
One Easter Sunday I stood before the pastor, the congregation, and God to confess my faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. This time I did not do it to please parents, congregation, or pastor. I did it out of conviction and faith.
It was then that a good number of people began to suggest I should consider the possibility that God was calling me to the ministry. At first I denied even the most remote possibility that there was a call from God. I was in my mid-30s, with a business and a family. I simply could not turn away from the life I was living to become involved in the ministry of a pastor. I was afraid. I knew what happens to many ministers who give their lives to the Lord only to be beaten down and rejected. My will to turn away from the calling was resolute but frankly not strong enough to overcome what I came to understand was God's call. There was nothing else in my mind, nothing else that I could see or dream about. I began to understand that all of my plans, my hopes and desires, could not be achieved. In essence I came to the belief that God would persist in the call until I would give in.
I have now been a minister in the Reformed Church in America 14 years. I have been beaten down and rejected now and then. I have not achieved great success or fame within the church. I have survived a heart attack and a stroke. I have sinned in word and deed. I am certain I have not only disappointed some of my brothers and sisters, but disappointed our Lord as well.
But there have been causes for great celebration. Many of the lost have returned to the Lord's pasture. Many have come to understand God's Word more fully. Many have come to understand God's grace and love for them. Many have been able to overcome their fears. Many have become strong and powerful in their faith. When all is considered, I have great job in my heart. I have a purpose in living, and I have the overwhelming sense of God's love for me through Jesus Christ and grace.
If God is calling I would encourage anyone to submit to his will without fear or reservation.
Steve Yon
Pastor, High Bridge Reformed Church
High Bridge, New Jersey
It was November 17, 1993, around 10:00 p.m. Central Time. I was nearing the end of the movie Malcolm X in the lounge of my college dorm when God told me in an audible voice to "go be a pastor." I wrestled with God until 2:00 a.m. that night, when he honored my bargain that I would see a pastor friend about this if I could get some sleep. The next morning I kept my end of the bargain.
The pastor and I shared similar religious experiences of visions of Jesus, Holy Spirit transformation, and a servant's heart. He told me to pursue vocational ministry until God says, "no." Other pastors, friends, and fellow congregants told me the same.
I have seen the power of God work through me in vocational ministry in mighty and miraculous ways, and I have watched him transform my flocks into the image of his Son. I take firm hold of his calling upon my life to be a minister of Word and sacrament, all the while still waiting to hear Him say, "no."
David Leung Kahler
Pastor, Griggstown Reformed Church
Griggstown, New Jersey
I was born in Santurce, a town south of San Juan, Puerto Rico. When I was seven, my parents relocated to New York City. I came to know the Lord as my personal Savior at the age of 14, in a New York City storefront Pentecostal church. During the early '60s, street gangs were popular and I thank the Lord for keeping me safe and away from those vices. In those days it was common to hear Puerto Ricans speak of "finding gold in the streets of New York," and many came in search of that opportunity. That was not the primary reason that Mom and Dad left the island. We were an upper middle income family, with commodities that not everyone had in their homes. Later I learned that they were having marriage difficulties and the relocation to the U.S.A. helped them stay together until my father passed away as an active Christian in the church.
My call to ministry was at the age of 17. I was incapacitated for a week, unable to walk, with paralysis from the waist down. The condition was not explainable by the team of doctors who examined me. Through the prayer of two ladies from the congregation, I was healed--raised to my feet in an instance, not a minute later! I promised the Lord to serve him in a meaningful way, with no idea that serving meant becoming a pastor. Pastors were underpaid, worked long hours, and were taken for granted. I quickly forgot my promise and consequently studied engineering, graduating from Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn with a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering. I married Consuelo (Connie) and we have two children, Natalie Ann and Luis Alejandro, plus now two grandchildren, a four-year-old named Christopher Alexander and a six-month-old named Nayanna Nadine.
Growing in the faith provided gifts in music and leadership. I was soon youth director, choir director, Sunday school teacher, treasurer, elder, preacher, and assistant to the pastor in sort of progressive leadership capacities. These positions were the preamble to a formal theological education at New Brunswick Theological Seminary. My expectations were to become theologically trained to better help the ministry of the local Pentecostal church we now attended in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The Lord had other plans!
Any Arminian studying in a Calvinist seminary is bound to have some questions. I had many! As I studied theology, Scriptures made more sense from a Reformed perspective. The theological studies at New Brunswick were valuable, giving good tools needed to reflect critically on Scripture. It is an experience that all those aspiring to a ministry should have.
In May of 1985, the Rev. Jhonny Alicea-Báez and the Rev. Franklin Simpson, who were leaders in the Council for Hispanic Ministries of the RCA, asked me to help as an interim minister at the New Life Reformed Church in Brooklyn, New York. After consideration I asked the elders of our Pentecostal church, and to my surprise they reluctantly said yes. I served New Life Reformed Church for about a year while still holding onto the ties with the Pentecostal church. In the middle of my studies my wife and I knew that our call was within the Reformed Church in America. Once again the Lord came into the picture. He knew that letting go of a job where I was performing well with a good track record would not be easy for me. I worked for a Fortune 500 corporation, Westinghouse Electric. They were among the first to downsize in the early '80s, releasing 8,000 people of a working force of about 162,000 from around the world. I now can say, "Praise the Lord, I was one of them!" In short, the Classis of Brooklyn took me under care and later ordained me.
After ordination by the RCA, I served as a prison chaplain and as director for the Council for Hispanic Ministries. The work as a chaplain in New Jersey's maximum security prisons (Rahway and Trenton) allowed me to witness to inmates who had been labeled as outcasts and the menaces of our society, most of them rightly so. However, even in that environment, God's grace is in action saving lives and transforming inmates.
Luis R. Perez
Synod Executive
Regional Synod of the Mid-Atlantics
I was born and raised in the very secure, covenantal arms of the Reformed Church in western Michigan. In the 1950s and 1960s, the county I lived in proudly proclaimed that a majority of its residents belonged to either the Reformed or Christian Reformed Church. And so you can immediately sense that my days were filled with people who looked like me and prayed with words that everyone understood.
In the fall of 1972, when I was a junior at Hope College, I spent a semester as a student in the Philadelphia Urban Program. Students from a number of small, liberal arts colleges in the Midwest found their way to a whole "new land" when they arrived in Philadelphia. We took courses about urban problems like crime, drugs, housing, and prisons. We lived in neighborhoods that were filled with people who did not look like us and prayed in languages we barely recognized.
Emanuel Lutheran Church was located in the center of Southwark Federal Housing Project in South Philadelphia. There were 4,000 people who lived in four square blocks--some in "low-rise" buildings, most in four tall high-rise apartment buildings that dwarfed the church. Emanuel was an old German Lutheran congregation that had begun to learn the "language" of those who surrounded it. The language was deeply influenced by latchkey kids and single parent households, by street gangs and rampant drug use, by loitering prostitutes and daily crime. It was also inspired by the enormous courage of parents who sought the best for their children and by those who believed that the day would surely come when they would find a way out of the past so they could finally and fully live in the land of "the dream."
It was at Emanuel and in Southwark that I heard God quietly calling me into ministry. I had arrived as a twenty-year-old religion major from a quiet, safe college, but I left as a person deeply called to a pastoral ministry immersed in a dangerous world. In South Philadelphia, I witnessed a church that lived close to the daily crosses of people's lives and constantly whispered Easter hope to those who would listen. I witnessed a church that was as deeply concerned about the physical and emotional needs of people as it was about their souls. I witnessed a church filled seven days a week with hundreds of children and teenagers who yearned for hope and felt the embrace of a new family of faith.
It has been almost thirty-five years since I heard God's call on the grimy, glorious streets of South Philadelphia, but it feels like it was yesterday. The call, God's persistent call, has never abandoned me; neither has the knowledge that although we all speak different languages born out of the diversity of our experiences, in the end, we all speak the language of faith and hope.
I am deeply grateful.
Gregg Mast
President
New Brunswick Theological Seminary
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