Discerning Your Call to Ministry
Jason K. Allen. Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2016. 153 pp. (Hardback).
A lot of people question what God’s will is for their life. And many of them wrestle with whether or not His will is for them to be in the ministry.
What do you do with that wrestling? How do you know if you’re supposed to dedicate your whole life to a ministerial role in a church? How do you know if your calling is to a job with a ministerial component — but not a pastoral position? What if you love Christ and His Church, but you’re meant to simply be a Christian who dynamically lives out his faith among his coworkers in a secular job?
Jason Allen, president of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri, decided to tackle those questions in this book, a compact look at 10 questions meant to help the reader put his life up against Scripture and see which role God may have in mind for him.
Allen says none of those callings make a Christian a second-class citizen, but he does want to help believers know exactly what it means to “surrender to the ministry” — and whether or not it’s for them.
‘Outsider’ experience
From the beginning, Allen makes clear his view that pastoral roles are reserved for men, so for me, reading this book as a woman was more of an “outsider looking in” experience.
But I very much enjoyed the process of self-evaluation against Scripture and felt like it equipped me to help a friend wrestling with the question. And many respected evangelical leaders endorsed the book with an excited “where has this book been all my life” tone. So men, if you’re asking yourself the question of to pastor or not to pastor, Allen’s book may very well be a good tool to help with seeking God’s guidance.
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