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God Delivers the Call to Ministry in Countless Ways

A picture is worth a thousand words. Jeremy Wester uses an illustrated book to share bible stories with a group of children during a mission trip to Chicago, Illinois.

By Jeremy Wester, Duke Divinity School

Former pastoral intern and TAC certified candidate for ministry, Jeremy Wester wrote the following essay, which will be included in the book, Beyond the Burning Bush: Hearing and Answering God’s Call, published by the United Methodist Church.

I really couldn’t tell you the first time I felt God knocking on the door to my heart. I just know that as I look back I can see the countless ways God has managed to find his way in.

I’ve never seen the heavens part, time has never stood still on my behalf, and I  certainly don’t expect to see the Spirit of God descend like a dove over me any time soon. In fact, there’s nothing grand or epic about my story at all, just a lot of little things that have come together in a big way to make me the person that I am today.

I was born into a United Methodist family, and I don’t just mean we went to the local United. One of my great-grandfathers was a circuit-riding preacher many years ago. Methodist Church

I don’t know much about the rest of his generation, but both sets of grandparents are long-time Methodists and my parents were both active lay members of the church.

They met at the Wesley Foundation at Texas A&M during college and my mom was even the youth director at my church when I started junior high. I guess you could say church has been in my blood since birth.

Up until college, Sunday morning attendance was more of an expectation than an option.

In my family, you were in church unless you were sick or out of town, and there was an unwritten rule that youth group events would be funded over any other form of entertainment.

Having this background, I have always been at home in the church and never felt any desire to leave. I even took the opportunity as a young boy to make friends with my pastor on the summer days that my mom would have to work and I was too young to stay home alone.

I remember times when I would sit in the back of the huge sanctuary staring at a beautiful stained glass portrait of Jesus reaching down toward two of his followers.

To this day, I don’t really know the full symbolism of the window, but I remember the amazing feeling it gave me to sit in that holy place and gaze upon the face of our Lord. Of course, I didn’t have much understanding at the time of what gave me those feelings, I just knew on some level that I was at home in the presence of God.

It wasn’t until I was a sophomore in high school that I came to know the fullness of God’s presence in my heart. As I said in the beginning, I really couldn’t tell you the first time God

began to knock on the door to my heart, but I can tell you with absolute certainty about the first time God tore down every wall to my heart and filled me completely with God’s love.

My family had moved to Pflugerville, Texas, that summer and by January, I was on a midwinter retreat with a bunch of people that I barely knew.

Don’t get me wrong, I really liked the youth group and the youth director had a profound

influence on my life; it just takes me a while to get comfortable with people.

So there I was on the retreat, still getting to know my own youth group and suddenly plunged into a group of several hundred unfamiliar faces. In the midst of my uneasiness and fear, I was given a time to sit and listen for the voice of God.

During that time, my youth director came over, laid hands on my shoulders, and began to  pray.

As he finished praying, something happened to me that I can’t even begin to put into words. I have never been at such a loss for words and understanding. The strange thing was for the first time in my life everything made sense. I had always believed in and followed God, but in that moment things clicked like the last piece of the puzzle was finally in place.

The overwhelming feeling of God’s presence gave me a profound look into the reality and meaning of being a child of the risen Lord and a look into the heart of God. In a moment that would probably mean nothing to the rest of the world, I was able to experience the power and call of God in a tangible way.

Even as a child I knew on some level that I could never be happy without sharing the power of Christ with everyone I met. Things had just become a little more concrete in that moment and I began to accept my call into the ordained ministry.

I certainly had not committed to the vocation yet. I wasn’t exactly running from the path

God had laid out for me, but I was definitely taking some back roads. I went to college as a physics major because I loved math and science and figured I would change the world by proving Einstein wrong and determining an entirely new scientific view of the world.

Those dreams quickly faded, however, as I realized again and again that I could never really enjoy a vocation outside the ministry.

I still love math and science, but I decided to put that on the back burner for a time and became a philosophy major, still not fully committed to the idea of becoming a pastor, but at least willing to get a degree that would prepare me for the types of things I would learn in seminary, should I choose to attend.

College was again a time of many small things coming together to help solidify my call into ordained ministry. It took a while for me to find my church home. I don’t know if it was a subconscious desire to look beyond The United Methodist Church or just a case of being lazy, but I applied for and got into a Christian leadership organization at Texas A&M and, for my freshman year, treated it like my church home.

It was what I would call a non-denominational Southern Baptist organization, as are many college ministries in College Station. I don’t really have anything against such ministries, except to say that they aren’t where I belong.

It was, however, a good experiment in finding where I fit into the church and gave me greater clarity in knowing that The United Methodist Church is where I belong. Still, I had to start all over finding a church home when my freshman year ended.

I began by checking out the Wesley Foundation where my parents had met so many years before, figuring that it couldn’t be a bad place to start since it had a big hand in my being on this earth in the first place.

Little did I know at the time that it would become my home for the next three years and it would be the place where God finally got control of my whole self, vocation and all. The campus minister, Max Mertz, pretty quickly began to push me toward ordination.

After contemplating my calling and taking the back roads for so long, I finally decided to get on the ordination track and see where God might take me.

I read all the books and met with Max countless times. I got more involved with Wesley than I ever thought possible, easily spending eight or more hours a day with my Christian family and taking various leadership roles.

I went on all the retreats and even joined the conference Board of Higher Education and Campus Ministry, which oversees the operations and budgets of all Wesley Foundations in the Texas Annual Conference.

Through all of these experiences, I continued to feel right at home learning what it really meant to submit to God in service of the church. I served as a pastoral intern for the conference during the summer after graduating college and am presently beginning my master of divinity at Duke Divinity School as a certified candidate for ministry with the Texas Annual Conference.

To this day, God continues to knock on the door to my heart and ensure I’m traveling God’s path for my life. As I look back, I can see so many little blessings that God has poured out on me to make sure I would find my home in ministry for God.

I was given a loving family to instill in me the value of the church. I was blessed beyond measure to meet my fiancée at the Wesley Foundation, just like my parents met years ago. I found friendships in Christian community during youth and college and have been given countless opportunities to live in and serve the body of Christ.

God still hasn’t parted a sea for me and I don’t reckon I’ll be able to walk on water any time soon, but I can rest easy in my calling knowing that the presence and love of Christ will be with me throughout the rest of the ordination process and throughout my life, gently nudging me along in my life’s journey closer to God.

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