Your Calling, Part II
by Steve Young, operations manager, Mdiv
In part I of “Your Calling,” I talked about how a big deal was made when someone was “called” into the ministry. Over the years I allowed this to skew my perspective, and it caused me to identify as a 3rdclass Christian. In my mind, 1st class Christians were missionaries, 2ndclass were vocational ministers, and 3rdclass were everyone else. The unfortunate side-effect of this identity was that I did not feel a responsibility to share my faith in a way to win others to Christ, that was my pastor’s “responsibility.” Looking back, I can see that I bought into a lie from satan, but it was easy to do since in many other ways I had become a “cultural” Christian. Patrick Morley from “Man in the Mirror” simply defines “cultural Christianity”as “pursuing the God we want instead of the God who is.”
As we opened the doors of our fabricating business in late 2000, unbeknownst to us, a huge automotive recession was staged to hit Detroit at the beginning of 2001, causing my wife and I to pray and fast in a way we never had before. This intense time of prayer thankfully began to whet my appetite for something more as the emptiness of cultural Christianity became more-and-more apparent. The side effect of this put me on a course of exploring what a “calling” was and who should have one.
Before going any further let me ask you, have you slipped into “pursuing the God we(you) want instead of the God who is?”
