Am I defaulting into ministry?

Last week I had the chance to return home to Naperville to spend my spring break with my family and at my church. I was blessed with the opportunity to meet with my senior pastor and a good friend of mine who also happens to be an elder. I expected those conversations to be encouraging times of catching up. What I didn't expect was to get challenged in the area of calling. More specifically, challenged to ask the question, how do you discern your calling?

See, it's easy for me to criticize students that default into spending summers at home and entering the job market without considering where God might have them. It's much more difficult for me to discern where God might have me. It turns out, just as students might default into those positions, I'm prone to default into that which is the most comfortable and familiar to me: ministry with Campus Crusade. I think we all have the tendency to want to default into that which is most comfortable for us without challenging the underlying assumption behind that desire.

One of the most significant things that was said to me about how to discern my calling was also one of the least expected: the importance of the church in discerning how one's talents, skills and giftings might give insight into God's specific vocational calling. If it is true that the church (and more specifically, fellow believers around us) is supposed to take on a meaningful role in discerning calling, then we must ask the question, do we have people around us that are willing to be honest with us? In evangelical culture there is a tendency to tell people "nice" and "encouraging" things, whether or not they are true. So if I get up and give a talk at our weekly meeting that is fairly bad, it's pretty unlikely anyone is going to be willing to tell me, gently and graciously, yet honestly, "Kyle, that talk sucked." Do we have people in our lives that will step up to the plate and be honest about our strengths and weakenesses, our giftings and liabilities, our fruit and failure? It's far better to have honesty salted with grace, than dishonesty with good intentions.

Ultimately, we want to get equipped and trained in that which we are called. In the young, reformed crusade sub-culture, it's not surprising to find that nearly everyone believes that they are called to go to seminary and plant a reformed church somewhere in the midwest. In some ways, that's become the default for that particular sub-culture. And so again, the challenge to me, and to each of us, is to examine our calling in light of who God is, who he has made us to be, and what others say that either affirm or reject what we perceive to be God's call on our lives.