By Jeremy Writebol, TGC. (image: Sebbi Strauch/Unsplash)
David was a physician with distinction. Lauded as one of the most brilliant young physicians of his day, he left the medical field and began pastoring in a small, poor mining community. William was a small-town shoemaker who uprooted his family to India and translated the Bible into more than 30 languages. Lily was an aspiring painter and artist. She put her successful art career aside to move to Northern Africa and reach communities of Muslim women that the men couldn’t access. Bill was an economics student and entrepreneur who started his own candy company. After becoming a Christian, he sold his business and started a campus ministry at the local university that later became one of the largest parachurch organizations in the world.
If you’re familiar with the history of missions, you might recognize these people. All had a given trajectory and direction for their lives. Good and noble vocations were in front of them. Yet each one of them ended up serving vocationally in Christian leadership. If you’d asked them when they were young if they could envision being pastors, global missionaries, or leaders in Christian organizations and ministries, they probably would’ve laughed. Yet God called them into full-time Christian service.
They weren’t leaving ungodly secular occupations in exchange for sacred and holy roles. They were simply following God’s call on their lives to serve him in specific roles within Christian ministry. They surrendered their ambitions and life trajectories to pursue new and God-given ambitions—with worldwide, eternal effects. How would you know if God is directing that same call toward you?
Five Signposts
As I tried to answer that question years ago, I stumbled on a letter John Newton wrote to a younger man wrestling with the same question. Newton said, “My first desires toward the ministry were attended with great uncertainties and difficulties, and the perplexity of my own mind was heightened by the various and opposite judgments of my friends.” Yet he understood what makes for a true calling and followed the Lord in it.