Quit 'yer bellyaching

Below I am going to paste most of my seminary application essay. This essay was the bane of my existence for some weeks until I actually sat down to write it. How relieving to have it completed! I have talked with some of you out there about this essay so I thought I would post it here. I found some things out about myself while writing it, so I would say the exercise was worth the torture.

I recently began working with the pastor at the United Methodist Church where I have been attending on a Lay Speaking ministry program. This program is forcing me to wrestle with questions I have pondered for quite a few years now. Similar to the Wesleyan Churchs guide to preparing for ministry, this program begins with a discussion of the call on a persons life. The CALL. The words almost haunt me.

I was raised in a wonderful Christian family in an independent Baptist church and have always felt a responsibility to the Lord with my life, conduct and values. I was saved as a four or five year old child at my bedside with my mother and have felt, like many people saved at an early age, both that I was too young or that my testimony was somehow less valuable because I wasnt saved from out of the gutter of sin. A few rededications at campmeetings and good counseling sessions from various pastors later, I found my faith firmly rooted. My senior year of High School, in the thick of college plans and applications, I found myself at an Aaron Jeoffrey concert at a church in my hometown. The music was fine, but the part that sticks with me was the attitude and testimony of the two men who comprise the group. A loving, dynamic relationship with the Lord could exist without making a person irrelevant to society, which I found my Baptist church often was. With this experience I knew I was searching for a Christian College that would give me a solid musical training.

At Houghton College I found many fantastic things: serious academic scholarship, a pursuit of holiness, a dynamic Christian community and a conservatory quality musical program. My second year I was so taken by my theology professors and the richness of faith that I found with this study that I changed my B.Mus. major to double BAs one in Music and the other in Religion. Four years were up all to fast and, because I was so far in to my B.Mus. degree, I needed to complete some two or three courses. I returned home to Northern Maine to finish these courses because the hundreds of resumes I had sent all over the country had not produced any posts where I could minister while attending school to complete my degree.

I completed these courses and in 2003 I was a graduate of Houghton College. Another batch of resumes was dispatched with the same result-no leads. The door was considered closed and so I began searching for other means of employment. I soon found myself in a bank performing credit analysis on commercial borrowers and then took a job at a different bank as a Commercial Loan Officer.

It is at this point in my life that I find myself trying to discern a call, my call, and whether it exists. My current employment is challenging but not rewarding in the way I had hoped my life-long vocation would be. I have entertained all sorts of positions in banks and in many other business environments and found each would be the same. Some sort of social work perhaps would provide me with a better sense of lasting vocational value, but I wonder if that would even fulfill my desire that my vocation would have some special sort of impact.

At a wedding in February of this year I met up with an old Houghton professor. He was actually the professor whose class had convinced me to change my major. He asked what I was doing and, when I told him I was working in a bank, said, You arent a teller, are you? His subsequent encouragement regarding my past performance in school and gifts and talents he had observed shook open the door of doubt that had been closed by a life of relative ease and comfort; was I on the best path I could be?

And so here I am. A professor and countless friends telling me my discomfort and dis-ease with my current vocation must be related to an impending change of direction. Open and closed doors have brought me to this place of uncertainty and the next step, it would seem, is a seminary education. Having come from a Baptist upbringing to a Wesleyan College and recently a UMC congregation, Asbury seems a good fit and I am in full agreement with the Ethos statement, statement of Educational mission and statement of Faith.

The specific context of my call, if I have one, is one of discipleship. Although I have a gift for and educational background in music, it is not itself an end but a means. I have found that most churches I have been blessed to be part of do not have a way of ensuring believers are matured through mentorship, worship and academic pursuit. My own experience lacked this, in fact, and perhaps this is why I feel a particular mission in discipleship. I believe corporate worship, tradition, rituals, service and learning are all beautiful things, but we are not as Christians called to any of these things specifically, rather, we are all charged to reach the nations with the gospel not a gospel of cheap grace or a gospel of an end-times insurance policy, but a gospel of the good news of Christs reign over sin, our deliverance from sin, and our freedom to realize the Kingdom of God on earth through our communities of faith.

Perhaps, to myself, even, I have just solidified my calls existence.

Houghtons motto or mission statement is to provide an academically challenging, Christ-centered education in the liberal arts and sciences to students from diverse traditions and economic backgrounds and equip them to lead and labor as scholar-servants in a changing world. I think this is a wonderful statement. to lead and labor as scholar-servants in a changing world. While at Houghton I certainly did find I was becoming a scholar-servant, or, at least, I was introduced to and came to admire those who were further along this path. I think this is precisely what Christ wants from us all. Perhaps we arent all called to be scholar-servants but we are all called to be servants. There is, after all, no higher calling than that of a servant.