Should Ministry Be a Calling or an Aspiration?

What Does Scripture Say?

A lot of men who aspire to ministry will use the language of calling saying I’m called or God called me. You might preach a sermon in a church and someone comes up to you afterwards and asks, Are you called to be a pastor? or I think you’re called to be a pastor.

There are responsible ways to use that language. A lot of people will talk about an internal call, a constraining sense of desire, followed by an external call or a confirmation from a church.

I’m a bit of a contrarian. I prefer to get rid of calling language altogether. Scripture doesn’t use calling to talk about the office of pastor. Yes, prophets are called, but that was special. God spoke directly to Jeremiah, etc. Scripture doesn’t use this exact word for this exact thing. So, that means we don’t have to. It’s a question of wisdom. Should we? Is this helpful language?

The Path to Being a Pastor

Bobby Jamieson

Written from personal experience, The Path to Being a Pastor lays the groundwork for aspiring leaders to walk through various stages of ministry preparation, trusting that the Lord will direct their steps on the path to becoming a pastor.

I prefer to talk about aspiring to being a pastor, or even more specifically, aspiring to the office of elder. That is an explicitly biblical category. So, Paul says in 1 Timothy 3:1 “If anyone aspires to office of overseer, he desires a noble thing.”

There are a lot of advantages to simply framing that desire in terms of aspiration. It recognizes that you want something but you haven’t arrived at it yet. It recognizes that there’s a sort of objective standard you need to measure up to, which is the biblical qualifications for elder—which are primarily a matter of character, but also of competence and ability to lead and teach in the church.

So, there's objective accountability. There’s a recognition that you have a desire, but there might be some distance in your own growth and experience before you get there.

There are some other advantages of framing it as an aspiration as well. It gives you a direction to pursue. It helps foster humility to say, This is something I want, but other people would need to recognize it in me. Other people need to see it in me. Ultimately, a church needs to call me.

There are some dangers even in a responsible use of calling language. It can sort of put the cart before the horse. It’s asking you to discern subjectively Has God done this to me? Well, in a sense, you don’t really know if he has until the church calls you to be their pastor. There could be a lot of detours and unexpected paths from now to then, or you might have a desire that’s never fully realized or satisfied and it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re out of accord of God’s will for you.

Subjective Guidance

Here’s a very specific application of this issue of calling. To say I’m called to pastor before anybody else has called you to pastor can create the danger of a kind of protective bubble around your own subjective sense of guidance. I know God has done this to me, I know this must be true of me, and it’s everybody else’s job to get in line and recognize it.

There’s an objective standard you need to measure up to, which is the biblical qualifications for elder.

By contrast, talking about aspiring to pastor opens that up to feedback from other people. It opens it up to biblical evaluation and it takes some of the pressure off. The point is not to make an immediate and permanent vocational decision but to ask, What’s the path you’re walking? What’s the journey you’re on? What are you aiming at and aspiring to in terms of the kind of man in Christ you want to be and how you want to be useful to other people in God’s church?

That’s my recommendation to you if you have any thoughts of wanting to be a pastor. I’d encourage you to simply look at 1 Timothy 3:1 and say, I aspire to the office of elder.

Bobby Jamieson is the author of The Path to Being a Pastor: A Guide for the Aspiring.

Bobby Jamieson (PhD, University of Cambridge) serves as an associate pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC. He previously served as assistant editor for 9Marks. Jamieson and his wife have four children.