Today Joe asks Jamie about calling. Specifically, to talk about the laity-clergy divide that exists in so many churches...and how, as a result, we should understand God's calling on our lives.
Jamie: Hey, everybody. This is Jamie Dew.
Joe: And I am Joe Fontenot.
Jamie: We want to welcome you back again to the Towel and Basin podcast.
Joe: And so today, I am asking... Jamie, I'm asking you about this question of calling. Particularly, I see this idea, sometimes, where people can feel that they are called to the ministry, or called by God, or not called by God.
Jamie: Right.
Joe: It's almost a laity versus clergy divide. I don't always feel that that's helpful, because if we're all called to follow Jesus, how do we understand calling?
Jamie: Yeah. This is an extremely important question. I don't think it's one... This is a question where we have allowed for the last couple decades for the pendulum to swing in ways that's not helpful. We get out of whack, and we need to correct it, and so then we over-correct, and it comes way over here. For example, probably 15 years ago, 20 years ago, up to that point, the dominant paradigm, it seemed to me in the church was simply this. There are those who are in the ministry, and there are those who are not in the ministry.
Jamie: On the one hand, that certainly does make sense. Right? I mean, there are people with a pastoral calling on their life or a missiological calling on their life, or to do student ministry or academics. Sure. There are people called to specific tasks, and then there are people that are laypeople in the church, and they're not called to those tasks. On that level, it makes sense, but here's what was problematic about that view.
Jamie: That view sort of insinuates that you're either serving God or you're not. If God has called you to do it, good for you. But everybody else are just sort of the leftovers, and they don't have a kingdom impact. That is an anemic and detrimental view of the body of Christ. That is not how God designed us. God designed it so that every one of his children, male, female, black and white, every one of his children has a role to play in his kingdom work. And so, that old view of in the ministry, not in the ministry, was detrimental to the vast majority of the body of Christ.
Jamie: I think about 10, 15, maybe 20 years ago. We began realizing that, and so we began correcting. It was good to correct, but here's what happened. We started saying, "Well, no, everybody serves Christ." Again, 10-15 years ago, I can remember when I was in seminary. If you asked people, "How many of you are going to go be a pastor in one of your seminary classes?" Probably 95% of the hands in the room went up. If you asked that same question today in our seminary classes, maybe 5% of the hands go up, and that's not good. That's not good for the body of Christ.
Joe: We've gone too far in the wrong direction.
Jamie: That's right. We definitely need more people. We, once again, do need to be calling out the called. I mean, look, God has called some of us to be pastors and some of us to be missionaries, and we got to start beating that drum again, but we started saying, "No, everybody is in ministry." I think what that did is it sort of took this pressure valve off, and people started thinking, well, I don't have to go be a pastor now. I can serve by just being X in the church, and you certainly can. Those are legitimate ministries in the church, but we've over-corrected to the point where we're not calling out the called anymore to give themselves to pastoral ministries. There's a bit of a crisis going on right now where, frankly, there is just not enough people out there and not enough called out people to go pastor the churches that we've got in the SBC right now. I think we over-corrected there.
Jamie: What we've got to do is understand how everybody plays into the calling of God in their life, and at the same time, give the special attention or the right attention to those that are called to carry out specific tasks within the body. I think that's been a bit of our history. Our corrective, I think we start very big picture real quick. We need to understand what God intends to do with us and in us. There's the mission and our purpose. There, I'd say two things. I mean, just building off of the instruction of Jesus and the themes we see in the Ten Commandments.
Jamie: Look, we are called to love God, and we're called to love people. We love God by developing the devotion, and our affections for Christ, and our intimacy with Christ and abiding with him. We love people by being kind, and gracious, and all those things, but we love people, also, by preaching the gospel, by fulfilling the great commission. We can't say we love people if we don't take the gospel to them. We have to execute God's mission. That's where we start. Okay, so understand, God is at work through history, through his people, the body of Christ, the church.
Joe: Very big picture kind of idea.
Jamie: That's the big picture. If that's true, then it's not just the preachers and the missionaries that God is going to use. It's also, yes, going to be the butcher, the police officer, the lawyer, the school teacher, what we need. If we're going to fulfill the great commission, then it takes the entire body of Christ infiltrating culture and leveraging their lives for the calls of Christ in those places, if we're going to do that.
Jamie: I think the question, when it comes to calling it, understand big picture, there's a calling on all of us, collectively, to execute his mission, but then there is a particular calling for each one of us, and it goes back to what we were talking about in one of our previous podcasts, this picture, this biblical metaphor of what we are, of the body of Christ, is central to all of us understanding our individual callings in him. Some of us are hands. Some are foot. Some of us are an eye, or an ear, or a nose, or a mouth. But collectively, together, we are giant, the body of Christ that God wants to use. We need to find out, individually, where do I fit in into that body of Christ?
Joe: Okay, so then how do we do that?
Jamie: Yeah, that's a very important question, too. Big picture, we understand what God is doing through history. Now we turn to me, as an individual, you as an individual, or maybe that teenager in a youth group, or that woman or that man later in life. They're wondering, how do I serve Christ? I would give four principles here.
Joe: Okay.
Jamie: Number one, we do have to start with biblical instruction, and simply put, what I would say to people is, listen, if the Bible forbids it, God is not calling you to it. If God commands it, he may very well be calling you to it. For example, you can't say, "Well, I'll just go be a prostitute for Jesus." Nope, that's out out of bounds. The parameters of scripture would forbid that. Okay? You can't say, "I'll be a thief for Jesus. I'll be a crook for Jesus." Well, no.
Joe: Because they need Jesus, too, and they do.
Jamie: Oh, we can justify all sorts of things, right?
Joe: Right.
Jamie: No, that's not what God would call us to do, because he forbids those types of things. God gives us some parameters on gender roles that I think we have to be faithful to. If the Bible has laid out some parameters, start there. Understand what the biblical parameters are, and then you start the consideration. From that point forward, I would say, it's not going to be a formula we have that, hey, if you just execute this formula, in 30 minutes, you're going to know what God is calling you as. Be patient, my dear brothers and sisters. This is going to be something that God reveals to you over the long haul, not in a quick flasher moment.
Jamie: For example, I remember when I was in high school, and even in college, all of my buddies and friends that just knew God was calling them to a certain type of thing. I can tell you now that none of them are doing those things. I, often, counsel college students, and they're discouraged or despondent because they're 22, and their friends in the dorm, they know what God has called them to, and they don't, and they feel like there's something wrong with them. I just assure them, "No, no, no, no. They think they know."
Joe: You're probably actually a step ahead.
Jamie: That's right. None of them are going to do that, probably. That's not how this works. Okay? First of all, I'd say biblical instruction. Start there. Second thing I would say is, and this doesn't sound like much of an answer to them, because they want to know the nuts and bolts of what I'm called to do. It sounds like I'm giving them a non-answer, but I would say, "No, no, no. Second obedience, you need to be an obedient follower of Jesus Christ in everything that you know he's called his people broadly to do. You need to develop and cultivate the practice of devotion, loving God, walking with God, obeying God, living for Christ in every single way you do." You say, "But I want to get to the nuts and bolts of what he wants me to do." But I'd ask a question. "Why would he show you the specifics if you're not devoted to him? Why would he show you the specifics if you're not actually living in obedience?"
Joe: Doing it.
Jamie: Yeah. Master that first. Right?
Joe: I mean, this is such a tired comparison, but I just can't help but see it... I have a four-year-old and a six-year-old at home, my kids, and they don't understand half, 95% of what I tell them to do. They don't get the why, but it's like, "Why do we have to do homework? Why do we have to do spelling words?" All this kind of stuff, right?
Jamie: Yeah.
Joe: But it is so important because you don't want to be... How do you spell "the" like Dumb and Dumber, right? You know what I mean? Right? And so, we don't want to create adults like that.
Jamie: Right, right. Yeah. You have to learn the basics of walking with him first.
Joe: So true.
Jamie: So, do that. The reason for that is for my third reason. It seems to me after you have cultivated and developed a life of devotion and obedience... By life and obedience, let me unpack that for just a second. I'm not talking about a short season. I'm not talking about you went to a summer camp and had a summer high, spiritually, or you have been away from God, and you've come back in the last two-three weeks, or three months, or four months, or maybe even a year. When I talk about a life, I'm talking about long, extended seasons of your life, years, maybe decades of faithful obedience and devotion to Christ. Develop that. Do that.
Jamie: Now thirdly, pay attention to your passions. What's God put in your heart to do? Now, this is where it gets sticky, because there's debate here. The world will tell you, "Just follow your heart." The well-meaning, I think, Christian will quote back from the book of Jeremiah, "But the heart is deceitfully wicket above all things. Whatever you do, don't trust your heart." Look, I totally get why some Christians are going to quote that verse in this context, and I would say there are times and places where they should quote that verse.
Joe: Sure.
Jamie: There's a lot of people saying, "I'm going to do this for God," and their heart is in the wrong place. They shouldn't listen to their heart. Here's what I'd say. I think you said this off the air. While the heart is deceitfully wicked, the heart can also be trained. Right?
Joe: Yeah.
Jamie: What you can do, is you can live your life for extended seasons of time, such that it becomes your default patterns and dispositions in such a way that you are submitted to Christ, you are obedient to Christ, you love Christ. Your heart is trained towards him. When you do that, now, and only now, I would say, "What has God put in your heart to do?"
Jamie: The last thing I'd say is, there needs to be corporate confirmation. This is to say that the body of Christ needs to confirm this in you, but now here's the question. What does that look like? Well, what I don't think it normally looks like, though you certainly could have some things like this, is people coming up to you, patting you on the back, and, "Man, you should be a preacher," or, "You should be a missionary." I mean, sometimes that happens. I think you have to have the humility, the eye for and the humility, to grant the way the church naturally and normally looks to you for service. For example, in my life, over the last 24 years, rarely, if ever, have I been asked to lead worship. In the few times I have done it, I didn't get asked again.
Joe: Confirmation noted.
Jamie: Yep.
Joe: That's the wrong way.
Jamie: Yeah, this is not how the Lord is using me. I do play a little guitar, but it's kind of for devotional purposes.
Joe: Sure.
Jamie: I'm not the guy to be up on a stage doing that. People sometimes ask, "You ought to get up there." No. There are better people in the body of Christ to do that.
Joe: [crosstalk 00:12:14].
Jamie: Yeah.
Joe: Are you a singer?
Jamie: No. I wouldn't be the singer.
Joe: Devotionally.
Jamie: Yeah, sure. To lead? No, I'm not. I'm not that guy.
Joe: I was just curious.
Jamie: Same thing with organization. I mean, rarely, if ever, has the church looked to me and said, "Hey, would you help us organize this major outreach event for our..." I'm just, no, that's not... If they did ask me, they would only ask me one time.
Joe: One time will do it.
Jamie: The church has, however, historically in the churches I've been a part of, leaned on me, needed me at times. "Brother, would you preach for us? We need you to do this." I think in those moments, that's sort of indirectly the body speaking and confirming, this is how God has gifted you. This is where God is using you. When you put all those things together, and give it the time and the process that it needs, I think you're positioning yourself to hear from the Lord on what he wants you to do.
Joe: That's really important to me to hear and just internalize because if you take this time period of, say, many years, and I know it doesn't have to be that exactly, but let's just say a long enough time period where you can no longer fool yourself.
Jamie: Right.
Joe: Right? You can get passionate about something that's not really for you for a season. You can do that for a season. I mean, it's called powering through. I mean, you can convince yourself of whatever you need to, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. But if we're talking about like, what am I on this earth for? You know what I mean? It's just really an unsatisfying thing to go down the wrong path.
Jamie: Absolutely. A good example of that in my life was, when I was in seminary, I worked for two attorneys.
Joe: You're kidding. What did you do?
Jamie: Basically, I paralegaled. They didn't give me that title, because I wasn't good enough at it, but I was basically a paralegal. I did real estate research for... This was back during the refi boom in the early 2000s when interest rates were-
Joe: Just before the bust.
Jamie: Yeah, yeah, that's right. It's basically what helped lead the bust.
Joe: Right.
Jamie: It wasn't my fault, guys. I just did research. That's all I did, but I did that. I mean, it was a job I probably needed six months to learn how to do and I got about 15 minutes of teaching, and then I just had to figure it out. Those guys were phenomenal to me. They were great to me. Looking back, I've said this on a previous podcast, nothing gets wasted in your life. How God used that to prepare me for what I do now is phenomenal when I look back on it. I'm glad I did it. I had built good relationships with them. During the time, there was absolutely no question, that was God's provision for me and my family during that season of time, but there came a point when I knew I could not stay in that job much longer, because if I did, I would be being disobedient. I had this growing sense that God was about to move me into a church and into a pulpit, and I didn't know what to do with that.
Jamie: Do I now put my resume out? I know a lot of people do that, and I don't have a problem with people doing that. In my own life, God doesn't let me do it that way. He does not let Jamie Dew do it that way, because I think probably because he knows I'll just get too involved and egotistical about it. And so, I just said, "Well, Lord, if that's what you want to do, you have my yes, but I don't know how to orchestrate that or bring that about." Man, within no time at all, God opened a door for me to be pastor of a church.
Joe: Let me ask you a question. This is a little bit of a sideline question. I know we're kind of finishing up this issue, but I can't pass this up. Did you have a period of unrest to rest or dissatisfaction to satisfaction?
Jamie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: Was it defined during that time and other times? Tell me about that.
Jamie: Yeah, yeah. Well, I would say for me, it wasn't in the major time. So like, moving from the law firm to the pastorate, moving from the pastorate to the classroom, going into a deanship, and then even, yes, even this last time, going from where I was as the dean of the college at Southeastern, and now I'm president here at NOBTS Leavell College. In all of those major moves, they were preceded by, not necessarily for me, at least, unrest, but for a sense of curiosity and a sense that I don't know if I'll be here long.
Jamie: At the law firm, there was this growing sense that, I don't think I'm supposed to be here anymore. I simply gave the Lord my yes, and at that point, I had peace. I trusted that he would open up whatever door he wanted me to do. When I was leaving the church that I pastored for eight and a half years, I was always afraid. I knew the day would come. I did. The day I accepted the call there, I knew two things. I knew, clearly, God had called me there, but number two, I also had a pretty clear sense that the day would come that I would go into academics. I just didn't know when that would be. I thought, I don't know if that's a year, two years, four years. Well, it was eight and a half.
Jamie: During that eight and a half years, I knew that day was going to come, and I always terrified that it would be vague when that time would come. It wasn't. When the time came, the Lord made it crystal clear to me, it's time. I could see it coming from six months out. There was a season of, I'm not supposed to be here. In that particular case, it was a stewardship question in my life. I had given my professional youth there, and I knew that I was not allowed, by the Lord, to give another season of life like that, that I had to go now to the academics side and disciple students.
Jamie: Even then, interestingly, at Southeastern, about two years before, this whole thing came up for the presidency here at NOBTS Leavell College. God had brought me to a sweet, sweet place in my life of... I was the recovering, arrogant guy that I talked about in one of the previous podcasts, where just genuine joy and delight in the job that he had given me, and what he had done in my life. There was such an overwhelming amount of contentment that I was enjoying it to the point where I just, in prayer, I would often find myself offering myself back to God. Lord, I love you. I'm grateful for what you've done. What do you want? I'll do anything, and then I almost died.
Joe: And next week...
Jamie: Yeah, oh, and the cliffhanger. No, I did. I woke up one morning, had an artery burst in my large intestine. I almost bled to death. I spent a month in the hospital, had major abdominal surgery to remove 15 inches of my large intestine. They tried a whole bunch of things to try to fix it.
Joe: Holy crap.
Jamie: Nothing fixed it, so they had to remove it. I ended up getting an infection. I mean, I was in the hospital for like a month, and I almost died. When I came out of that, it was so clear to me that I shouldn't have survived. There was just no way that I would've survived that. I could not help but ask the question, "Lord, what do you want from me?" Because I was so content with what he had done in my life, the next thing was, God, what do you want from me? I just want to give it, whatever that is. And so, I kind of knew.
Jamie: For about two years, I had this sense that something is going to happen. I don't know what it is. I never, ever envisioned this. I suspected it would be maybe step down from my dean role at Southeastern, and just go back into the classroom and pour myself into students, directly. Or, I even suspected maybe God was going to take me to a church to pastor a church again. While I would've never thought that I would go back into the pastorate, and plenty of times, would not have wanted that, I was willing. If that's, Lord, what you want me to do, then that's what I'll do, and then this happened. I don't know. Yes. All that to say, it was preceded by seasons of something is up.
Joe: I hear a lot of what you're saying. I hear a lot of things in this, but one thing that stands out to me is, there's a very wholistic view, whether you are discerning your calling or whether you're watching God call you, is a very wholistic view. The more pieces of that that we can look at, the more we can figure out what God is telling us.
Jamie: Right. Triangulation.
Joe: Triangulation.
Jamie: Things coming at you from multiple directions, all saying the same thing. That's where I say, biblical instruction, obedience, passions that develop within that season of obedience, and then corporate confirmation really sort of give you that triangulated advantage point. It should be the case that God shouts at you from every direction of your life, "This is what I want you to do."
Joe: That's super helpful.
Jamie: Hey, everybody. This is Jamie and Joe again.
Joe: If you liked this podcast, would you leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts? That helps other people find it.
Jamie: And, if you have any questions, we'd love to hear about them. Just go to jamiedew.com/questions, and send them in that way, and we'll take a look at the most frequently asked questions and give them a shot.