“While the leader was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”
— John Wesley, May 24, 1738.
My call to ministry started well before I actually recognized that it was a call. The widow of Lacy VanNorman, Martha, told my mother when I was six, that I was going to be a pastor. At fourteen, Sandy Foster was a guest preacher at my home church. And after the service I asked her what a call was. She gave me her story, and then said, “Michael, do you have a call?” And I said, “Nope.” Five years later I was a dorm host at Messiah College, getting ready to go on vacation. My grandmother was a delegate to Annual Conference, and I was sitting for the first time ever in Annual Conference watching the Ordination Service.
Bishop May gave an invitation at the end of that service for those who had a call on their life to come forward. I do not know how I got from the middle of the Annual Conference floor to the stage, but I remember Sandy Foster running up onto the stage. And those of you who remember Sandy know that running was not her thing. “I’ve been praying for this since you were fourteen,” she said. Jay Morris was standing beside me, Guy Camp was standing beside me, and numerous other pastors and lay persons who had been praying for me since I was six years old, fourteen years old ....
The Ordination Service is a celebration of God’s work in a person’s life to answer the call to serve the church of Jesus Christ. I think about the incredible lengths to which Mary, a family friend of five generations, came to be at my ordination. She was in her late nineties, and after having broken her hip a few weeks earlier, she said she’d come to my ordination. “I’m going, sure,” she said. And as we were marching in, she was sitting in the hallway. And she said, “Michael, look.” And she pushed her walker away and she said, “I’ve been told that we recognize and celebrate God’s work in this by standing. And I am standing today.” And she stood up.
If you have the opportunity, go to an ordination service to celebrate and support someone answering the call for the first time, or someone being ordained for a life of service in the church of God.
