Highlight: Advice for Men Who Want to Be in Ministry

Apologia Studios

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Something to be said to men who desire vocational ministry, you have to sort of...

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The position of vocational ministry, it's faithfulness that should land you there, not you vying for the position.

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Those are men that always terrify us. Men who want the position or trying to get the position, you know what

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I mean? Those guys scare us, because if you are truly called to ministry, it's a God thing and He's doing it in you.

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It should be obvious to everybody, because, oh, it is the case that He's all these things. You're doing the work of ministry.

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You're caring for people. You're sacrificing all those things. You sort of... I almost feel like it should be so organic, you fall into it, where everyone around you goes, right?

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Go. You're supposed to stand there, sir. You know what I mean? Because it's just... It's so obvious that the

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Lord is using you in that way. So with guys that wanna go into vocational ministry, they wanna be a pastor, they wanna lead others.

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I'm terrified of the guys that want that position. I wanna lead others. It's like, no, you should be a leader and God's using you and everybody around you just goes, yeah, that's obvious.

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Please stand there, sir. But men who are just like, I wanna just go right into ministry and start getting paid and just only do this.

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It's like, you know, that scares me. And you kinda need to hurt a little bit and show that you're doing this with the right motivations.

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Yeah. First thing I wanna say is just, we always say this all the time, but you should have an internal and external call.

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So a lot of times we'll get people that are like, oh, I wanna start this ministry or I wanna do full -time ministry. And it's like, okay, cool.

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That's the inward call. Do you have an external call? Do you have someone that's an authority over you that you're accountable to saying, yeah, like you were saying, like you should have pastors that say, yeah, you're fit for this.

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This is a good spot for you. Because too many guys just wanna like, they just wanna do their own thing and they have no accountability.

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There's no one, you know, an authority over them. And then you become lone wolves.

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But one thing I think is important, you know, I probably had been doing,

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I don't know, like 10 years or so of some form of ministry, you know, just in my church, through my church, whether youth group or evangelism.

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I know the same with you, probably longer than that. And, you know, so there was a lot of time we had put in well before God called us to plant this church.

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And I mean, I honestly, when I felt called to do full -time ministry, I was still working a construction job.

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And I was having prayers like, Lord, how is this gonna work? I don't know how, you know, and then through some very sovereign moments,

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God ordained moments and circumstances, you know, he thrust us into that. And I mean, it was a good five years of us planning the church before we were paid full -time.

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Yeah. You know, five years. So that's working, you know, three jobs for Jeff. I was doing whatever

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I could, you know, like... And doing the church for him. Five, six jobs. I even worked some jobs with you. Yes.

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Yeah. I always try to forget those. I put those on my memory, but you seem to always wanna bring them up. We worked as bouncers.

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We did. We worked as... We had to break up a fight once. We had to break up a fight in a club. Oh, that's right. I forgot about that. We did drywall, which you did all the time.

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And then we put up a fence and like a horse. Oh, that was the worst. A horse thing. I remember that day was awful. It was very hot.

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That was awful. It was very hot. And all this while doing full -time, like, nose to the grindstone, around the clock ministry.

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Right. I was talking to Pastor Zach the other day, because I asked him, I was like, how many times... Because he did the same thing. I was like, how many times did you have to cancel?

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I'll get this guy calling me right here. How many times did you have to cancel appointments because you got stuck at a job?

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You couldn't leave. And he's like, all the time. Should someone who is not able to, or who is unwilling to do, quote unquote, regular ministry, meaning not filmed or put on YouTube or in a podcast, start a ministry?

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Should they? Is that the question? Yes. Well, again, it goes back to what I was saying earlier. Do you have the support of your pastors saying, hey, do this?

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You know what I mean? I saw someone said, is that a requirement?

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And I would say, absolutely. There's too many... Because the pattern is laying on of hands. Yeah. There's too many people.

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And we should specify, like, starting a ministry doesn't mean you're a pastor. Right.

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Right. There's all kinds of ministry opportunities. We know all kinds of people that do ministry that aren't pastors. Right. Or even just people who do it full -time and are paid versus someone who's doing it when they can.

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Right. Exactly. So like, there's all kinds of different things you can do, but you should always be under someone's accountability that's supporting you and even under their umbrella of protection.

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This is even like, for our abortion mill ministry, we have people that come out. It's mostly our church members, but we have people that come out that go to other churches and we get questions all the time.

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Like, hey, I want to come join you guys. We're like, great. Make sure that your pastors know and that you're under their authority and protection.

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I mean, it's... And when I say protection, like, you know, if something happens to you, like the abortion mill, for example, it can be a dangerous ministry.

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If something happens to you out there and you don't have anybody to protect you, like, you're on your own, you know?

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So it's a dual purpose. It's for accountability and protection. And yeah, I mean, we've just seen so many guys over the years who, like, just aren't under anybody's accountability and they kind of flare up and then cause issues because they're just lone wolves.

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I want to clarify something because somebody said, why would working alone automatically make a person a wolf?

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Not what I'm saying. I'm not talking about necessarily a theological or heretical wolf.

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I'm just saying lone wolf in that lone wolves operate on their own.

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They don't have anybody overseeing them. And that's my point is not necessarily that they become a heretic.

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It goes bad. It goes real bad. It goes real bad, real fast. No accountability. There's a lot of, quote unquote, discernment ministries out there that have really no connection to the local church, no authority over them from the local church.

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And so if they go off the rails and start doing things that they ought not to do, there's no one really to put them into check.

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And we've seen that a number of times over the years with discernment ministries and everything else, guys that are very passionate about truth.

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And so they set themselves up as leaders and they try to speak to these things. Obviously, I want to believe the best about them, that their motives are good and strong and healthy.

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But because you're alone and divorced from the local church with no authority over you, I'm going to say it goes bad.

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It just goes bad. You need the church and God puts the authority in the church in the way that he does for a reason. And the pattern in ministry is like you're within a church body and you're qualified.

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And there's people there who see that you're qualified and there's accountability and there's laying on of hands. That's the pattern for ministry in our

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New Testament. And that's why, even with the circumstances being what they were and the passion that we had to care for the souls of these people at the hospital, and even with people speaking into my life who were solid men,

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I wasn't going to make the move to plant Apology of Church on my lonesome.

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I wasn't going to declare myself to be a church planter and pastor. I said,

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I'm not doing it unless these men in my life agree unanimously and lay hands on me.

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I won't go. And I wouldn't have. I promise you, I would not have planted

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Apology of Church without that behind me. And so, yeah, so I think that for us, we're very passionate about that.