Remember your call.
Support the weak.
Gather in the outcast.
Welcome the stranger.
Seek the lost.
When I think back to the beginning of my faith journey as a young child, I have fond memories of Sunday School classes, Scripture Union exams, Whit Walks and being a fairy in the annual church pantomime. I really had a sense that my Church was my extended family, full of aunts, uncles and grandparents that nurtured me as I was growing up.
At the age of 21, I went away to university and drifted from Church, just as a lot of young people do at that age. But when I graduated and returned home, I learnt that the church theatre group was staging the show "Joseph and His Technicolor Dreamcoat".
I knew I wanted to be involved so back to church I went. I acknowledged that it wasn't the right reason to be going to church, but once again I was held, nurtured and encouraged to explore what faith means as a young adult rather than as a child.
I think back to when I first felt God’s call, I remember reading the story of God calling Moses to go to his people in Egypt and Moses arguing strongly against God that he was not the right person to do what God wanted him to do. And God ended that argument with Moses with the words “Now, go! I will help you to speak, and I will tell you what to say.” (Exodus 3:12).
For me at that time the very idea that God would use me to speak of him to others was laughable. I quickly learnt that when God calls, as scary and daunting as that maybe, God gives us the gifts and skills and strength that we need for the task he is calling us to.
However, the call didn’t stop there; there was even more as a few years later God called again this time to the Ministry of a deacon and he did so through more words, this time from a Methodist Conference report of all things – The Role and Recognition of Evangelists in the Methodist Church. I got excited to the point when I felt that my heart was burning as I read about ministry that was about going where the church is not, living and proclaiming the gospel (but not necessarily by preaching or even verbal communication) and interpreting the church to the world and the world to the church.
And it was in response to the sense of ‘going out’ from the church, whilst remaining within in it that excited me so much.
Looking back over my ten years of ministry I can see how God has given me the ability to be able to talk to anybody about anything to enable me to get alongside people from all sorts of backgrounds who are on all sorts of different stages on their faith journey (indeed if they’ve even started on that journey) and to be able to offer them the love of God shown to us through Jesus by giving those people the gift of time, of conversation and a listening ear. I hope and pray that by doing so I let them see that they are valued.
Being called to the Ministry of a deacon and being a member of the Methodist Diaconal Order and being able to share in peoples’ lives, in their joys and in the depths of despair, is an enormous privilege. I’ve had two appointments so far, both of which are very different so it would be impossible to describe exactly what it is a deacon does. And yet I am daily amazed by the way that God continues to work through me to bring all those I meet closer to Him.