“All things are become new”

The Particular Baptists of the Philadelphia Association benefited tremendously from the revivals of the Great Awakening, but at the same time felt their distinctively Baptist identity threatened by the interdenominational nature of the movement, its de-emphasis on local church accountability, and its loosening of restrictions on who could speak on behalf of God. This chapter explores how Hart and the Philadelphia Association navigated these tensions in the 1740s, and how in that context Hart experienced a “regular call” to ministry. In 1749 Hart agreed to relocate to Charleston, South Carolina, where the Baptists of the South were few, weak, and divided; he would spend the next thirty years transferring a combination of Philadelphia Association church order and Great Awakening revivalism to the Baptists of the South.

Experiencing a Call to Ministry: Changing Trajectories, Re-Structuring Life Stories

This paper presents a qualitative analysis of women’s experiences of call to Christian pastoral ministry as a second career—a mid-life turning point. Drawing on 44 semi-structured interviews with pastors of different denominations, I look at women’s stories of call through the lens of interpretive theory to analyze how women create meanings around this life altering event, and how they construct past experiences in light of these decisions. I employ George Herbert Mead’s theory of time to analyze how women afford prior secular work experiences sacred meaning in light of their subsequent “pastoral call” experience. This paper attempts to arrive at a better understanding of women’s experience of entering pastoral ministry, as well as their past and future life trajectories.

Nothing

This article highlights 1 Cor 1:25–29 and the criteria that God uses to qualify a call to serve. The passage wonderfully reveals the desire of God to use our weakness as the criterion for a call to ministry. Paul’s specific language affirms God’s inclination to use the humble, the weak, the oppressed, the broken, the things that are not, and the disqualified, to realize His redemptive plan to transform lives and communities. Many North American Evangelicals live amidst historically unprecedented levels of affluence and enjoy a level of comfort and ease. Affluence demands “more” and the church often heeds to it. Antithetical to the Corinthian passage is the “prosperity gospel” promoted in many Evangelical churches today. Prosperity gospel claims prosperity and financial success as the direct result of one’s faith. Principles of the prosperity gospel are trivial pursuits of consumerism, acquisition of things, the perennial effort to attain success, in order to qualify in ministry. Still those principles are not the criteria God would use to qualify a call. He uses the foolish, the weak, the disqualified; He uses the things that are not.