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Browning !1 Claire Browning Dr. Barnette Formation for Christian Ministry 3 May 2017 Analytical Essay Call to Ministry My first interview was with a woman at my church, Double Oak Community Church, named Val Harvey. Val kind of took me in as soon as I started working there. She is a constant source of light to those around her, she can make anyone laugh, and I am so thankful for her presence in my life. A few weeks ago, I did a ministry highlight for Double Oak’s new ministry for parents of teenagers. Val and her husband, Joe, are heading up the ministry and using their life experience to lead, guide, struggle with, and encourage parents of children from sixth through twelfth grade. Val began her story by telling me about her upbringing. She was raised in the church, early religious upbringing as if often seen in ministers. She grew up, married Joe straight out of college, and got pregnant within the first year of marriage. “I had absolutely no idea what I was doing,” Val laughed, “We were about scared to death, this wasn’t our life plan. We wanted to do the traveling and house buying and career advancing before we brought a little baby into this world, but she was coming, ready or not. And God could not have given us a more perfect blessing.” Emma, now 17, came into her parents’ unprepared little home and was followed by her sister, Abby, who is now 14, three years later. Val absolutely loved being mom. Joe worked while she stayed home with the girls. Their lives were filled with playdates and shopping trips

Browning !2 and movie days. Val says it came pretty easily for the first few years. “Don’t get me wrong, being a mom is hard, but my girls are my everything, and staying home with them just felt right; it felt easy.” Then, when Emma started fifth grade, Val began to notice changes in her relationship with Emma, in Emma’s demeanor, and in Emma’s relationship with her sister, Abby. About two years later, when Abby was in fifth grade, she noticed the same changes. “I felt like a prisoner to my girls!” Val says they ruled her life. They fought, with each other and with Val and Joe. They started to give into peer pressure and to body images that the media portrayed. They struggled intensely with finding their identities, as I think all adolescent girls do. Val began to get tired. She struggled with parenting them in a Godly way instead of snapping at them or yelling. She felt so alone. She says she was scared to talk about it to other women, other ministers, her bible study group, or her best friend because she didn’t want to seem crazy. “Nobody else will understand,” she thought, “and then I’ll look like a terrible mother and my girls will look like tyrants.” Eventually, when Val and Joe moved to Double Oak from The Church at Brookhills, God put some wise, older couples in Val’s life. They poured into her, initiated vulnerability, and gave her meaningful, helpful advice. Val says these couples were pivotal in her life. They helped to save her relationship with her girls, her sanity, and maybe even her marriage. Now, Emma and Abby have pretty much grown out of the teenage attitude phase. They still cop it every now and then, but Val says she can now put that energy somewhere else- the parents’ ministry. About two years ago, Double Oak’s pastor, Adam Robinson, was seriously urging the congregation to grow in their faith, no matter what that looked like, no matter how big or small.

Browning !3 Whether it was just beginning to read the bible daily or to move to a foreign nation and preach the gospel in clicks, Adam really wanted the congregation to tune into what the Spirit was asking of them. Val says a lot of people joined community groups and started up in-home Bible studies, but she felt something deeper. During that very sermon, Val felt the Lord telling her, “youth parents,” three separate times. That evening, when Val talked about it with her husband, they began to pray for guidance and understanding. They felt the Lord leading them away from the community group that they were leading. “It was a long time coming,” Val said, “we were the oldest ones there and they were starting to call us grandma and grandpa!” They went ahead and stepped down and continued praying about what “youth parents” meant. Eventually, they scheduled a meeting with Double Oak’s youth pastor, Brian Maynard. Val got about two sentenced in before she realized that Brian had a huge grin on his face. She continued explaining what the Lord had reveled to them and how she wasn’t sure what to do, but she knew it had something to do with the youth parents. Brian took a deep breath and said, “I’ve been looking for y’all.” The Lord had laid a ministry for parents of youth students on his heart, as well, and he was searching for a couple to lead it. They immediately jumped into the logistics and the planning and the formatting, and fifteen months later, they had kick off night about a week ago. About 38 couples attended. Val and Joe got amazing feedback and felt affirmed in what God was calling them to do. Now, Val says she’s a little nervous because she hasn’t ever really had the title of “minister,” but she says where God leads, she’s willing to go. Second, I interviewed my boss, Hayes Parnell. He is Double Oak Community Church’s do-it-all tech guy. His official titles are associate worship pastor and lead technology contact. However, he does the job of at least five people, and I’m honestly honored to call myself his

Browning !4 intern. He leads worship alongside Kelly Stevenson, runs IMAG during the services, helps out immensely in the youth group, used to do all video production, but that’s my job, now, and he’s pretty much always on call to sort out some cords or get a projector up and running. Hayes also had early religious exposure. He grew up a First Baptist Leeds here in the Birmingham area. His parents stopped going to church when he was about ten, but he stayed as he was heavily involved in the youth group and all of his friends were there, as well. He always loved music, played drums and guitar and sang in church from a young age. Around age 14, he began leading worship for the youth group. He arranged the music, wrote original songs, and developed an even greater passion for music and the ministry that it can provide. When he was 16, he felt God leading him to worship leadership as a calling, whether vocational or bivocational. He remembers the exact moment that he heard God and gave in, as well. He accepted the call in the, “very Baptist tradition of coming to the alter in surrender,” he said. He was more than excited to pursue this calling and life path and continued pursuing it full force throughout the rest of high school. Hayes began to lose track of God’s calling, though, in his first year of college. He stayed in Birmingham to stay with his high school girlfriend who was a year younger than him. He went to UAB and majored in business, and he only passed nine out of 24 hours the whole year. He continued leading worship at First Baptist Leeds and started a landscaping business to make a little money. He planned on transferring to The University of Alabama to attend school with his girlfriend, but felt like something was wrong. “I threw my hands up and said, ‘God, I am so tired of running. I’ll go anywhere,’” he said. He felt God pushing him to look at The University of Mobile and their worship leadership program. A week before he had to sign his lease in for his

Browning !5 house Tuscaloosa, he visited the campus and felt totally at peace for the first time in a very long while. Hayes transferred into The University of Mobile on academic probation with a 1.9 GPA. He and his high school girlfriend were broken up within the first semester apart. He started leading worship in a youth group that his childhood friend was leading within the first year. A year later, het his now-wife, Bethany, and they started their life together. “Everything about The University of Mobile was confirmation,” Hayes said, “and I remind myself of that when I go through rough patches in ministry. This is my calling; God made that so abundantly clear.” Hayes graduated, and he and Bethany got engaged. Hayes felt the Lord leading him back to Birmingham, and although he didn’t understand why God wanted him to leave his life in Mobile, he listened. He moved to Birmingham and got a job as an IT guy at a bank and drove back to Mobile on the weekends to be with Bethany and lead worship at their church. A year later, after Bethany graduated, they got married and made the trek back up to Birmingham with no idea of what to expect or where God would lead them. After moving to Birmingham, Hayes and his wife, also a worship leader, took about six months off of ministry while they got situated. The Lord called them back before they though they’d be ready. They applied at so many churches and ended up having to turn a few down. Eventually, they ended up at Hayes’s home church, First Baptist Leeds, as associate worship pastors and Hayes as the interim youth pastor. Through this time, Hayes continued being ! bi-vocational and working at the bank. He made a delivery in the Mount Laurel area to a church he had never heard of, Double Oak Community Church. Sandy Stevenson, Double Oak’s children’ minister and the wife of the music minister, recognized him from The Church at

Browning !6 Brookhills, where Hayes had attended before his family moved to First Baptist Leeds and where Kelly, Sandy’s husband, had previously led worship. Sandy set up a meeting with Hayes and Kelly after hearing that Hayes led worship near by. Kelly expressed that he needed an associate worship pastor, and Hayes and Bethany began to pray about it and felt like God was leading them there. They moved to Double Oak Community Church, Hayes continued to work bivocationally as a worship leader and an IT guy at the same bank he had been at, and Bethany stayed home with their new baby girl, Hannah. A few years and another baby, Bella, later, Hayes got an offer from the church to be on staff full time, but in a double role. Hayes resisted as he felt like he had just gotten the hang of being a husband and a dad and having a job. His wife, though, assured him that he should trust God and as they prayed through it, Hayes felt like God was leading him to leave his job at the bank and give in to fulltime ministry. He took the second job as lead technology contact and continued leading worship on Sundays. Hayes says he sometimes struggles with the question of ability verses calling. He loves being able to help people in a technical capacity, but also recognizes that that’s not exactly God’s calling for his life. Worship is still very much where Hayes wants to be and he struggles with balancing devoting his life to that and also finding time to fulfill his other other duties as a tech guy. Hayes left off with something that really impacted me. He said, “I think a lot of ministry and calling is a lot like scripture, it’s concrete. You have a calling that God ordained and revealed to you and is blessing you with the ability of fulfilling. However, seasons of life, God-given talents and abilities, and lots of other things can put you in the market to be flexible. I like to hold onto

Browning !7 my ministry with open hands. I’ll take what He give me and let go of what He tells me to let go of. I find that’s the easiest way to make sure I’m in His will.” As for me, for as long as I can remember, I had big plans for a perfect set of twin girls, a perfect, preferably wealthy, husband, a perfect law practice, and a perfect life, all wrapped up in a perfect white picket fence. I went to Olive Baptist Church every time the doors were open from the womb through about eleventh grade- early religious exposure, Myers’ first step in the call process. I loved Jesus, and love Him even more, now. I wanted to live my life for Him, but I still wanted it to be my life. At Student Life Camp the summer after my eighth grade year, God rocked my world when He called me to be a missionary. It was very sudden, I heard that still, small voice loud and clear, and I knew what it was saying immediately. I can still feel that feeling. At first, I was excited, but as I returned home and started my freshman year, I started to doubt. What about my life that I already had all planned out? The only thing that came to mind when I thought of being a missionary was malaria and cannibals in the middle of the Sahara. Although I had heard God loud and clear, when the camp high wore off, it was a little easier to ignore Him. I poured into studying, First Priority, and being a reading tutor while looking forward to my days as a lawyer with my white picket fence. However, no matter what I did, I felt so empty and heavy, like something was missing from yet weighing on my heart. In April of 2013, my freshman year, I got a call from the director of missions at my church, a family friend, Robert Gilliland. A spot had opened up on our church’s youth ministry mission trip to our sister church in the heart of Spanish Harlem in New York City. He told my mom he felt like I needed to be there and that he would even pay for it to get me there. She didn’t tell me this until after I knew what I needed to do with my life, but it kind of retroactively

Browning !8 confirmed a lot of my feelings. God is not very subtle sometimes… Although I felt God tugged on my heartstrings, I resisted. I could not let go of my own plans. I had convinced myself that hearing the call to missions was just part of a camp high, and I knew in my heart of hearts that if I went on that trip, I would not be able to fight anymore. While I did keep fighting for as long as I could, God persisted, as He always does, and a few months later I was on a plane. Even though while in New York City I was not exactly in the trenches, God used the opportunity to speak to me. I spent the week and a half learning about how to be Jesus to people by meeting their needs first and using that as a tool to share the gospel. The experience was amazing, and being surrounded by mentors with a heart for Jesus made it just that much harder to ignore my weary heart and my call to missions. On the fourth night, I was finally brought to my knees in the Metropolitan New York Baptist Association living room, and I surrendered. I felt the burden of emptiness lift, and I became so free and at peace. I am called to be a missionary; it is not a camp high or a guessing game or a fight, but a privilege. When tenth grade was coming to an end, I started wondering why I still felt like I was supposed to go to college. I was ready to move overseas and be a full-time evangelical missionary. But, that did not feel right, so I waited, and God slowly began to reveal His plans to me. By mid-junior year, I had spent almost two years in my school’s broadcast journalism and multimedia production program. After all the stress and responsibility and making countless videos, it was, and is, still my passion. I began thinking maybe I could combine that passion with my heart for missions. I met Nathan Troost from Lantern Vision around Christmas time that year as he was making a promotional video for L.E.A.D. Academy, my family’s school. I briefly got to talk with him about his job, and when I told him I wanted to go to Samford University, he told

Browning !9 me all about Samford’s video production program. I again felt God pull on my heartstrings, as I was reassured that Samford is where I am meant to be, and that God’s plan for me is abundantly more than I can imagine. Since then, God has set my heart on fire for orphans. I was brought to tears when watching a promotional video for Compassion International, and immediately, without a doubt, I knew that is where I am meant to be. God brought put the pieces- that camp experience, my attraction to Samford, my run-in with Nathan Troost, every video slaved over for broadcast, that Compassion video on a random YouTube playlist, and so much more- together for this specific calling. Working with Compassion will provide such a unique opportunity. While filming, I will be in the mission field sharing the gospel and working with those orphans. At the same time, I will be providing Compassion with material to spread the word about orphans and sponsorship and how people can help Compassion help the world and expand the Kingdom. Through this class and this semester, I have kind of chilled out a little. I know that I’m going to be a missionary, maybe vocationally, maybe for a year or two, or maybe that entails treating my life as a mission field and actually committing to it and not just saying it like we Baptists tend to do. Also, this semester, I have slowly made my way back to the church. My junior year of high school I got way disillusioned thanks to my youth pastor. Both a sarcastic and a genuine thanks, though. I think disillusionment is important in the life of any believer, but mine was mixed with anger and that quickly mixed to form disgust. Though this class and my internship at Double Oak Community Church, I have pretty much gotten over that. I still go on rants sometimes about religion and women and denominations and churches, but I have come to terms with it. I've seen what it takes to work at a church and why we still need churches, and for

Browning 10 ! that I am thankful and would completely consider church-related ministry. Compassion International is definitely my heart, and I so hope that’s where God continues to lead me. However, I have found that it’s easiest for me to say, “I’ll do what You want,” because fighting with the One who wants better for me than even I do seems a little silly....