Called to be a minister?

“You said you are called by God to offer yourself as a minister. You want me to believe that!”

“I was fresh out of graduate school. Highly recruited by a Fortune 500. Guaranteed a career. But I decided to offer myself to God and entered seminary. I am God’s servant.” I heard that.

“My dad wanted me to pick up the family business. It was in billions. Trouble is, I don’t love money. I just wanted to go to seminary and give my life to serve God. So, I ended up leaving my family.” That too.

“It was such a time when all of HK emigrated. My parents wanted us to move to Canada. I felt I wanted to stay to serve God and ended up being the only one not going there.” Bet you remember that one too.

I mean no disrespect.
I judge not their calling by their ensuing personal life or career success.
I also had no qualms about what they felt as valid.

These are completely beside the point.
What then is the point?

The point is this: the entire thing is within their head, as they felt and interpreted, however genuinely, and not open to validation and challenge.
On a basic point as this, I just can’t surrender and grant the speaker divinely appointed authority.
I refuse to do so.
I refuse to lay down my God given right to suspect.

Didn’t the Bible teach us not to despise but to examine all things and keep the good and discard the bad? (1 Thess 4)

There’s miles of distance between despise and examine.

I don’t wish to waste time in recounting horror stories of recent seminary grads and freshly ordained pastors. I have said these are all beside the point. Though admittedly, we all at various times have used those anecdotal to justify our view on the issue, on either side.

Having reiterated that, let me return to the substantive point requiring attention. And I feel it is incumbent on seminary professors and presidents to state unequivocally their views and practical way to deal with this matter. That is to say, if the conviction of being called by God to serve as a minister, or called by God to offer one as a minister, entirely resides within the one holding such conviction, where does validation by schemes using investigations external to the person holding such conviction, gets their validation authority? Why would external enquiries validate or invalidate a purely subjective conviction residing within?

I would appreciate seminary professors clearly outline their arguments here. I would even set aside the suspicion that these professors have “conflict of interests” in the matter for practically all these professors have held or claimed that they too had such convictions to enter into their current vocation. Let’s set it aside. Just focus on the crux of the matter.

But to sharpen the enquiry, let me anticipate the stock answer that says “the church can judge, mostly by external observations over a period of time.” Setting aside the chasm between the use of an approach that employs external parameters to validate what’s purely internal to the person holding the conviction, investigations of these kinds are fraught with pitfalls: How big should the “church” be for it to give confidence to the result? How many investigators are there in the task? What parameters are examined, for how long, and are they there to confirm the presence of the Holy Spirit or just its apparent outworking?

Answering these questions will reveal how limited in effectiveness this stock answer is.

It should be time for this discussion to leave it to those seminary professors it is challenging to respond, if they respond to this professional call.

But let’s once and for all remove the following cop-out. For those who would cite Paul’s self claim of God’s calling, as if that would give them a warrant to claim likewise, let them at the very least emulate Paul in two aspects: don’t take no money and take 39 slashes. Simple objective and external proofs, none here in this day and age is willing to accept.

So don’t cite Paul.
Just do the professional job.