A Recent Testimony from Someone Called to Ministry
Early Years: Roots I Didn’t Yet Understand
When I look back, I can see beginnings that I didn’t recognise at the time. I grew up in a close and rather sheltered Christian community where church, school and family all overlapped. It was a warm world, mostly kind, sometimes claustrophobic, and full of people who thought in similar ways. I took that for granted. Even the teasing and the difficult patches left their marks in ways I wouldn’t understand until much later.
My faith in those early years wasn’t dramatic. It was simply part of the pattern of life, like the seasons or mealtimes — always there, always steady.
Stepping Out: Meeting a Wider World
Everything changed when I left home. Suddenly I was surrounded by people whose lives, choices and assumptions were completely different from mine. It forced me to work out what I really believed, separate from the environment I’d grown up in.
Those years were stretching. I dealt with pressures I hadn’t expected, including mental-health challenges, and I found myself trying to make sense of adulthood while juggling study and work. The world felt bigger, messier, and far more interesting than I’d imagined.
Finding Community Again
Eventually I drifted back into a church — almost by accident. It wasn’t grand or polished, but there was warmth in it. People of all ages mixed together naturally. Someone always asked how you were, and meant it. I hadn’t realised how much I’d missed that kind of uncomplicated belonging.
It was in that setting, without looking for it, that something in me began to stir again. Faith took on a new shape, something more adult and more honest.
The First Hint of Calling
The idea of ministry didn’t come to me suddenly. I noticed someone else going through the discernment process, and it sparked a quiet curiosity in me. I found myself wondering — almost reluctantly — whether this might be something for me too.
The thought felt slightly absurd, but it also wouldn’t go away. It sat quietly in the background, popping up in the moments when life became still.
The Pause That Made Everything Clearer
Then came the pandemic, and like everyone else, I found myself with far more time to think than I’d ever had before. With the rest of life stripped back, the sense of calling — that persistent tug — became clearer.
For the first time, I could see how different pieces of my life connected: the early faith, the experiences of exclusion, the longing for community, the ability to listen, even the technical precision from my career. They seemed to point in the same direction.
Testing the Call
I didn’t want to jump to conclusions. I spoke to people I trusted: clergy, mentors, friends. They asked the difficult questions — about my motives, my strengths, my fears, the reality of ministry rather than the imagined version. Their questions didn’t scare me off; instead, each conversation made the path feel a little more real.
The journey was slow, sometimes uncomfortable, but somehow steady. Nothing pushed me away. If anything, the sense of rightness grew.
Formation: Being Shaped by Others
Training was a lesson in humility. Living in a Christian community sounds idyllic until you actually have to share space, make compromises, and face your own rough edges. But those experiences formed me more than any lecture could.
I learned patience, vulnerability, honesty, and the importance of simply being present with others — not trying to fix everything, not pretending to be perfect, but showing up as a real human being.
Friendship as a Way of Becoming
One thing that surprised me was how central friendship became to my understanding of ministry. Not the easy friendships we choose, but the unexpected connections that stretch us, soften us, and sometimes frustrate us. I began to see how deeply we shape one another — how God uses those everyday relationships to transform us slowly, quietly.
That insight became one of the anchors of my calling.
Walking the Path: Still Unfolding
Now, as I look back, the journey makes more sense than it did at the time. Nothing about it was straightforward, yet each stage prepared me for the next. The calling didn’t arrive as a loud declaration — it arrived as a steady invitation, becoming clearer the more I paid attention.
Ministry, for me, is not a destination. It is a path — sometimes clear, sometimes foggy — walked with God and with others. I take each step not because I have everything figured out, but because something deep within me recognises this as the direction I am meant to go.
What is a friend?
The speaker reflected that “friendship” is far more complex than simply choosing people we like. We often imagine that friendships are deliberate choices — picking one person at a table of five because they seem “good for us” — yet much of life places us among people we did not choose at all. Workplaces, schools, churches, halls of residence, and chance encounters all bring people into our orbit, sometimes becoming friends, sometimes not.
A friend, they suggest, is different from an acquaintance: friendship grows out of time, trust, shared experience and the freedom to be ourselves. While we try to choose friends who are good for us, we also recognise that friendship is shaped by circumstances outside our control. Some of our best friendships arise unexpectedly, even in situations where we would never have chosen the people around us.
They also note that friendships can be individual or group-based. Group dynamics can be difficult — people can influence one another for good or ill — and there is always the risk of being “led into the wrong crowd”. For this reason, the speaker often finds one-to-one friendships more authentic and less pressured.
Ultimately, friendship involves both wisdom and openness:
wisdom, in gravitating towards those who help us grow;
openness, in recognising that friendship often emerges from the unpredictable mix of people life places beside us.
We cannot fully choose our friends, nor can we entirely avoid being shaped by them — but we can choose how we include, welcome, and care for the people around us.
