SEDALIA, Mo. (ABP) — Veteran ministers may have little in common when it comes to locale and style, but many agree on at least one thing: God uses a variety of ways to call people to Christian service, they say.
In Joel Thielepape's case, two people figured prominently: a representative from the New York Yankees and a young preacher.
Thielepape, who recently celebrated his 60th year in ministry, recently completed an interim pastorate at Woodlawn Baptist Church in Austin, Texas. But in 1947, his one “burning desire” in life was to play baseball, and he had just been invited by the Yankees to tryout camp.
“I was thrilled to death to go,” he recalled. “All my life I had been a Yankees fan.”
But Thielepape didn't make the cut. Apparently, it all turned out for the best.
“I came home and that night the church where I was a member was having a youth-led revival,” he said. “During the invitation, I was overwhelmed by the call of God. I surrendered to God's call, and I can honestly say that in 60 years I have never doubted for one moment that God called me to preach.”
On the other hand, Drew Hill, pastor of First Baptist, Sedalia, Mo., was influenced to enter the ministry by his mother, despite the fact that his dad was a preacher.
As one of three brothers in vocational ministry, Hill said he used to worry other people might assume he had simply entered the family business. Hill's brother Pete serves as pastor of First Baptist Church in Smithville, Mo., and his brother Jim is executive director of the Baptist General Convention of Missouri.
His father's presence and preaching had an impact, but “Mom's life probably more than any other one thing” prepared him to hear God's call, Hill said.
For other ministers, a group dynamic urged them toward the vocation. A 1951 photograph has frozen in time a gathering of 10 young adults — four men and six women — all from the small Fieldale Baptist Church near Martinsville, Va.
At least two are deceased — Carlos Flick, longtime head of the history department at Mercer University, and Jerry Mehaffey, who served as a chaplain with the Veteran's Administration. Flick's twin brother, Carl, remembers how Ryburn Stancil, the pastor at Fieldale, led him to Christ.
“I can't speak for the others, since they grew up in the church and I didn't, but I think they responded to the love and caring they experienced from him,” said Flick, a retired Navy chaplain.
Stancil and his wife were childless and invested themselves heavily in the lives of the church's youth, Flick recalled.
Henry Martin, another member of the Fieldale 10, served in Nigeria 25 years as a foreign missionary before retiring from a church in Memphis, Tenn. The preaching of an interim pastor prior to Stancil's pastorate caused him to join foreign missions, he said.
“I joined the church … because the preaching of this interim pastor really spoke to me,” he said.
The six women in the photo discovered limited avenues in the 1940s to fulfill that calling vocationally, but most married ministers.
Margaret Ann Stegall, who has worked 50 years as a volunteer at Fieldale Baptist Church, used her volunteerism to fulfill the call she felt as a young woman.
“The times were different then,” she said. “It was just after World War II, and the world had been our focus for years. There was a belief that we could change the world — and we believed God was calling us to do it.”
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— This story is part of a series about “hearing the call” to vocational ministry.
Read more:
Hearing the Call: Congregations strive to create a culture of calling
Hearing the Call: Clarification an important task at Baptist schools
Hearing the Call: Church approves 82-year-old for ‘gospel ministry'