God uses a variety of voices in calling people to Christian service, veteran ministers agreed, pointing to their own experience.
In Joel Thielepape's case, two voices figured prominently—a representative of the New York Yankees who delivered a discouraging word and a young preacher who presented a message of hope.
Thielepape, who recently celebrated his 60th year in ministry, was 17 years old in the summer of 1947.
“I had one burning desire in my life, and that was to play baseball. The New York Yankees invited me to a tryout camp, and I was thrilled to death to go,” he recalled.
But the Yankees were looking for greater speed than Thielepape could deliver, and he didn't make the cut.
“I came home, and that night the church where I was a member was having a youth-led revival—a young man was preaching. 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,” said Thielepape, who recently completed an interim pastorate at Woodlawn Baptist Church in Austin, Texas.
Drew Hill, pastor of First Baptist Church in Sedalia, Mo., was influenced to enter the ministry by his preacher father—but even more by his mother.
His father's presence and preaching had an impact, he acknowledged. But, he said, it was “Mom's life probably more than any other one thing” that prepared his heart to hear God's call.
As one of three brothers who entered vocational ministry, he was worried other people might see his pastor father and two older brothers and assume he simply had entered the family business. Hill's brother Pete is pastor of First Baptist Church in Smithville, Mo., and his brother Jim is executive director of the Baptist General Convention of Missouri.
A 1951 photograph has frozen in time a gathering of 10 young adults—four men and six women—who answered what they considered God's call to full-time Christian service. Re-markably, all 10 were from one small congregation, Fieldale Baptist, near Martinsville.
Virginia Baptist Historical Society
A 1951 photograph shows 10 young adults from Fieldale Baptist Church near Martinsville, who answered what they considered God's call to full-time Christian service.
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.
But Flick's twin brother, Carl, remembers how in his early-adult years, Fieldale's pastor Ryburn Stancil 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.
Henry Martin, another member of the Fieldale Ten, served in Nigeria 25 years as a foreign missionary before retiring from a Memphis church. The preaching of an interim pastor prior to Stancil's pastorate caused him to answer the call to foreign missions, he said.
“I can't remember his name, it's been so long ago, but he had been a Presbyterian missionary at one time. My brother was a deacon at Fieldale, and I visited the church because of him. I joined the church, however, because the preaching of this interim pastor really spoke to me,” he said.
The six women who felt a calling to ministry discovered limited avenues for them to fulfill that calling vocationally in the 1940s, but most married ministers.
Margaret Ann Stegall has worked 50 years as a volunteer at Fieldale Baptist Church, seeking to fulfill the sense of calling she felt as a young woman.
“It was just after World War II, and the world had been our focus for years,” she said. “There was a belief that we could change the world—and we believed God was calling us to do it.”