Ecclesia. Sign me up.

Sometimes I’m not so sure why I want to be a pastor. I mean lets just break it down: bad pay, long hours, high stress, and I have to deal with weird church people. So why do I want to spend my life this way?

Every once and a while, they are becoming more frequent, I have these moments of clarity. These moments of clarity allow me to see exactly why I want to be a pastor, why I want to be a part of the Church. Today at church I had one of those moments. Today was my church’s fourth anniversary of being planted and we had a baptism service. They gave each of the candidates a chance to address the congregation and give a few words of why they were being baptized. One of ladies who was being baptized said that she had been a Christian for over a decade now and was instrumental in planting Ecclesia and had been heavily involved in starting ministries. For a long time she couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t willing to be baptized. Then she said she really did know but it was hard to say out loud. She went on to tell us that she was afraid that she would leave, leave the faith and the Church. She said that it had been easy for most of her time as a Christian but she was worried that when times got hard that she would just give up. She continued to tell us how this past year had been the hardest year of her life, the loss of her parents, the long fight against sickness and death of her husband, and now being a single parent. The reason that she didn’t leave she said was because of the church. At this point the pastors on stage and anybody who knew the woman and her story were crying and fighting back tears. She said the reason she didn’t leave was because of the people in the church who paid her bills when her husband was sick, the people who constantly stayed with her in the hospital overnight, and the love and support that the community gave. She said she hadn’t walked away and it was time to go public with her faith because she knew she was never walking away. The pastor chocked out through tears you were dead in sin and dunked her into the water and when she came up he said you are now alive in Christ. In that moment I knew that this church, this community and others like it around the world was what I wanted to spend my life for.