Ministry Monday

Happy Monday, friends! I will be away from blogging for the rest of the week.
We have this tremendous opportunity to travel to Oklahoma and candidate for a position at a church in a pretty cool “city”. There is a lot of packing to do as we prepare. This trip is really exciting, but will also take about a week away from our 3 weeks left here. I have to pack for our trip, and pack for the move simultaneously. Whew.
Please be in prayer for us. We want to be the right fit for this church. If we aren’t, then we want God to make it very clear to us and them. A lot of people expect us to just jump on the first position offered just for the sake avoiding being job-less and income-less. That is not at all what we are going to do. We will prayerfully consider it. Anything that God doesn’t want from us, we will not do.

A lot of people wonder how this whole process works for us, so I thought that I would share a little bit about when we first started in ministry 7 years ago in June.
When Scott was preparing for graduation from Bible college in 2009, we were praying about what God wanted us to do. I still had some time left in college, but we were so ready to dive into ministry. We prayed, and felt God saying “GO!” I looked into finishing my school through Liberty University Online and became really excited about that. This gave us the freedom to go WHEREVER we felt God calling us without fear of my degree getting in the way.
Scott put together his resume and started looking at churches that were hiring. We have a really great home pastor who gave an awesome recommendation and started to put Scott’s name out there; letting people know that he was looking to become a youth pastor. We had three churches that invited us to come and candidate for their positions over the course of a month and a half. What that means is we traveled to them, Scott taught Sunday school, and we gave our testimony of coming to know Christ and being called into ministry. We met many members of these churches and ate a lot of good food. haha! Two of the churches had special activities with the teens over the weekend so that we could get to know them on a less formal level. It is a lot of fun. I am an introvert, so some of it is really intimidating, but it is fun getting to meet so many new people.
All three of these churches ended up offering the position to Scott. It just so happened that they all offered at the same time. To be honest, it was incredibly overwhelming. We did not feel like any of those open doors were wrong. So, once again, we prayed a lot. We felt like one church was the best fit for us. It paid the least amount, was in the coldest state, and involved the most insane schedule… just so that no one thinks that we picked what was going to make the most money and be the easiest. Quite frankly, it was the HARDEST.. But, we both learned a LOT in our time there.
The process is basically the same each time. When we start feeling God tugging on our hearts as though it’s time to move on, we pray for opened/closed doors and direction. God opens and closes them in His time. We obey.