ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN PASTORAL THEOLOGY & PRACTICE LPTP-9 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 www.captionfirst.com *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> JOSHUA: Thank you. Your comments are most helpful. However, I have another practical question. I am currently serving here in Wyoming, and I love it. I grew up here and am very comfortable serving God's people. But I know that pastors don't always stay in one place. I'm not sure how that works. How do pastors move from one congregation to another? Can you tell me something about the call process? >> PROF. SENKBEIL: Great, Josh. You know, we've been talking about a call, haven't we, and how a man is placed into the ministry in the first place. Now you're asking how is it then that pastors move from one call to another? Well, certainly you alluded to it. Namely, it's not really merely a question of where one is comfortable and what you're familiar with. I myself grew up in a rural area, and I ended up serving congregations in all kinds of settings including urban settings and missions and now teaching at the seminary, all really in answer to various calls that came my way. Well, the process of calling works like this: When a congregation is vacant, a list is drawn up of candidates for that office. These candidates come from within the congregation; that is, members of the congregation can place names in nomination. The district president where the congregation is located also may add names to that list. And then the district president will then compile a list of these nominees, both the ones which he has designated and also the ones which came from the congregation, together with all their qualifications and certain information that's unique to that individual pastor, information which really came from him and also from the evaluation of other people. Then, on the basis of this list of nominees together with their qualifications and the information that is compiled, each congregation that wants to call a pastor then is sorting through this information seeking the guidance of God prayerfully as to which man it might be that God would like to give them as a pastor. And that's the man that they select by process of vote to extend their call to. Now, when a man receives such a call, a call of a vacant congregation, he's presented with some of what a dilemma because he already has, remember, a valid and legitimate call right where he is. And so now before God he must seek out God's direction because he has two calls�-- the one where he presently is and the one that he's received from the vacant congregation. How would a pastor work through this? Well, he would certainly seek the counsel of others, his own district president, for example, his brothers in the ministry, but also the members of the congregation where he serves and their leaders to get their perspective on what it is that remains to be done in that particular location. And his interest, now again, is not his personal interest, where he would like to be and what he would like to do in terms of the office of the ministry; but rather where is God calling him to serve? That, again, is a matter of great prayer and meditation and concentration really working through a combination of factors, namely, the needs of the congregation he's presently serving, the needs of the congregation that has called him, and his own unique qualifications and abilities. And he is then interested in understanding where are these qualifications and abilities and the needs best matched? That's how he arrives at a decision. And it is, indeed, a confident thing then that a pastor and a congregation then, respectively, might with confidence know at any given time that this is the pastor whom God wants to give them and that the pastor himself knows that he is God's gift to these people at that moment in time. It provides him again with that joy in the ministry that we talked about earlier. Thank you, Josh, for that question. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***