Why Are They Talking With Him About My Missional Role?

A Story of Personal Reflection about Serving in the Center of God's Will

Why Are They Talking With Him About My Missional Role?

Key Foundational Insight: Serving in the center of God’s will for your life and ministry is the sweetest of all places.

The title of this article was the question I could not get out of my mind once Burtt started talking with me about the ministry position he was negotiating with our Southern Baptist (SBC) missions agency during the summer of 1980.

We were rooming together at the Glorieta Baptist Conference Center near Santa Fe, NM during Home Missions Week. This was an annual gathering of people who were involved in some direct or support work with the SBC missions agency.

Burtt was an interesting person in the constellation of people in the friendship circle of my family. He married a college friend of one of my sisters. I attended the wedding in Washington, DC in the early 1960s as a teenager.

He became a Baptist minister and ended up serving in Philadelphia where my father was his director of SBC work. That closeness caused our friendship to begin growing as colleagues even though there was a significant age difference.

Move forward a decade and I was assigned to work in his office in Baltimore, MD where he was now director of SBC work. I had an urban specialist assignment for two years to work with churches in transitional communities in Maryland.

Our friendship grew significantly during that time.

Following that closed-end assignment I moved to Charlotte, NC to serve on the staff of the Baptist association in that metropolitan area.

It was during my time in Charlotte that Burtt and I roomed together in New Mexico.

The Missional Role

Burtt was in talks with the Metropolitan Missions office at the Home Mission Board about becoming the national consultant for megalopolitan areas. These are the areas of one million or more in population in the continental United States.

Each evening, he talked with me about the negotiations. He had a lot of questions about it, how to do it, and whether he ought to accept it.

I tried to answer his questions and make suggestions from my experience.

What became difficult is the longer the week went on, and the more in-depth we got in talking about the role, the more my soul was disturbed.

“Why are they talking with him about the missional role to which God is calling me?” I pondered.

The more we talked and prayed about it, the more I felt it was a role to which God was calling me. But Burtt was a friend and colleague of many years. I wanted to do all I could to support him.

It was tough.

By the end of the week, the negotiations for the position ended. Burtt had a lot of ways he wanted to shape the role, and which moved away from what the Home Mission Board desired.

A Conviction

I went home and continued praying.

Serving in the center of God’s will and calling for my life as a Christian minister has always been a high priority for me. Every ministry transition I made was the result of a clear calling from God.

When that clear calling was not there, I often struggled and did not feel assurance. I thank God I never accepted a ministry role to which I did not feel with full confidence God wanted me in that role.

I turned down multiple national and regional roles during the past five decades. The offers kept coming. Many I gave serious consideration. But I have always remained in what I have understood to be the center of God’s will for my life.

I found that to be a place a great joy!

A Twist

A couple of months later, the director of the Metropolitan Missions office contacted me. He asked if I would be interested in talking with him about the role with which he previously talked with Burtt.

That was a clear sign for me. But there was a problem.

Two years earlier I had turned down this exceptional missions leader—Don Hammer—for another role with him. I had gotten close to saying “yes”. He thought I was coming and pressed me for a final answer.

I was not ready to accept and did not that day. Angrily he ended the telephone conversation.

At that time, I was in a two-year closed-end assignment and would have no job in a few months. The great thing that happened next is a story for another day. It was one of the examples of God opening a door I did not know existed. We will talk later about this.

An Opportunity

Don and I quickly worked through our earlier conflict. To put it simply, he had a life crisis in the intervening two years that caused him to rethink how he handled various situations. Including mine.

Don came out of that life crisis a refocused leader and someone I knew I would love to have as my leader and colleague.

Within a few weeks we negotiated my role as national consultant for megalopolitan cities. My wife and I began a challenging four-year ministry of great importance that was in the center of God’s will for us.

It was also four years of great challenge due to the nationwide travel involved. It is that travel and the unknowns of how that would impact our family that had caused me to turn down Don’s offer two years earlier.

The travel was still a great point of stress. Yet in four years God would send someone calling again to provide relief for that stress.