In this video from TGC’s Pastor to Pastor series, pastor and TGC Board member Irwyn Ince recalls his calling from the corporate world into ministry. He calls men to be sober-minded as they evaluate a call to pastoral ministry, sharing good questions for discerning next steps.
Transcript
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Irwyn Ince:
And that’s when I finally said, Okay, I think that the Lord is calling me to ministry, and that looked like a huge change in direction for my family and well, I did not set out in my adult life thinking I was going to become a pastor or pursue any kind of ministry calling. I had a professional career as an engineer, and thought I was going to spend my life climbing the corporate ladder, and the Lord had some other plans for for me and for me, it happened when I was thinking about going back to graduate school to get a master’s in business administration to help my career, and as I was thinking about school, the idea of going to seminary starts popping into my head, and I’m just wondering, what is going on? Why am I thinking about going to seminary that has nothing to do with my career path, and at a time of just prayer, remember, I was on a business trip, and I was spending some time with the Lord, and I remember this experience that the idea of going back to seminary, going back rather to school to get a master’s in business, it just became a distasteful thing. The desire just went away. And I knew that if I went back to school, I was going to go to seminary, as that was the first kind of indication to me that, okay, maybe there’s some call. And I I wasn’t convinced yet. I thought, well, I like to learn, so maybe this is just to become a better Sunday School teacher as I volunteer at church, so I had to do some more prodding and bring some more conviction to my heart through my own scripture reading through just prayer time and conversation with some folks leaders at the church. And that’s when I finally said, Okay, I think that the Lord is calling me to ministry, and that looked like a huge change in direction for my family, telling my wife who married me on I like To say engineer potential, not pastor potential. And so, so once she was on board, and she wasn’t on board until after I preached my trial sermon, right before I started seminary, and even though she didn’t like it a whole lot, she said, Oh, okay, I see, I think, I think I agree that that you’re called. And so from that point, pursued seminary part time, still worked full time in my career, while because my wife Kim was a stay at home mom, we had three children at the time, and eventually a fourth. And so I needed to stay in my job, do seminary part time, serve as an intern in the church, and eventually take the leap into into full time ministry, as somebody who was in the corporate world, the business world, pursuing a career that I loved. I loved what I did. If you’re in that scenario and wondering, does the Lord have a call on my life to ministry outside of this world? You enjoy what you do? Here are some of the things that that really were substantive to me. I knew that there would be a significant sacrifice in making this transition. I knew from the standpoint of my earnings and my salary, knew from the standpoint of my family dynamics, what happens in ministry when you are a pastor’s family compared to when you are a professional in the corporate world, right? So, so being sober minded about those things, but the key things are these, if you are married, that that you and your spouse are on one accord, that you have a frank conversation, because here’s the deal, you don’t know what it’s going to look like until you’re actually in it, but you at least have to, at the front end, have conversation and and try to. To try to put on the table some of the things that you believe will be different, and how you’re actually going to try to navigate through those things as you pursue ministry. And you also have to have an outside affirmation of the call. So it’s not enough for me to feel in my heart that the Lord is calling me. Yes, I’ve already said that my wife needs to be in agreement, but I need to have others as well who see this in me in order to go ahead and make the make the leap to begin pursuing a life of ministry. The other thing I’ll say is this, it was very beneficial for me to do seminary on a part time basis. Very beneficial for us to have the time over several years, to not have a radical life switch, where one day I’m in the corporate world the next day, I’m a full time seminary student for to take a take our time through that’s not necessarily for everybody, but for us in the stage of life where we were, it was important for us to take it kind of slowly, step by Step, and allow us to experience things in a much slower pace, such that by the time I graduated again, it wasn’t, it still wasn’t, you know, oh, this is wonderful, at least from my wife’s perspective, but we were much more prepared To take the the journey into full time ministry.
Irwyn Ince (MAR, Reformed Theological Seminary; DMin, Covenant Theological Seminary) serves as the interim lead pastor of Grace Mosaic Church in Washington, DC and adjunct professor of pastoral theology for Reformed Theological Seminary. Ince is also a Council member of The Gospel Coalition. He has contributed to the books Heal Us, Emmanuel and All Are Welcome: Toward a Multi-Everything Church and authored The Beautiful Community: Unity, Diversity, and the Church at Its Best and Hope Ain’t a Hustle: Persevering by Faith in a Wearying World. He and his wife, Kim, have four children.
