Speaking and hearing the Call: an interview with John Neufeld

Photos of John Neufeld by Wally Schmidt.

Something wonderful happened to Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary (MBBS) in 2002. It got the opportunity to work with high school students in theological education. And, it got the means to do it! The Indianapolis-based Lilly Endowment Inc. granted the seminary $1.6 million (US) over four years to implement its proposed “Hearing the Call,” a project that calls out and mentors youth toward ministry.

John Neufeld, 35, was hired as project director. He had been associate pastor of McIvor Avenue MB Church, Winnipeg, for six years, and prior to that, studied and worked at MBBS.

One day last summer, just after he had changed offices on the Canadian Mennonite University (Winnipeg) campus, I spent a couple hours in conversation with John. His books, neatly labelled with call numbers, were already on shelves and his computer was up and running. We talked for a while about his books, especially a precious collection on prayer from spiritual mentor and seminary teacher Waldo Hiebert – “the margin notes are wonderful!” – and then settled into wide-ranging and animated conversation about giving and receiving the call to vocational ministry. John’s excitement about what he does characterized everything he said. Here are some excerpts.

You’ve been directing “Hearing the Call” for about a year now. What have you been doing?

The initial part of the project was getting my head around the 27-page proposal, which was incredibly detailed, and saying, how do we make it work. There were 3 components. The first was working directly with high school students. The second was working with their congregations. And third was networking the ministries that work with high school students, such as YMI and our camps and to some degree, our colleges.

This spring we launched a pilot group of Ministry Quest [see sidebar]. We’re also rewriting a resource package churches can use to discern and call out leaders. And, we’re collecting and telling the stories of those in ministry leadership so that pastoral ministry is an attractive and respected vocational choice.

How has it gone so far?

The entrepreneurial side of it – creating a project – has been a lot of fun, but the latent demand out there is probably what’s made it so rewarding. There’s a hunger for this. Churches are asking, what do we do, because we’ve lost the art of being a discerning community.

How did we lose it?

Well, this is complete speculation on my part. I think we lost it in the transition to professionalization. We lodged ministry preparation with our schools and the individual who’s studying, not with the church.

Now we find that our first instinct as churches is to hire from without as opposed to developing someone from within. If the church has been gifted by Christ with everything it needs, hiring externally – and this is my personal conviction – should occur when we have exhausted all internal possibilities. And that means we sometimes call someone who doesn’t have the experience, who doesn’t have the education, who has a lot of rough edges, whom we know too well, and we say, we will invest in this person. The church is scared to do that. So we hire externally; we have what’s essentially a blind date and make the decision to get married based on that blind date.

So you’d like to bring churches back to finding their leaders within their own ranks?

That would be a personal desire. And it’s also a pattern of many of our newer and growing churches. They will have multiple staff, many of them part-time, people in a wide range of professions who pick up between a quarter and three-quarter time in the church. They’re chosen from within because they’ve already demonstrated their ability and have the church’s trust.

You’re targeting the search for leaders at high schoolers. How would you answer those who say that 16 to 18 is too young?

Well, for one thing, the grant gave very strict parameters. It was to work directly with high school students and their churches.

But people do ask that question, there’s no doubt about it. When Jim Pankratz [at the seminary] was writing up the proposal he checked with some Christian high schools and found there were no diagnostic career instruments that identified ministry potential and virtually no counselling of students who showed inclinations for pastoral or mission ministry to go in that direction. There’s a great discomfort in suggesting to a high school student, you should really consider pastoral ministry.

Yet at the same time youth are choosing a myriad of other professions, with huge commitments and responsibilities. And we think nothing of it. If we don’t offer youth the language and categories that help them talk about a call to the ministry, we have fundamentally failed them. . . . I don’t think it matters that much, frankly, where we start engaging people in conversations about ministry as a vocation, but we must start.

What’s your own story of call?

My story involves being asked at Fort Garry [MB Church, Winnipeg] to preach a sermon when I was 16 years old. (It was summer.) I found that sermon when I moved offices. It was awful! It didn’t come close to the caliber of preaching of my pastor (Dan Unrau at the time). But, over and over again I heard, John, we see something in you. Now, when a 16-year-old hears my story, and thinks, you know what, Neufeld had the church speaking into his life and he started to listen, what’s the church saying in my life and am I listening? They start to see themselves in your story.

Is there room for faith formation and struggle in the church’s call?

I need to tell you that after I preached my first sermon I still walked away from the church. I pretty much abandoned faith. It took a significant crisis when I was in college for me to wake up . . . God chased me down and found me . . .

Shortly after that it became abundantly clear that I was going to be a pastor. It was through a series of occurrences. The most telling of them was when I was working at Simonhouse Bible Camp the following summer. There had been a small forest fire about the size of a baseball diamond. It was a miracle the camp didn’t burn down. The water bomber had put it out, flattening the burnt trees. I was the assistant director, it was camp training, and I was in a foul mood that day. I didn’t want to spend the summer with these people. I walked through this baseball field-sized burn on a rainy day. The stench of a forest burn on a rainy day is like when you pour water over a campfire, except magnified! I heard a voice. “If you follow me you will be like the green trees you see, but if not you will be like the charred wreckage.” I stopped and looked around . . .

You walked away for a time, but came back. How can churches give that room to those they are calling to leadership?

I think we always have to have room for someone to walk away. The church’s call cannot be coercive . . . [The answer lies] in relationship. What’s important is that there is always somebody in this young person’s life. A life-on-life, one-to-one relationship is far superior to the best database because it’s sensitive to the context. I think of the people in my life at Fort Garry who expressed the belief that I was called to leadership and see how they tracked me relationally over many years. They stuck to me like glue. Len Siemens, a man I didn’t know well at first, regularly took me out for coffee or lunch and he’d ask, John, when are you taking your next step?

Earlier you talked about creating a language of call. What do you mean by that?

A couple of very practical things. Scripture provides us with the first language. The youth [at our retreats] read aloud to each other every call story we find in Scripture. Abraham’s call, Samuel’s call, David’s call, Saul’s call, Deborah’s call, Mary’s call and more. As we read these stories we unpack them, looking for the common themes: God’s big, God does unusual things, God uses unusual people, God works outside the box, God blows our expectations out of the water, God asks things of us that we can’t do without Him.

Then we take the biblical categories created by those stories and ask, how do we organize them a bit for practical application in our lives? On the retreat, the seminary staff and faculty and other presenters tell their stories of call to ministry. Students start identifying the common themes and finding themselves in others’ stories.

Then we ask, how does the church call people? Is there something that uniquely happens after Christ ascended to heaven? We see from Scripture that the church has a lot of the initiative. The church gathered, prayed for, laid hands on deacons. The church blessed Paul and Barnabas and Mark. The church called the Gentiles into faith and sent them into mission.

So we offer the youth new ways to talk about vocation and call. And we ask them to begin shaping their own call story, because they’ve already had little calls along the way.

So the language of call is a narrative?

Very much so. There’s a journey from early awareness to nuanced awareness and then, more specifically, here it is in my own life . . . For some it’s the “aha” moment, for some it’s the voice of the Spirit. Usually the church is actively speaking. For many people it’s truly shalom, that deep peace that says I’m in the centre of God’s will.

How are churches responding to “Hearing the Call” and its emphases?

The most responsive churches are those where leadership development – as in Ephesians 4, equipping others to do the work – is a significant concern of the pastoral staff. Some of them love the coaching and mentoring themselves and then they take this as an opportunity to do more of what they love. It’s not an obligation for them; it’s a joy.

What about issues of gender and ethnicity?

Our goal is to have a balance in Ministry Quest that reflects our churches’ geographic, ethnic and gender mix. In Canada, 12 percent of our churches are Chinese, so we need to have reasonable Chinese representation. Many of our growing churches in the U.S. are Hispanic or Slavic. The population is half female. Our denomination has the position that all positions in ministry are fully open to women with the exception of senior pastor. We need a good representation of young women in the program. It takes regular reminding. I’ve found what’s most effective is challenging churches to nominate a male and a female.

We discovered that the absence of diversity slaps youth in the face. In fact, the guys in our pilot project were concerned that there were only three females. Diversity is part of our youth’s value system.

What about parents’ role? It seems that parents today hesitate to recommend the pastoral ministry to their children.

The prayer that a child would become a pastor or missionary was a common prayer of my grandparents. There was a practical side. They had eight kids and couldn’t divide the farm eight ways! But, humour aside, they were convinced this was a high calling and they desired it for at least one of their children.

When parents are hesitant to recommend pastoral ministry, or any other vocation for that matter, it’s often because they value their aspirations for their children more than the aspirations God has for their children. Do we pray about our children’s vocations? I think as we pray, our aspirations for our children will change, as will the value we place in the church and in those who lead us.

I don’t have a cynical view of the pastorate or church–pastor relationships. I have a lot of friends in pastoral ministry and we’ve been treated generously and favourably by the church. It’s not easy work. There are always going to be difficulties but that’s true in any profession.

I sense you are both excited and optimistic about the future of the church.

Oh yeah. For one thing, those who have been identified as emerging leaders are often more committed than their parents, to the things they believe in, including the church. I see a willingness in them, a radical commitment, and at the same time, a huge skepticism about asking too little of them. They are rising to the occasion. I don’t have any doubt about that.

What I fear is those who fail to understand that handing over leadership to people who have such a radically different view of leadership is going to be difficult and traumatic.

What do you mean?

Youth today are questioning the assumptions of modernity and its philosophies. Enlightenment ideals and the scientific method aren’t adequate anymore. It means that experience-based convictions are as influential, maybe more influential than simply the facts; that data-based leadership is insufficient; that relationships are far more important than outcomes. Let’s face it, the next generation will have different priorities. Their value on experience and their pursuit of relationship will change the face of the church.

They’ll soon be in our pulpits.

That’s right. And they love the Word. They know the Word. Much of it they’ve learned through music. It has something of a Living Bible feel as a result. It’s almost King James-ish in that it has a cadence, a poetry the NIV lacks. They want to experience God in Word and prayer. The biggest critique coming from our first Ministry Quest group was that we didn’t spend enough time in prayer together, enough time in shared worship. Celebrating communion together was a highlight for them.

Any last thoughts for readers?

It’s important to me that churches realize this isn’t the seminary or an institution working with teenagers. We only provide the catalyzing experience. The bulk of the work is the six months between Ministry Quest events, where the local church takes up the responsibility of week-in and week-out, life-on-life, mentoring. The church calls, and the church disciples. My question is, are we in the congregation prepared to take the time to disciple this generation of emerging leaders?

The second group of Ministry Quest participants, Fall 2003

Ministry Quest The high school component of the “Hearing the Call” project is called Ministry Quest. It’s directed by Rick Bartlett out of MB Biblical Seminary, Fresno, Cal., and is designed for youth ages 16 to 18 nominated by their churches to apply for the program. It has three independent stages (named to reflect John Neufeld’s love of sailing). Compass includes an opening retreat that explores “calling” as a journey and a 13-week mentoring relationship focused on spiritual formation. Charting Your Course includes another retreat, focused on gifts and leadership style, and a mentoring relationship focused on the practice of spiritual disciplines. It also includes a short-term ministry assignment. Setting Your Sail involves internship in the church and a retreat focused on recognizing and building leadership capacity. The pilot retreat was held last March with 14 students. The second round of Stage One has been launched this fall; each succeeding year will see another group of 65 to 80 entering stage one. A predictable dropout rate of about 50 percent is built into the program. All MB churches in Canada and U.S. are invited to nominate participants. More information is available at ministryquest.com.