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Joel Fick’s sense of call was born out of a personal crisis. The son, grandson, and great-grandson of pastors, Fick was planning to work with his hands—maybe the military, maybe law enforcement, but certainly not the ministry. While attending a Bible college for a gap year after high school, however, Fick became convinced of something. The Bible he thought he knew well as a pastor’s kid taught what he felt repulsive: Calvinism.
“It was destabilizing; it became an existential crisis,” he remembered. His friends had begun talking about Calvinism, and he headed to the library to collect the evidence to prove it wrong. He couldn’t. So great was his distaste, he wrestled with walking away from Christianity altogether. It was not an easy time. But in it, he turned toward the Lord.
“I can still remember praying and just telling the Lord, ‘You have my heart. I can’t walk away, so I’m going to submit to what I think the Word teaches.’”
That was the first domino, as he explained. After it fell, the rest of his story toward ministry is simply told: “That act of submission was the beginning of my sense of calling. Wherever I felt the Scriptures were leading, that’s what I was going to believe and obey. With that came a desire to teach others what the Scriptures taught.”
Every year, Fick, now pastor of Redemption OPC in Gainesville, Florida, speaks to Timothy Conference attendees about the call to ministry. To these young men, who may themselves be grappling with the big questions of life, Fick endeavors to bring clarity about the call.
“What I’m passionate about is to sort of demystify it,” he said. While God’s calling is always supernatural, Fick explained, young men often think about the extraordinary calls in Scripture—Paul on the road to Damascus, Gideon with his wet wool, Moses in bare feet—and compare them with their own experiences. “And yet in spite of those extraordinary calls, those men still thought of themselves as unworthy and unready. How much more so when we are trying to discern an ordinary call?” Fick reflected.
Aijalon Church can relate. When he came to the Timothy Conference thirteen years ago, he was “resistant” to the idea that he might have a call to ministry. “I went because my session wanted me to go,” he happily admits. Nothing visibly changed at the conference. But now, years later, he sees how the Lord worked.
First, the conference caused him to confront an assumption. “I didn’t think I was the kind of guy who would be a pastor in the OPC,” he said. But after spending time with others who were considering ministry in the OPC but who had varied personalities and interests—from church history nerds to sports lovers—Church began to question his assumption. What these guys had in common was something that might seem ordinary: a seriousness about the Lord. “I had a gift of loving God’s Word and wanting to share that. Hanging out with others who believed the same thing was important for me,” he reflected.
The conference also connected Church to one of the speakers, David Winslow Jr., who later became a mentor to him. “I’m from New Jersey, he’s from California, and we wouldn’t have had this relationship,” without the conference, Church said. Winslow is the one he emailed later in college, asking the big question: “What should I do with my life?”
When Church came back to the conference in 2023 as a speaker, it was still the fellowship that Church enjoyed the most. “I spent the whole day with the guys,” Church said. “They had a lot of questions. I talked late into the night with one and had a really deep conversation.” They’ve kept in touch. Church encourages young men to consider the Timothy Conference even just for that reason alone: it’s two days of fellowship with others who take their faith seriously.
The committee does not promote the conference directly to potential attendees—at sixteen to twenty-one years old, future church leaders might, like both Fick and Church, be far from thinking of themselves as cut from pastoral cloth. Rather, Fick explained. “We’re going first to sessions, secondarily to parents.”
Fick’s encouragement for sessions and parents is this: “Actively think about the young men in your church who might be called to ministry. Who are the young men who are actively involved in the church, who are asking questions in Sunday school, who are leading godly lives?” The gifts may well need much nurturing, but when someone comes to you and recognizes your gifts, “that can be a huge boon,” he said. “Take the next step, and think about them in context of public ministry or missions.”
This year, the Timothy Conference will be held in Escondido, California, from February 19–22. The speakers are Joel Fick, David VanDrunen, David Winslow Jr., and Danny Olinger. Applications and more information are at opc.org/timothyconference. The deadline for sessions to submit applications is December 14.
The author is managing editor of New Horizons.
© 2024 The Orthodox Presbyterian Church
