I began regular church life in the late seventies as a teenager when my sister took me with her to Queenstown Baptist Church at Margaret Drive. It was not far from the Tanglin Halt Road flats, where Joyce was living with our aunt. Two years of Sunday School and worship services gave us the fledgeling faith we needed to respond when the baptism call was given, and we were immersed and added to membership there. My earliest impression of a pastor was supplied by Pastor Alan Leong. He was the working man’s preacher. Dressed in light short-sleeves and tie, he sent out fiery sermons from the pulpit with powerful gesticulations with his right arm while waving a fat Amplified Bible with his left. Off the pulpit, I remembered his warmth and readiness to relate with both young and old members.

Later, the influence of peers led me to join the Selegie Baptist Centre (now called Hosanna Baptist Church as a result of a merger). Since most of its members were very young, the fellowship led by two ministry workers, Mimi Ling and Annie Tan, provided many opportunities to organise activities and to discover leadership. As I continued to grow in faith and spiritual identity there, I continued to look to the people in front for inspiration, both local preachers and Southern Baptist missionaries. I was often in awe of those who could preach with such extroversion and presence, but I could not see myself doing that. It was not until I heard Pastor Buddy Morris that the notion came to me that I could be a preacher myself.

Pastor Morris, a Southern Baptist missionary, always preached in his normal speaking voice, which was soft and calm. His words were evenly paced and not given to much modulation, but the few messages I heard from him always found their way into my conscience. After one of his messages one day, I thought, “I can do that.” Without realising it then, I had given myself permission to explore the ministry of proclamation. In the years that followed, I joined the church’s lay-preaching team, signed up for BTS TEE (Theological Education by Extension) classes on hermeneutics and homiletics, served out my bond with the Ministry of Education, heeded the call to pastor and was affirmed by church leaders, and joined BTS as a student.

Looking back after many years, I can see that my journey into Christian service had three things in it that opened the way for me to become a minister: the examples of pastors I wanted to be like; an imagination captured by the Gospel; and a pathway—a way to go from where I was to where I could minister and grow in it. My experience is limited to church and seminary life, but I think these three things may apply well to every follower of Christ who wants to invest himself or herself in any part of God’s kingdom. Church members respond to the call of ministry through the inspiration of their pastor’s or leaders’ lives, the desire to give oneself to Christ and the ministry of his Gospel, and the help given to guide them from where they are to where they could be.

I am convinced the first two motivations are the important areas of reform if we want to raise the next generation of ministers. Do our members know the full, complex, fascinating and sometimes mysterious lives of pastors? Pastors read sacred and classical texts, share the Gospel with lost people, devote hours to prayer, talk to people about their pain and joys, minister to the dying, dedicate infants, baptise, marry and bury, plan mission trips, raise money, build buildings, get together with other ministers to dream big dreams. Do our lives inspire imitation, or do our members know only of that solitary life spent shuttling between home and office from Tue to Fri? As a minister, am I known as much for depth of soul as for breadth of ministry?

The great pressure on us today is to be productive managers. But the need of the church is for prayerful, spiritual poets. I don’t mean (necessarily) pastors who write poems. I mean pastors who feel the weight and glory of eternal reality even in the midst of a business meeting; who carry in their soul such a sense of God that they provide, by their very presence, a constant life-giving reorientation on the infinite God.

John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals.¹

For the third point—a pathway, please know that you have a seminary that is ready to work with you. Church and seminary can together help someone who needs ministry counselling to visualise and map a way forward. Like many pastors, our faculty members can model service in higher education for church members. Lay Leadership Development classes are excellent introductions to theological training. Our hermeneutics and homiletics courses can help churches build a lay-preaching team. Your church can work with BTS to introduce an internship program for potential ministry candidates. These and other ways light a path for the ones God calls. I believe we can succeed in preparing and sending out the next generation of ministers when the work of the church, the seminary and the missions agency converge more.

Fong Choon Sam
Interim Co-President

¹John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry (Nashville, TN: Broadman and Holman, 2002), 66.