FACE TO FACE
Moving to Naperville! Jacob Warren
College Church, I want to take a moment to thank you all for these two years of my pastoral residency and all the ways God has used so many of you in my life and life of my family during that time. Before I do that, for those of you who I’ve yet to have the opportunity to get to know, allow me the privilege and pleasure of explaining how God brought us here in the first place. While my wife, Sara, traces her spiritual birth to early childhood, God called me to himself and saved me while an “outwardly religious” ministry major in college. I had been doubting the genuineness of my faith for some time—I lacked a sincere desire for the things of God, and I looked for meaning and fulfillment in relationships and identities that eventually would have brought about my destruction. The turning point came on a day that for anyone else might have seemed unremarkable. God broke me emotionally and spiritually and revealed my deep need for Christ. I was petrified of what it would mean for me to come clean, to admit that I’d never really known him. I was moved however by a newly wrought and holy fear of God, along with a new and deep abiding sense of his love for me. These were “religious affections” as Jonathan Edwards would put it, and they were the first evidences of a genuine faith. A faith that I had not stirred up in myself, but one God himself worked within me. He spoke light into the darkness of my soul. Not long after that transformative moment I had the opportunity to go on my first missions trip to Kazakhstan in the former Soviet Union. Prior to my trip home I was encouraged by the missionaries that I worked with to consider praying in earnest about a longer commitment after graduation. I came back from that trip convinced that I would spend the rest of my life in Central Asia. Fast forwarding to 2014, Sara and I returned to the States after 8 1/2 years of ministry in Northwest China and Turkey, with three kids (all born in Turkey) in tow. While open to the possibility, we just didn’t sense an immediate call back to the field, instead, the Lord had placed a growing desire in my heart to serve the local church. Over the past four years I had numerous opportunities to lead and test the waters of pastoral ministry, all of which led me further and further down the rabbit hole with increasing velocity. I've been very intentional along the way to plead with others to speak into my life and tell me the truth about myself and their understanding of how God is using me (or how he is not). My time at College Church has been an enormous part of that process. Even when applying to the pastoral residency, I struggled with using phrases such as being “called to the ministry” in reference to my own experience because, after all, at one point I was certain that I’d been called to serve cross-culturally for the rest of my life. But now, after encouragement over and over again from my fellow pastors and so many of you, along with a clear “call” or invitation from New Covenant Church in Naperville to serve as pastor of congregational Life, I am confident in moving forward with a true sense of “calling” to the ministry. So, thank you College Church. Thank you for all of you who took the time to get to know and invest in a young family who was most likely only going to be here for two years. Thank you for all that you did to make us feel at home in Wheaton. Thank you for allowing me to stutteringly and stumblingly serve you and care for you as God would have me. Thank you for the way you modeled grace, character, kindness, patience and generosity toward us as a family and to me as a pastor. I’m grateful and will continue to pray for you in the weeks, months and years ahead. I’m looking forward to the ways we might minister together as our churches cooperate for God’s glory and our joy.
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