A complete change of identity

I wanted to share with you a letter I received recently from a retired army colonel.  I met him in Kansas City recently as I was sharing with Dr. Andy Johnson’s class on missional theology at Nazarene Theological Seminary.  What the colonel said struck me as crucial for us today as we think about shaping Christian identity.  For those of you in church leadership there may be some lessons and new practices we need to create in order to effect a complete change of identity. 

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David,
Hello! I finished the spring semester and am already engaged with a summer course but thought I needed to honor your request. I currently live in Lansing, KS, having retired from the Army in 2003.  I will be a senior MDiv student at Nazarene Theological Seminary in the fall. I am studying theology because God made me. More specifically, I have seen the devastation caused by untrained and under-trained people assuming that God had called them to be pastors and concluding God’s call was all they needed. If pastors are like doctors of the soul, then it seems they should be trained. I would not want a first year pre-med student trying to remove my appendix simply because he felt called to be a surgeon.