Take these steps to discover if He is calling you: 1. Pray.
2. Read everything about missions and missionaries that you can get your hands on.
3. Go hear any missions speaker you can. God often chooses that time to clarify His calling to individuals.
4. Talk to your pastor. He can help you with practical steps and his prayer support will help you sort through various issues.
5. Throw yourself into local outreach. Improve at ministering effectively in your own culture.
6. Go on a short-term missions trip.
7. Contact a missionary sending agency.
8. Consider giving a year of volunteer service cross-culturally before deciding whether you should offer the rest of your life.
9. Persevere.
10. Pray.
A person greatly enhances the possibility of hearing God's call if he or she has:
1. An open mind
2. Attentive ear
3. Pure heart
4. Busy hands
5. Ready feet
Then Samuel said, "Speak, for your servant is listening."
1 Samuel 3:10
10 Ways to Avoid Becoming a Missionary
Adapted from: Stewart Dinnen
Avoid being convicted:
1. Skillfully avoid the command in John 4:35 to take a long hard look at the fields. This is not only depressing but it is unsettling, and could lead to genuine missionary concern. (John 4:35 "Do you not say, 'Four months more and then the harvest'? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest.").
2. Have a good, healthy (socially legitimate) target ahead of you, such as higher qualifications, promotion, bigger home, better car, higher salary, or providing for the future.
3. Get married as soon as possible so you can devote your life to the socially accepted norm of settling down, establishing a career and raising a family.
4. Never expose yourself to personal contact with missionaries. Their testimonies are disturbing, and the situations they describe tend to contrast with the materialistic living of the western world.
5. Develop a closed-door mentality. Remember North Korea, Saudi Arabia, China and other closed countries. (Forget the many countries still open to missionaries and never listen to talk about creative access countries.)
6. Always keep in mind your own past failures. It is unreasonable to expect you will ever be any better. This means never study the lives of Abraham, Moses, David, Jonah, Peter or Mark, who were all dropouts at one stage, but didn't stay that way.
7. Always look at missionaries as super-spiritual people with tremendous gifts and saintly characters. This will heighten your sense of inadequacy and remove any guilt complex about not being one of them. Finally, if you do become a little concerned about missionary work: 8. Listen to those who feel you are indispensable where you are, and that your local church can't do without you.
9. Start worrying about money, after all the Rand (South African currency) is very weak.
10. Go out right away without any training. You'll soon be home again, but no one will be able to blame you for not trying!
