So you say you’ve been “Called to the Ministry” huh? I hear this all the time, and sadly, most were prideful, holier-than-thou, egomaniacs looking for titles, power, and prestige.
The First Heavy Metal Church of Christ will be 13 years old this June. During this time, and only by God’s Grace and Protection, we have survived 6 or 7 church splits, 7 location changes, 4 failed coup attempts by jealous underminers, thieves, scammers, slanderers, mudslingers, loss of shallow friendships, and the cherry on top of this Molotov Cocktail called divorce…
Through all of that, God has managed to use a group of Misfit Black Sheep to reach HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people WORLDWIDE through PG-13 - Trojan Horse Evangelism Tactics, a Facebook page with 29,000 followers, and our t-shirts being worn in 23 different countries!
We have had in the neighborhood of 1,100 Baptisms and that doesn’t include the hundreds and hundreds of salvations in the field and on the road that we lost count of. That number also includes 4 FORMER Satan worshippers, along with a handful of FORMER, Atheists, Agnostics, Wiccans, and Pagans, and this number is growing almost weekly!
And the funny thing? Ministry is the LAST thing that I ever wanted to do. This idea is CRAZY and should have NEVER worked and it WOULDN’T have, had this been just some idea I came up with. The First Heavy Metal Church is GOD BREATHED. It is a TRUE modern-day Holy Spirit phenomenon that I can take NO CREDIT for because I was never cut out for this to begin with. Any ideas I ever came up with before 2011 have FAILED… I am living and breathing proof that God can truly use anyone if you will only step out of the boat and say, “Here I Am Lord”… And to be honest, once I said that I tried to renig 4 different times before launch, and HE WOULDN’T ALLOW IT! It’s almost like He pushed me off the pier and as I was falling to the water, He yelled, “DON’T WORRY BRIAN I LOVE YOU AND I WON’T LET YOU DROWN! Now learn to swim son! SWIM!!!”
I hated it all for the first 8 years… I thought about quitting almost DAILY for 8 solid years, but I feared God too much. I was more afraid of what my life would be like after walking away from my God Breathed Destiny… Jonah kept coming to mind… Had I walked, I truly believe my life would have been worthless and I would have spent whatever life I had left, constantly living miserably in “What If” land…
Now for these past 5 years, I absolutely LOVE my adventure with Christ! I pray that this is God’s will for me from here to eternity! The firs 8 years was nothing more than God sandblasting me down to the bare metal so that He could rewire and rebuild me into who and what I am today. I guess that Brian would Have not been able to handle what lies ahead… (Which is kind of scary to think about)
1 Corinthians 1:27-31 is one of my favorite scriptures, simply because it is about me and the FHMCC…
27 Instead, God chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful. 28 God chose things despised by the world,[a] things counted as nothing at all, and used them to bring to nothing what the world considers important. 29 As a result, no one can ever boast in the presence of God.
30 God has united you with Christ Jesus. For our benefit God made him to be wisdom itself. Christ made us right with God; he made us pure and holy, and he freed us from sin. 31 Therefore, as the Scriptures say, “If you want to boast, boast only about the Lord.”
Hello everyone, It’s nice to meet you! My name is FOOLISH! AKA Saint Hellion!!! AKA Brian Smith…
Still think you are called to the ministry? If you are CURRENTLY in the ministry and you CANNOT relate to this writing, you are probably hiding behind the walls of an ineffective country club church…
If you think you are getting called to the ministry by God, and you are not shaking in your boots scared, then I am scared for you!
Be careful what you pray or wish for, get prepared to lose yourself, stop polishing that armor, because that’s not what armor is for, and start sharpening that sword, because if this is a TRUE calling, your life is going to drastically change and you will never be yourself again… You MUST rely on God and ONLY GOD, or you won't even make it to the first mile marker...
UP THE IRONS!!!
