‘Discern’ student retreat calls out the called

By Lindsey Williams
Writing Specialist

Ken Hall, Student Ministry Consultant of the Discipleship/Sunday School Department, joined Tanner Cade, Director of Communication Services, and Jon Martin, Director of Men’s Ministries, on the Mississippi Baptist Convention Board’s (MBCB) “Around the Table” Podcast. They discussed the upcoming Discern event, a weekend retreat for high school and college-age students seeking to understand what a call to vocational ministry looks like. 

Students and student pastors are invited to attend Discern at Garaywa Camp and Conference Center in Clinton from January 5-6. The event originated several years ago when a group of youth pastors proposed the idea to Hall because they recognized a great need within their ministries to help students discern God’s calling on their lives.

“(The emphasis on Calling Out the Called) first came up across the Southern Baptist Convention during COVID. We had a Zoom meeting with all the youth leaders in different states… They were saying, ‘Our students are not hearing anything about what it means to be called.’ We asked the question, ‘When was the last time any of us heard from the pulpit that invitation (to ministry)?’… It’s just not done anymore… One of our desires was to begin to focus on this and that hopefully our pastors would catch hold of it. God is still calling people, but we think there’s a lot more in the pew that just don’t really understand the concept of not only how God calls you, but what does it mean to be called?”

“When I began to sense God calling, I knew it was God,” reflected Hall. “Now, I didn’t respond for years. I just thought He had made a mistake,” he laughed. “But I knew exactly what it was because of the way my pastor dealt with the subject. When I finally surrendered, my pastor said, ‘I’ve just been waiting for you to respond.’”

“So, I think that it’s really important, not only for the pastors, but for those who work with youth to know how do you cultivate and identify people who may be sensing that? How do you help them walk through that? That’s part of what we do at Discern. We encourage an adult to come with the students, whether it be the student pastor, a parent, somebody, and we try to give them some tools on how to disciple them and to mentor them toward that call.”

“John Allen May from Eastpoint Church up in North Mississippi is going to be our main speaker, and he has such a heart for this,” said Hall. “We’re going to have breakout sessions for guys and girls. One specific session is we have an honest conversation with the guys on our team. They talk about what it means to be a man in ministry. We talk a lot about guardrails, and not just how to stay faithful from a sexual side but financially, how to be a person of integrity. They’re very honest about the things that trip you up.”

“We really home in on how you’ve got to keep that personal walk with Christ, and what it means to have a family in ministry… We’ll also break off into groups where the students can look at a list of different ministry areas and pick one or two to hear stories, to hear how this person came into the ministry.”

Hall expressed, “We have some small group times for the students to get together and share their experiences, and that helps because they know they’re not out there alone. And our desire (this year) is to develop a mentoring program and pair them up with people in ministry.”

Registration for Discern ends Dec. 18. If you know a student interested in ministry, you can find out more information at Discern – Mississippi Baptist Convention Board (mbcb.org).

To listen to the full “Around the Table” episode with Ken Hall, visit Podcasts – Mississippi Baptist Convention Board (mbcb.org).