Steve Stull is the pastor of the East State Street Church of God in Huntington, Indiana, a long way from his boyhood home in Kansas, both geographically and in his knowledge of God's will for his life. One principle that has helped guide Steve on his life's journey is what he calls his open door policy, "When I become aware of opportunities and what seems to be a leading of the Lord, my prayer has been, 'well if this is your will, open the door and I'll walk through the door, and if those doors open, that's the way I'll go, and if they close, then I'll go another way.'" Steve's path to ministry has woven in and around many open and closed doors.
If we had to pick one door more crucial than the rest to Steve's journey, it would be the door Steve entered nearly 30 years ago. To grasp this door's importance, we might picture the following photograph. Pastor Steve and his wife Janet are standing in front of their house in Tokyo, Japan. She is slightly taller than Steve. Visualize them as being perfectly comfortable together, because they have reason to feel that way. For the last two years, Steve and Janet have been with each other almost constantly as visitors in a strange land.
Today, Steve smiles as he tells of that time in his life, "We hadn't been married a year when we went to Japan. We lived in a Japanese community and our offices were together. We taught together and we were forced to depend on each other and spend more time together than we probably will until we retire. It was really good for our relationship."
In the snapshot, Steve and Janet are more than man and wife - they are best friends. They are short-term missionaries living in a sea of Japanese people. The nearest missionaries other than themselves live more than an hour and a half away. Language and cultural differences have left Steve and Janet only each other as confidants and mind partners. They have only each other to sit down and freely chat with. This time in Japan has strengthened their relationship in all ways.
The snapshot captures one moment from two lives spent in the practice of obedience to God. It is a defining moment in their lives. Steve and Janet share that moment in time because of their past faithfulness to God. Their comfort with each other and with their situation in life demonstrates the fruit of obedience to God. Let us examine their past faithfulness to God which has led them to this moment in time.
When Steve was a junior in high school, God began to call him to Christian service. He was asked to be one of three youth to share for about ten minutes apiece in an evening service at his church. Steve chose to give a 3-point talk on a doctrinal topic. Though he can't remember today what the topic was, he does recall, after a moment of thought, "You would hardly call it preaching, but it might have qualified for that. I can't say that it was a real distinct call at that point to preach, but it was a call to ministry that was pretty undefined."
Steve heeded that call by going to Anderson College with a major in Bible. He didn't broadcast his call to other people, partly because the nature of his call was so vague and partly because he was still a seventeen-year-old kid who was shy about, even embarrassed about receiving such a leading from God.
By Steve's sophomore year in college, he and Janet were dating. Steve went home with Janet during the Easter break of that year to visit her parents. A missionary was speaking at church that weekend and Steve once again heard God's call, this time to missions work. He decided to go through this door, if it was truly open. Trying to go through the door turned out to be a frustrating experience.
He visited the mission board at the church headquarters in Anderson, looking for advice about what his major should be to prepare for missions. He recalls his frustration, "They didn't give me very specific guidance. It was kind of like 'What are you interested in, what do you like?' I did some aptitude testing and ended up with a teaching major in Social Studies." He picked teaching because he thought teaching might be a good door into missions. He was unsure if he was preparing correctly for his calling to missions and he was feeling uncertainty about that calling. In the following months, another complication to his calling arose.
Steve and Janet became engaged and were married by their senior year in college. Janet felt no call to missions. As a pastor's kid, she not only didn't feel a call to be a pastor or a pastor's wife, she vowed she would never be a pastor's wife - she wanted a normal life. Steve and Janet dealt with the uncertainty of this situation in a typical manner, "I didn't want it to be that I felt the call and I'm just dragging Janet grudgingly along - that wouldn't have been very satisfactory. We followed the open door policy where, if this was what God really wanted us to do, He would work out the details and would affirm to us that, yes, this was His will."
God sent that affirmation to Steve and Janet. Not wanting them to think it was just their imagination, God affirmed their call through Janet. She had graduated at midterm of her senior year with a teaching license in English and had gotten a job while Steve finished his student teaching. Janet's interest in short-term missions was piqued by a conversation with a fellow teacher who had recently done a two-year missionary stint in Africa. When Janet shared this with Steve and they talked about it, they thought, "That really sounds neat."
Steve and Janet decided to visit his church's mission board again to discuss the possibility of going on a short-term mission trip, probably to Africa. "We were talking with them for about 10 or 15 minutes and they said, 'Well, we've got a place for you,'" recalls Steve, his voice still full of awe 30 years later. "We were really surprised by that; we weren't anticipating that kind of a response. They said Japan and we said, 'Well, we'll think and pray about it' and we began doing that."
Steve's open door policy had worked and the door to missions had suddenly swung wide open - to Japan! They prayed about it and told their families about it and received only support from all directions. As Steve tells it, "This was in the first part of April and we were to leave for Japan in the last part of June if it worked out. It seemed like the pieces fell into place. We were free to go, we met the qualifications, and we had an interest in mission's service. It seemed like something the Lord was leading us in - we said yes and took that route."
As we have already seen, their faithfulness in taking this route resulted in a wonderfully rewarding experience of service to God in Japan. That experience in turn led to Steve's career call to ministry as a pastor, with Janet happily at his side. We don't need to know the details of the rest of Steve and Janet's journey to full-time pastoral ministry to guess how the journey has progressed. Suffice it to say that Steve wasn't called by a voice from a burning bush like Moses was called, he didn't put out a fleece like Gideon did, and he wasn't anointed by a prophet like Samuel anointed King David. He saw the open doors and he responded faithfully, an obedient servant.