Biography
The Rev. Jim Somerville is pastor of the First Baptist Church of Washington, D.C., which calls itself a church of “Baptist tradition and ecumenical perspective.” It was Jimmy Carter’s church during his four-year presidency and is the oldest Baptist church in our nation’s capital. Jim was raised in West Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina. He earned a degree in Fine Arts from Georgetown College in Kentucky, and studied for the ministry at Southern Seminary in Louisville. He was a featured speaker at the 2004 Festival of Homiletics, where he preached to a congregation of more than 1,000 people at the National Cathedral.  [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"Do What You Want" 
The crisis came for me in the summer of 1978.

That was the summer between my sophomore and junior years in college, the summer I was supposed to decide what my major would be. I had been putting it off as long as possible—taking all the required courses and squandering my electives on things like drama, printing, film making and photography. But at the beginning of my junior year I had to declare a major and so there, in the summer just before, I was trying to decide what that major would be.

For reasons I can only imagine I had been dreaming about a Mercedes-Benz coupe and wondering how I would ever get one. My father was a Presbyterian minister, working among the poor in West Virginia. He had taken what amounted to a vow of poverty when he accepted that call and so we never had much money. Maybe that was why I began to think that, when I was on my own, things would be different. Maybe that was why I began to think about declaring a pre-med major.

We lived in an old, white farmhouse, perched up on a hill overlooking the railroad tracks. My brothers and I used to sleep on the upstairs front porch in the summers, dragging our mattresses out there so we could hear the chirp of the crickets and the deep croak of the bullfrogs. After we had talked ourselves out each night and just before I fell asleep I would pray, "God, what do you want me to be?" And when I woke up in the morning I would pray again, "God, what do you want me to be?"

As the summer wore on those prayers became more urgent. I had this idea that declaring my major would determine my future, that I stood at a point from which the full trajectory of my life would arc out in one direction or another. For that reason I wanted to be sure that the direction I chose was the right one. That's why I was asking God in the first place.

But by the end of the summer I was tired of asking. I needed an answer soon. I woke up one morning and demanded, "God! What do you want me to be?" And the answer came back as clearly as if someone had spoken it aloud: "Be a Christian."

What?

"Be a Christian."

And that was it.

I lay there for a long time afterwards, wondering if I had dreamed up the answer to my own question, but the more I thought about it the more it made sense. As long as I loved and served Christ I could be anything I wanted to be. I breathed a sigh of relief and decided then and there that when I got back to college I would declare a pre-med major.

Barbara Brown Taylor tells a story that is almost identical, and, for that reason, wonderfully confirming. In her book The Preaching Life she confesses that she struggled with her sense of call for years. “One midnight,” she writes, “I asked God to tell me as plainly as possible what I was supposed to do.

“‘Anything that pleases you.’ That is the answer that came into my sleepy head.

“‘What?’ I said, waking up. ‘What kind of an answer is that?’

“‘Do anything that pleases you,’ the voice in my head said again, ‘and belong to me.’

“That simplified things considerably,” Taylor writes. “I could pump gas in Idaho or dig latrines in Pago Pago as far as God was concerned, as long as I remembered whose I was.” In the silence that followed she decided it would please her very much to be a priest, and to the great benefit of so many of us she still is.

My career as a pre-med major, on the other hand, lasted exactly one semester. I was taking Calculus, Microbiology, Organic Chemistry, and hating all of it. “If this is what you have to know to be a doctor,” I thought, “then I don’t want to be one.” I dropped out of school for a semester, transferred to another college, switched to an art major, graduated, got married, and for a while worked as a graphic designer. But then I took a part-time job as a youth minister, began to assist in leading worship, and one day in the Spring of 1984 some well-meaning person at church asked if I had ever thought about being a pastor.

The crisis was on again.

I began to pray those same fervent prayers, lying in bed at night, hoping to see a scroll unrolled from the ceiling with a message from God just for me. I searched the Scriptures, wrote in my journal, talked to anyone who would listen. But finally I remembered the lesson I had learned in the summer of 1978. God had called me to be a Christian and I had said yes. As far as God was concerned, then, I was free to do whatever I pleased, and like Barbara Brown Taylor, I decided it would please me very much to enter the ministry. Twenty years later, I’m still here (and I still don’t have that Mercedes coupe!).

William Willimon says the question of our vocation is settled at our baptism. When we say yes to Christ we answer the most important call that will ever come our way—the call to follow Jesus, to be his disciple, to take our part in bringing in that crazy, upside-down Kingdom he was always talking about. Even more important than what we do, then, is who we are. “Be a Christian,” that voice said to me. “Belong to me,” that voice said to Barbara, and then do whatever pleases you. But does that mean everyone can or should be a minister?

Not everyone seems to be good at it, even the ones who feel “called” to it. My wife asked recently, “If it’s God who calls people into ministry in the first place, then why does he call some good ones and some bad ones? Why doesn’t he just call the good ones?” It was a good question. I didn’t have an answer for her right away. But the next morning I woke up and wrote in my journal, “What if God calls everyone into ministry and just has to make do with the ones who say yes?”

Was that possible?

Later that day I called some of the people I thought had the right kind of gifts for ministry, people in whom I had seen some evidence of this mysterious “calling” we often talk about. “Listen,” I said (as if their lives weren’t already complicated enough): “What if God calls everyone into ministry and just has to make do with the ones who say yes?” And then I listened to the long silence on the other end of the line. Can I just tell you that out of the three people I called that day two have enrolled in seminary? They said yes, in other words. They decided that if they could do whatever they wanted, it would please them very much to enter the ministry. And why not? Frederick Buechner says that vocation is “that place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” I know the world is hungry for good ministry, and if the thought of being a minister in such a world makes you glad then say yes--say “Yes, yes, YES!”

I have to confess that there have been some times when I was less than glad to be a minister, and some Sundays still when I tremble under the weight of trying to speak a word for God. But on those days I try to remember that while I am the one who made the choice to enter the ministry, there was a choice before that one, the choice God made in calling me to be his in the first place. That’s the voice that whispers in the morning hour and in the middle of the night, and the choice that precedes all other choices. “Be a Christian. Belong to me. And remember . . .“I chose you."

1. Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life, p. 23.
2. William Willimon, What's Right with the Church, p. 131
3. Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, p. 119

Interview with Jim Somerville
Interviewed by Floyd Brown

Floyd Brown: You were chosen. That’s pretty obvious! I think of John the Baptist who was doing great works and people were beginning to look upon him as the Messiah. But he had to stop and tell them, “No. That is not my calling. My calling is to lead you to God and to identify the Messiah when he comes, to point him out to you as the Lamb of God.” We are not always on a direct path in our calling, are we?

Jim Somerville: No. I want to point out that it’s not just being called to the ministry that counts. I think about my wife, for instance, who was clearly called to be a teacher. The first picture that I saw of her, and the one that I loved, was her standing with two small children, not hers, but children. When I saw the picture it looked so right for her to be with kids. These days she teaches four-year-olds in a DC public school. She is surrounded by twenty Pre-K children everyday and she’s just where she’s supposed to be. She has answered that call on her life. John the Baptist was supposed to point the way to the Christ. He was just the voice, not the Messiah. So everybody’s calling has dignity to it and God seems to know better than we do what is in us that needs to be called forth. Those of us who are lucky to hear it and are able to answer the call.

Brown: And be a Christian first.

Somerville: Be a Christian.

Brown: You grew up with a father who was a Presbyterian minister with almost a vow of poverty. That filters down into the whole family. What was your childhood like?

Somerville: I think that’s why I wanted that Mercedes Benz coupe! I don’t remember that when my dad took the vow of poverty that he asked his children if that would be O.K. with them, so we just went along for ride. But we were growing up in West Virginia. Everybody was poor there in the southern part of the state. It was like growing up in the Great Depression from the stories I hear people tell. Everybody was poor and so we didn’t know that we were any different from anybody else.

Brown: You are in the First Baptist Church in Washington, DC. That must be a challenge. Your diversity includes all races, levels of income and the whole thing. What is it like being a minister in a church such as that?

Somerville: Well, it’s a big challenge, but it’s a wonderful challenge. I look out on my congregation every Sunday and it’s like a day of Pentecost. There are Medes and Persians and residents from Mesopotamia, all these people who are out there from all over the world. Washington is a great international city and in the congregation we have people who are rich and poor, black and white, and from every part of the world. It’s almost impossible to gather up all those diverse people into one congregation and gain a sense of unity. That’s the challenge, I think. But it also reminds you every Sunday how wonderfully diverse God’s creation is and how each of those people brings something special to the mix.

Brown: Talking about calling and the path to where we finally wind up, just think about the background that you’ve had. You grew up in poverty and you wound up going to great schools. You are very successful. It was really a calling to prepare you for what you are doing today.

Somerville: I think so. I did grow up in a very poor part of West Virginia. I went off to a school with the children of CEO’s and diplomats. To be able to be at home with that group of people and at home with the desperately poor has been good for me in preparation for my coming to Washington. There are congressmen in our congregation, judges, federal reserve governors. And there are also people who are homeless and some who are mentally ill. To be able to talk to each of those people is something that I’ve had to learn how to do over the years.

Brown: You have such great wisdom for such a young man. It takes a lot of years to come to where you are now. Does President Carter ever come to church there when he’s in Washington now?

Somerville: No, he hasn’t been there in years.

Brown: You better give him a call!

Somerville: I have given him a call. He was such a faithful attender when we was in Washington. His daughter, Amy, was baptized in the church. He came and joined that church on the first Sunday that he was in town. I thought it was because it was such a wonderful church, but he told me later in both places where he served as Governor of Georgia and as President of the United States, that he and his wife joined the nearest Baptist church. So that’s what First Baptist is, the one nearest the White House.

Brown: Do you still have the Jimmy Carter pew?

Somerville: Yes we do, with the brass plaque. Come and sit in it sometime.

Brown: Thank you for being with us. We look forward to seeing you again.

Somerville: Thank you.