Photo by Bureau of Land Management Oregon and Washington

By Ajung Sojwal

I am frequently asked this question, “Why did you choose to be ordained in the Episcopal Church?” This was never a question for me through the discernment process toward ordination in the Episcopal Church. Now, after more than ten years of ordained ministry, this has become a deeply personal question.

I have wrestled with God and my own sense of call into the Episcopal Church as I interviewed with church after church for the position of Rector, often making it to the final list of candidates, only to find out the church decided not to go forward with my application. The most common reason given for their rejection of me was that they felt I was not a good “fit” for their church.

After one more of those times when yet again, I was deemed not a good “fit,” I struggled with the whole notion of being called into God’s work in the Episcopal Church. In the turmoil of the emotional battle within me, I heard a voice deep within my soul say, “I will send you where I send you.” Since then, I have approached my deep yearning to partner with God in His work in and through a local church, more as a sending and less of a call. I am confident more than ever that Jesus alone has the prerogative to “call.” Those who dare to answer that call will always be “sent” by Him to people who will receive us with joy, but with many more we may have to shake the dust off our feet and move on.

This is also when I began to understand that churches often settle into a place of being custodians of what it meant to be the Body of Christ in imaginations past. An Asian woman, like me, behind the Lord’s Table and in the pulpit, has never been featured in the imagination of historically “white” or “black” American churches. I will never “fit” into the picture that is already developed, framed and hung within the walls of churches built to capture the imagination of God as experienced in the past.

Yet, I firmly believe that I, and people like me, are sent to the very places where we will be spewed out by systems held captive to the imagined glory of a monochromatic past. Yet, I go trusting in God’s vision of His magnificent Kingdom free from human descriptions where people like me have always been featured in certain ways. In God’s sending of me to where he sends me next, I choose to open myself to surprises of the Kingdom where lowly mustard seeds become trees, the Kingdom where the last can be first, where a woman’s hidden leaven transforms the flour, where the fisher-folk gathers all sorts of fish and the monochrome snapshot of the past turns into the panoramic masterpiece of God’s new creation.

This is faith for me, that I am sent not to affirm someone’s banal imagination of the Body of Christ, but to proclaim with my voice and in my body, the untamable imagination of a God who seeks not for the good fit but for belief that the Body of Christ has resurrected and is on the move.

Ajung Sojwal is the Interim Rector at Calvary Church in Stonington, CT. She lives with her husband in Stonington, CT.