Moses and My Call To Ministry
By Rev. Dr. Robert Kenney
Robert Kenney is a Lecturer in Religious Studies and Philosophy at Northern Kentucky University near Cincinnati, Ohio. He is an ordained minister of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and a member of Tylersville Road Christian Church.

This is the story of how God called me to ministry, and how my call included a call to work for racial justice and reconciliation. When we receive God's love and accept God's Grace into our lives, we have not arrived as Christians, but have only begun a process of being converted. I believe that we have begun an adventure in becoming "ambassadors for Christ," involved in Christ's ministry of reconciliation to God and to one another. Put another way, we become vessels for the empowerment of others as we learn to let the empowering love of God flow through us.

My call to the ministry came through watching a Jewish movie, "The Ten Commandments". The movie includes a scene in which Moses responds to God's call to go back to Egypt and demand freedom for his people, the Israelites, who were being cruelly mistreated as slaves. In the prologue to the movie, Cecil B. DeMille, the director, connects the story of Moses and the Exodus with the struggle for freedom of all peoples. He does this as a Jew in the 1950's, expressing the Jewish commitment to the civil rights movement in the U.S. He is aware that his audience primarily reveres the book of Exodus as being part of the Christian "Old Testament". It is this Biblical portrayal and seeming reenactment of Moses' call by God to go and demand freedom for the Israelites (when he had been raised as an Egyptian prince) to which I responded.

I have always known that God would lead me, as he did Moses, if I would just follow that leading. When I was a child I wanted to be a missionary to foreign lands like India and Africa. Being one who was "raised in the church" I often assumed that I was going to be a minister. In a similar arrogant fashion, I decided while in junior high school that I would join my friends and become a creative and very well paid electrical engineer. I recovered my concern for people in high school, and decided to teach psychology or history in college. I never wavered from my faith. I became increasingly active in church (Sunday School, youth group, choir, preaching on Youth Sunday). I had experienced God's love. I had felt forgiven when I was baptized as a believer at age nine and many times in church and church camp and after prayer. But I had never really experienced God's grace, however, as Grace -- as God's total acceptance of me as I was -- until that day in June 1966 in that movie theater.

It was not just the scene in the movie that God used to call me. I had wanted my fiancée, Ruth, to go to the movie with me to see what I had remembered vividly as being the most powerful movie I had ever seen. Ruth did not want to go and I left her apartment really disappointed and feeling lonely.

Right before the scene showing Moses' return to Egypt, my best friend, Roy, and my fiancée came down the aisle of the theater, found me (theaters were small in Lexington, Kentucky then) and sat down to join in the experience. I was overwhelmed with a sense of God's love and God's personal concern for me. Right then, I knew that it was not what I would do for God but what God could do through me and with others. While I held Ruth's hand and watched Charlton Heston walk back to Egypt with sand blowing in his face, I knew that God had called me to the ordained ministry and to working for social justice, including racial justice and reconciliation between people of all races.

The road has not been smooth and I have taken many detours. Ruth and I got married, but divorced three years later because of my neglect of her (for college study) and her response to it. Fortunately God saw to it that we had no children. While in my first year of seminary, I experienced God's Grace again when I discovered that, although divorced, I could still be a minister in my denomination. I then really felt that I was still trying to earn my salvation when the last hitchhiker whom I ever have picked up "let" me out of my car at the point of a gun. Too aware, then, of God's unconditional love, I flunked out of seminary. I finally truly surrendered to God at the church where I was a Student Assistant Pastor.

I met Jane, my wife of almost twenty-nine years at a church related singles group. We served with the members of a united ministry of three small churches in eastern Kentucky. We then worked with members of a small congregation in Shepherdsville, Kentucky, near Louisville. I represented three denominations and worked closely with other Protestant, Catholic and Jewish campus ministers and social workers at the University of Louisville.

There, I joined the group that convinced the University to divest from businesses dealing in South Africa and took part in the many other church-supported social justice activities. I taught racially mixed groups of men who were in prison but very intelligent college students. I also served part-time as a Minister of Visitation at a large church in a racially changing neighborhood. I did these last two ministries while finishing my Ph.D., preparing to teach Religious Studies and Philosophy and teaching part-time at local colleges. After becoming a full-time Lecturer at Northern Kentucky University, I took part in the "Undoing Racism" workshop, which led to becoming more involved with social justice work once again.

Part of my ministry of reconciliation has been to serve on the Coalition Building Committee of Study Circles. Study Circles is an organization that helps people from very diverse ethnic backgrounds to learn about one another's experiences and to work together for a common goal such as better community/police relations here in Cincinnati.

A few years ago, at a New Year's worship service, I wrote that I wanted to discover God's further will for my life. I still sensed that I needed to write that request as a prayer. I should have known that although this vessel of God's love has often been more like a "cracked pot," God is still not finished with me.

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