I remember well the day the pastor of my home church asked me to preach the sermon on Youth Sunday. I was horrified. To him it must have seemed natural; I could not have been more involved in church. Still, the invitation made me realize I had no idea what a sermon was, let alone who could preach or why one would. I had been in the church all my life but so much about church and ministry remained opaque and foreign. Gracelessly, I declined. The pastor, though more gracious, was clearly disappointed. Embarrassed by it all, I dropped out of everything except choir. He thought he'd seen something within me like a call, but I was unprepared.

How then do we prepare young people to welcome the invitation when it comes - to recognize a call to the ministry, to investigate and even try on pastoral identity?

For me, one starting point for this is a weekly children's sermon. So often advice for pastors about children's sermons is framed in terms of survival but it is my favorite part of worship. I take apart biblical language and liturgical movement so that they understand what is going on around them. But I also talk to them about my own childhood and about my call to be a pastor. Among other things, the children's sermon gives them the chance to know me as a person.

As children see me functioning in worship and in conversation with them, they get a glimpse of the world of adults and of work that moves past the understanding that "this is what I get paid to do." They may begin to see that being "grown up" involves more than immediate rewards in being a parent, a citizen, a friend, a sibling. It involves a grace-filled discovery of oneself as one who gives, as one whose life finds fulfillment in being a part of others' lives. And a pastor has a unique vocation as a trusted part of people's lives, often as a symbol of the invisible and eternal relationship we have with God. I have a children's sermon on the Magnificat in which I talk about how we magnify God for others. Mary was specially chosen for this and ordained pastors are set apart for this, but everyone has a capacity to bring God "whom no one has seen" to visibility through love for one another. Perhaps just this small description might tempt one of them to think about what it would be like to live with that task constantly in mind.

I also believe it is critical for children to "try on" ministry, from the sacred to the mundane. During one children's sermon on benedictions, I invited the children to turn and stand on their pew, facing the congregation. Together, we stretched our hands out over the seated adults and pronounced a blessing. With children, as with adults, there is nothing that can compete with the actual experience of someone else's work. Whether it is office work, written prayers or worship leadership, I like to work side-by-side with children, letting them take on more and more.

Culturally, we are losing the Protestant conviction that one's vocation guides and energizes all that we are and all that we do. Most people associate the word vocation more simply with a professional career. For that reason I am convinced that we do not start young enough to build vocational consciousness. Though we have begun to recognize spiritual formation in very young children, we often reserve discussion of vocation until adolescence and later and, in doing so, I fear we leave children to discover their own goodness when we could so easily compliment them, build them up, and speak with them explicitly about their gifts. We restrict our feedback to the grades that they receive in school, a place that many of our children experience as both difficult and unrewarding. But the church can be an alternative place for learning - learning not only to explore the sacred but also what one does well. Given explicit permission to ask questions and a discreet time and place to do so, children will take themselves deeper into the spiritual life and - with the right preparation - into God's call.

Thankfully, my pastor's invitation to preach on Youth Sunday was not the last invitation to take myself deeper into God's call. One summer, a few years later, I substituted for our church secretary. I was nineteen and there in the church office, in the day to day work, I was given the opportunity to see the pastor at work and to try on ministry myself. Only then did what had been foreign and opaque become imaginable, intriguing and ultimately inviting.