Captain James Hughes

As pastors, we experience a whole range of events and moments in our ministry. We’re there for the happiest days, such as weddings, and for the saddest, like funerals and hospital stays. Being on this side of ministry today, with the red epaulettes of officership as opposed to the blue ones of soldiership, I can see that pastorship is a two-way street. We can all minister with and to each other. I wish that in my younger years, I would’ve made more of an effort to pray with and pray for my own pastors, rather than just telling them that I will pray for them. Those are moments that break the mold. You might not think about it when it happens, but you still feel the impact of it.

The College for Officer Training can’t teach you everything about ministry, but it can teach you enough to fall back on. You’re never going to remember every detail from your training, but it will still be inside your heart, prepared for you. You only need to ask the Lord to bring that guidance forward. In preaching, I stress that we should not start a new project and then remember to ask God to bless it. Instead, pray first and ask for guidance before you start that new project. I’m guilty of sometimes forgetting that myself. That’s when I start something which ends up failing, and I’m left asking myself, “Isn’t this what God wants? I’m doing this for Him.” Praying for guidance in ministry is a continuous lesson.

Captain Marcella Hughes

During our past appointment in Tiffin, Ohio, we met a woman who had grown up attending the corps. Through circumstances in life, she had fallen away from the church and had just recently returned when we arrived. She was struggling and looking for answers, but through soldiership, we saw how much she wanted to know the Lord. When she became a senior soldier, she said that it was the proudest moment of her life, because she had fallen so far, yet God still brought her here. I love witnessing that impact in others, because when people think that they’ll never get to where they need to be, we know the Lord is hard at work. My favorite thing in ministry is to walk alongside others to see how the Lord changes their lives. These are people who invest in themselves because they want to know the Lord and have Him be part of their journey. There’s great reward in knowing that because they were faithful, God moved, and He worked in them.

Pastors carry a lot with us. When others share the struggles that they deal with, we take that everywhere we go. We feel it lying in bed when we can’t sleep at night, always thinking about what we can do to help this person with their struggles. There have also been occasions that we have to reach out to other officers and ask if they’ve ever encountered anything similar themselves, because we have never encountered anything like this. The last thing we want to do is say the wrong thing or make the wrong moves and make it worse. Pastors are in the business of people, and people are very delicate.