Hooks, Not Lures: Pastoral Formation in a Homeless Shelter
Jesus approached ordinary fishermen with a simple command: ‘Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men’” (Mark 1:17). For years I heard “fishing” and assumed I knew the assignment. I’m no pro angler, but I enjoy it. I love a good day on the water. I’ve wandered the aisles at Bass Pro, compared rods and lures, binged how-to videos, taken notes, adjusted, and tried to improve my skills.
That’s also how I read this passage, and I asked the wrong questions: What does it mean to fish? How can I do it better? I thought being a “fisher of men” depended on charisma or persuasion, something rooted in my personality and skill.
I kept putting the weight on the outcome of the command and overlooked the promise: “I will make you become.” Did you catch it? Make. You. Become.
Who has the power to make you become anything? A boss can assign tasks, and a parent can impart wisdom. A teacher can train habits, a counselor can untangle motives, and a mentor can sharpen judgment, but only God can remake who we truly are. Only the Creator creates anew. He doesn’t merely coach performance; He recreates identity: new heart, new name, new direction.
“When Jesus calls us, He invites us into something significant, messy, and transformative.”
Jesus wasn’t offering these fishermen a new gig. He’s not offering a tidy mission. A platform, a method, and adoring crowds. He’s calling them into something weighty and real. And it’s not just about the people they’ll reach. It’s about them. He was promising a new identity, and that meant the death of the one they had.
This truth came home on a fishing trip to Bend, Oregon, with my sons. For my youngest, this was his first time out on the water. He was thrilled when he landed his first trout, right up until he realized the Scout badge we were working on required him to clean and cook it.
We both learned something that day. For my son, fishing would be forever catch-and-release. For me, fishing wasn’t just the thrill of the strike; it was grappling with death.
In the biblical tradition, fishing is not about winsome attraction, gentle wooing, or clever luring. It functions as a symbol of divine judgment and disruptive power. The prophet Amos declares, “The Lord GOD has sworn by his holiness that, behold, the days are coming upon you, when they shall take you away with hooks, even the last of you with fishhooks” (Amos 4:2). It is a severe image: a judgment that ends what cannot continue and closes one chapter so another may begin.
When Jesus calls us, He invites us into something significant, messy, and transformative. Who we’ve been and what we’ve done may have brought us this far—but it can’t take us where we truly need to go. In this sense, Christ’s call is both judgment and invitation. He calls us to leave behind familiar comforts, to die to old identities, and to step fully into the new life He alone can offer.
Change is never easy. I know this. I serve as a chaplain at a Christian shelter for homeless families in downtown Vancouver, Washington—Open House Ministries. People arrive with CPS folders and court dates, motel receipts crumpled in their pockets, detox sweats, and kids who’ve slept in the back seat. They bring survival skills that kept them alive on the street but don’t translate to life in community.
“Ministry is not the art of better bait; it is trust in the One who remakes.”
Our shelter is not hotel; it’s a community with structure: curfews and sobriety, parenting standards and chores, room checks, counseling, chapel, and case plans. To someone used to chaos, order feels like judgment. To someone used to isolation, accountability feels like exposure. But this is the strange mercy of the gospel: the disruption that ends what cannot continue so something new can live.
What changes people here is not technique or temperament. It’s the promise. Not “make yourself appealing,” but “I will make you become.” We watch identities get remade: from addict to in recovery; from homeless to housed; from absent to present; from ashamed to forgiven; from broken to whole.
The lesson holds from pulpit to pew, from classroom to shelter. Ministry is not the art of better bait; it is trust in the One who remakes. Our task is to announce, embody, and patiently walk with people through the death of what was and the birth of what Christ is making them to be.