Bi-vocational ministry is increasingly common today. Research published by Patricia M. Y. Chang through the Pulpit & Pew initiative of Duke University notes that the majority of Protestant congregations in the United States have fewer than 100 regular attendees. Many of these churches lack the financial resources to support a full time pastor. Chang explains, “As employment opportunities for full-time, fully ordained pastors shrink, the future leaders of many congregations will be lay pastors, local pastors, part-time tentmaker pastors, yoked pastors, and pastors with alternative means of support (partner income or retirement benefits from previous careers).”
In these congregations, the pastor’s interests are necessarily divided. Since they are usually the only pastor serving the congregation, they shoulder the responsibilities of weekly preaching and congregational care, along with the weight of working a second job. When the need of the church is combined with the pastor’s desire to be in ministry, the result can be a workload that amounts to two full-time jobs. This is a burden that the church may be all too willing to allow the pastor to bear.
Churches can help bi-vocational pastors maintain the right priorities by making sure that the congregation is doing all it can to support the pastor financially. Paul describes pastoral compensation as a “right” (1 Cor. 9:12). The church’s leadership team needs to assess congregational needs with an eye on the minister’s strengths in order to establish guidelines for strategic investment of the pastor’s time. It is especially important that the pastor’s ministry be exercised in the area in which he or she is primarily gifted. This increases the likelihood that the pastor’s ministry will be energizing rather than draining. To increase the likelihood of true accountability, church leaders and the pastor should work together to articulate these guidelines in writing. These written priorities ought to be re-visited regularly, at the very least on a yearly basis.
It will be especially helpful for the church’s leadership to touch base with the pastor’s family. A frank conversation with the pastor’s spouse can reveal “blind spots,” either on the part of the pastor or the congregation, that contribute to ministerial burnout. An exhausted minister with an embittered family is too high a price for the church to pay for the service of a bi-vocational pastor.
