Seeing Through Bivocals - Christianity Today

The commentator on public radio was complaining about being misunderstood. She had recently moved in with her mother. They liked each other and decided to be housemates.

Unfortunately, none of the commentator’s friends could believe the matter was so simple. The only reasons they could imagine for living with one’s mother were neurotic dependency or grave financial necessity. Everyone expressed the polite hope that she would soon be able to move out. It was as if her living arrangement, regarded as perfectly normal and healthy for most of human history, had somehow, in one generation become a horrible fate, a last resort for desperate people.

Well, I don’t live with my parents, but I understood how the commentator felt: I’m a bivocational minister.

Somehow, true ministry has been defined as a full-time career (“One of our youth, Sammy Smedly, has come forward tonight to give his life to full-time ministry.”), and bivocational ministry has been defined as an aberration. When I became bivocational, no less than three other ministers told me how they had to “go bivocational” once. They encouraged me to think that my fall from grace was only temporary. I’d get back on my feet soon and be a full-time (i.e., real) minister again.

But what if I don’t want that?

How does a person become a bivocational minister? Not on purpose, usually. Few, if any, young people feel a call to be “a pastor, among other things.” Few, if any, seminary students endure three to five years of graduate school in order to moonlight as a minister. It offends our sense of propriety and thrift to think of all that preparation—not to mention that sense of divine calling—being for the sake of a part-time job.

But bivocational ministry happens. It happened to me.

Freedom from failure

Two years ago, after completing two seminary degrees and teaching at both the college and seminary levels, I received a call to pastor a small church in Wisconsin. Despite the church’s size, I was offered a full-time salary. I was surprised at their generosity, but I didn’t question it. I had already decided to accept the position if offered, even if the salary had been much less. As it turned out, this was a good thing.

The church was founded 15 years ago as one side of a bitter church split, and it has led a bipolar existence since then. First it was a few families in a living room, then a growing church averaging over 50, then eight adults renting a room. Now it was up; now it was down. Now it had external financial support and could afford a full-time pastor (e.g., the pastor before me), and now it didn’t—and couldn’t.

After a year and a half of using up the church’s savings to pay my salary, we agreed together to cut my pay and my hours. Presto, a bivocational minister.

Now I lead services on Sunday and am in the church office on Monday and Tuesday. On Tuesday evenings I’ve been teaching an extension course in Hebrew in a town about a hundred miles away. Wednesday through Friday, I am available to substitute in the public school system. On the days I don’t get called in to sub, I go back to the office if necessary or, if I am actually caught up at church, I write novels for young adults. I take Saturday off.

I face many frustrations, but in the end there remain these three: money, guilt, and time. And the greatest of these is time.

But—correct me if I’m wrong here—aren’t all these frustrations typical for full-timers as well? Do I really have less time than other ministers? I wouldn’t dream of saying so. It would offend them if I did. (We ministers, as a species, are proud of our time demands.) Do I really have less money and more guilt than full-timers? I doubt it. This frustration was simply to be expected. What I didn’t expect, though, was the freedom of bivocational ministry.

Working by moonlight

Sure, I don’t have much time, but no one in the church expects me to have much time. I used to feel compelled to prove that I was busy, that I really did do more than prepare sermons. I don’t have to do that anymore; my members know I’m busy.

Another pastor once told me about how many meetings he went to. It was a mark of his ministerial commitment. Not me.

I set aside one evening a week when I’m available for meetings. If a committee wants to meet some other evening, it can go right ahead and tell me later what it decides. A group started an in-depth Bible study of Romans on Wednesday nights. They were through chapter 11 before I made my first appearance, and that was fine with them.

Another welcome surprise has been that I understand my members better than ever before. In fact, most American families require more than one job to make ends meet. My schedule isn’t unusual. When I go to an evening meeting nursing the headache brought on by teaching eighth grade science all day, I’m making no greater sacrifice than any other person on that committee. Every small business owner knows my feeling of always walking on the edge. That guilt and fear that I’m doing too many things and none of them well—that’s everyday life to a working mother.

In fact, I may be part of a paradigm shift. (Okay, maybe not, but I’ve always wanted to use that expression in an article. Paradigm shift. Paradigm shift.) Families today live in a world of multiple jobs, frantic schedules, and frustration. I fit in that world now. I’m normal.

Multiple personalities

Surprisingly, I’ve discovered the bivocational life fits my personality. You see, I’ve never wanted to be just one thing. When I was in first grade, I scribbled a note that my parents still save, in which I said that when I grew up I wanted to be a “paster” (which I think requires a collage degree).

By fourth grade, though, I was writing poems about my goal of being a writer. Through my teen years, I planned to be an English teacher. I committed my life to ministry during my senior year of high school, but in college I majored in English, not because I thought it would be helpful, but just because I wanted to. I began writing novels while in seminary. Add to the mix my roles as father and husband, and it’s clear my pastoral identity is just one part of who I am.

Today I am a pastor and a writer and a teacher, and most days I enjoy each role. In earlier incarnations, I’ve been both a full-time pastor and a full-time teacher, but I like both roles more now that I’m doing them part-time. It is oddly strengthening to be able to shift from one role to another. People are advised to leave their work problems at the office. No problem. I leave mine all over town. Every time I change my job persona, I am a new person.

A few months ago, while having a miserable day in an eighth grade class, I called my wife from the school to check in and discovered that one of our church members had taken ill. Stopping by the hospital on the way home, all the frustrations of the classroom dissipated—I became the other me. After a frustrating and unproductive day at the church office last January, I came home to get word that my second novel had just been put on the American Library Association list of Best Books for 1999. I was renewed.

Just this past Sunday, a new family came to visit the church. As I introduced myself, their daughter peered at me. “Do you substitute at the middle school?” I said I did, trying to remember her face. She smiled broadly. “You were in my science class! You were a good teacher—better than my usual one, anyway.” I don’t recall how my sermon went that day, but I had a good morning.

The life I lead is not for everyone. There are pastors who are wholly focused on their ministerial identity, who have a single-minded intensity about their calling. (I know you’re out there. You’re the people I avoid at ministerial gatherings, because all you talk about is church.) For these people, spending time at a job away from church would be a penance. Not so for me.

Yes, I’ll admit, on any given day I might feel less positive about my multiple personae. Freedom has an evil twin, and sometimes being free to invent your own role means not knowing what to do. Sometimes everything comes due at once, and I do it all poorly. Sometimes we run out of money. Sometimes I feel as if I don’t belong anywhere.

Sometimes my jobs conflict, and someone doesn’t understand why I wasn’t at the hospital or police station earlier. Sometimes people get tired of hunting for the preacher.

But I wouldn’t trade it. I like preaching. I like writing adventure stories. I like hospital visitation. I like planning worship. I like leading Bible study. I like teaching, even eighth graders. I don’t want to give up any of these parts of who I am.

When I “went bivocational,” the church felt guilty enough about it that they wrote into the agreement the financial criteria that, once met, would automatically result in a raise in my salary. Right now I’m wondering if maybe that raise might be better spent hiring someone to do the clerical work that usually falls to me. It wouldn’t be a full-time position, of course, but maybe we could find someone who could bear the stigma of being bivocational.

Gerald Morris is pastor of Living Water Christian Fellowship in Wausau, Wisconsin. fbcw@pcpros.net