The bivocational minister and passion

For twenty years I served as the bivocational pastor of a small, rural church in Indiana.  During most of that time I worked in a factory on the assembly line and various machining lines.   We also took ownership of a small business which I managed, and on top of all that I decided to earn a college degree.  Yea, I was busy.  There were also times when I was operating on autopilot.  I often felt like a robot.  Push a button and out would pop a sermon.  Press another button and I would show up in a class.  A third button would put me running a machine.  I was doing everything I was supposed to do, but there was no passion in anything I did, and that is especially dangerous when it comes to ministry.  Unfortunately, I have met many pastors who also lack passion for what they do.

There are many reasons pastors lose their passion for ministry.  We face challenges that threaten to overwhelm us, people who oppose what we are doing, frustration due to a lack of immediate results, fatigue, a sense of loneliness in ministry, and the various pressures that go along with ministry.  However, those by themselves are not enough to rob us of passion.  Andrew Blackwood once wrote, "In pastoral work the most serious obstacles lie within a man's soul."  It is not the problems themselves that take away our passion, it is how we choose to respond to those problems.  I have found two things to be essential to maintaining passion for ministry.

The first is to reconnect with God's call upon our lives.  When I stop long enough to remember that it was God Himself who called me to this work, it puts ministry is a completely different perspective.  He could have called anyone, and certainly there are people who would have been more qualified and capable, but He chose me.  Furthermore, He called me to bivocational ministry.  During my years as a pastor I would remind myself that perhaps one day He would call me to a different ministry, which He eventually did, but at time I was doing what God had called me to do.  When we can rejoice in that call of God on our lives it becomes much easier to maintain passion for what we are doing.

The second thing that is so essential is to maintain our passion for Jesus Christ.  As ministers it can become easy to get so involved in studying about Christ and telling others about Him that we neglect our own relationship with Him.  We become professional teachers and managers and forget that everything we do should flow out of our relationship with Him.  If we allow that relationship to grow stale, our ministries will become stale and our passion for that ministry will quickly fade.

Congregations can tell when we lose passion for what we are doing.  In fact, they may notice it before we do.  It shows up in our sermons, the way we go about our ministry, and our personalities.  If we lack passion it won't be long before our congregations will also lose their passion for ministry, and soon both the pastor and the congregation are just going through the motions.  There is little life in such places.

Don't let this happen to you.  Stay mindful of God's call on your life and maintain your passion for Christ.  If you do these two things you will find it much easier to deal with the challenges of ministry and maintain your passion for the ministry He has given you.

For more on this read The Bivocational Pastor: Two Jobs, One Ministry.