Bivocational ministers need teams

Last week my wife had surgery.  She spent three days in the hospital before I brought her home.  While in the hospital she received excellent care from 24-hour nursing staff who made sure she had everything she needed to heal from her surgery.  Housekeeping came in every day, at least once, to make sure her room was clean.  Food services brought her three good meals every day, and yes I said the meals she got while in that hospital were good.  She had two physical therapists work with her twice a day to help her regain mobility.  Her surgeon and a hospital doctor checked on her every day and ensured she received what she needed to recover.

On Thursday I brought her home.  Who do you think her nurse, her housekeeper, her cook and dishwasher, her therapist, and the one who ensures she has what she needs to recover is now?  You are correct...me!  It is a labor of love, but it is labor.

Sometime on Friday I got to thinking how much this looks like bivocational ministry.  In larger churches different ministries are led by various people.  Depending on the church there may be a fairly large staff.  Even in a smaller church with a solo pastor there is often at least a part-time administrative person and someone to clean the facility.  However, sometimes in the bivocational church the pastor wears all those hats, and is expected to by the congregation.  A friend of mine told me of resigning a small church when a woman complained after church that he had not replaced the burn-out light bulb in the ladies bathroom since "that's what we pay you to do."

When bivocational ministers are expected to do all the ministry (as well as the maintenance and everything else in the church) and work an outside job it gets overwhelming.  In fact, it is more than overwhelming; it is impossible.  It is also unbiblical.  The work of the church was never intended to be done by one person.  You need a team of people working together to make your church have the impact in its community God intends.  If you are serving as a bivocational pastor your church is probably too small to have a paid staff, but you are not too small to develop ministry teams.  My friend, Terry Dorsett, has written the best book to help you develop the teams you need.  The title of the book is Developing Leadership Teams in the Bivocational Church.  This is not a book about theory; it is a book that walks you through how to build the teams you need.  It is the book I wish was available when I served as a bivocational pastor for twenty years.

The second thing you need to remember is that you have a responsibility to take care of yourself.  Yes, bivocational ministry makes a lot of demands on your life, but you are responsible to take care of yourself.  You must make sure to keep your life in balance.  My book, The Healthy Pastor: Easing the Stresses of Ministry will help you do that.  It addresses some of the common challenges that can keep a pastor's life out of balance.  While we will never eliminate many of these stresses, there are ways to limit their impact on our lives.

There is good news ahead on the home front.  On the day this article will be posted we will begin having therapy at a nearby rehab center.  We will go back to see her doctors and, hopefully and prayerfully, get some restrictions lifted.  We now have a routine set up that makes everything run much more efficiently and doesn't require so much time to accomplish everything.  Stress comes into our lives from many directions, but with the right teams and the right methods of dealing with them, much of their impact can be reduced.