When a church transitions to bivocational ministry

A few days ago I met with a small congregation to discuss their pastoral needs.  For many years they have enjoyed a fully-funded pastor who recently left the church, but their numbers have declined to the point that they weren't sure that was still a possibility.  Like many marginally fully-funded churches, the salary wasn't the primary issue; providing benefits such as insurance was the problem.  I was asked to talk to the congregation about what having a bivocational pastor would look like for them.  About half of the congregation came for the discussion.

Because this was new to them I wanted to assure them that what they were considering was becoming more common across denominations today.  I have talked with leadership from numerous denominations, and every single person has told me their numbers of bivocational ministers are growing, and they expect that growth to continue in the forseeable future.  Every leader with whom I spoke said it is becoming more common for their smaller fully-funded churches to seek a bivocational pastor when it's time to call a new pastor.  This information seemed to help this church realize that there was nothing wrong with them nor had they failed God in some way by not being able to support a fully-funded pastor.

We began to talk about the changes that would occur.  How the pastor would not be available as easily as their fully-funded pastors had been.  How they would have to step up and take over some of the responsibilities they had previously entrusted to their pastors.  How the church would need to move to a pastoral care mindset to a congregational care mindset.

I then began to explain some of the benefits the church would receive by having a bivocational pastor.  I gave them figures on how bivocational ministers often have longer tenures than their fully-funded counterparts.  Because most bivocational ministers come from the general geographic area of the church they already have roots in those communities and already know the general area of the church.  I told them how most bivocational ministers have great work ethics and how many of us have adopted the motto "Whatever it takes" to accomplish the ministry.

After discussing many of the benefits and challenges bivocational ministry would bring to the church the congregation began to ask some really good questions.  It was obvious they had been talking about this before asking me to meet with them.  Their questions were honest, and I felt their responses to my questions were honest as well.  When we finished our 90 minute conversation the church moderator asked how many in attendance would be in favor of calling a bivocational minister as their next pastor.  Every person raised their hand.  This was not an official vote; that will come later in a regular business meeting, but it was an indication that this is the direction this church will go.

The good news for this church is that I already have several possible candidates I can share with their pastor search committee.  That is not always the case when a church seeks to call a bivocational pastor.  I am excited because this church is going into this transition with their eyes wide open.  I have no doubt there will be some challenges down the road as they transition from having a fully-funded pastor to one who is bivocational, but I believe we will be able to work through them.  I also believe this will provide this congregation with a new focus.  Part of our discussion centered around potential ministries the church could provide to impact their community, and calling a bivocational minister will free up some of their finances to offer those ministries.  Both the congregation and I left the meeting excited about the possibilities as this church begins a new era of ministry.

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.

John Maxwell and the law of the rubber band

Anyone who has followed my writings know how much John Maxwell has influenced my thinking about leadership.  Out of all his books The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You remains my favorite and The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth: Live Them and Reach Your Potential is right behind it.  Both are must reads for anyone called to be a leader of any organization including ministry related roles.  In the second book one of the laws of growth is called The Law of the Rubber Band.

This law teaches that a rubber band is only useful when it is stretched.  A pile of rubber bands laying on a desk is just that: a pile with very little value.  But, when a rubber band is stretched it is capable of doing many worthwhile things.  There is an important application here at both the personal and the organizational level.

Most of us, myself included, enjoy the status quo.  Since we already know how to do whatever it is we've been doing for some time we enjoy continuing to do that.  To do something different would stretch us out of our comfort zones, and most people don't find that especially enjoyable.  However, it is when we are stretched that we become more valuable.

There have been so many times in my life when I've allowed myself to be stretched.  As a factory worker the only thing I had to worry about was showing up to work on time and doing what I was told.  When I felt God calling me into the ministry I found myself stretched.  Suddenly, I was working in the factory and serving a small church as their bivocational pastor.  I had no pastoral experience and no education beyond high school.  Believe me when I say there were many times I felt stretched way beyond my comfort zone.  Later I decided to earn a college degree and became a college student in addition to my work and church roles.  Now I'm stretched even further.  After twenty years of pastoral ministry I'm quite comfortable in that role when I felt God calling me to a new role serving in our judicatory.  I knew how to pastor; I didn't know if I could do this new work, but I also knew God had called so I accepted it.  Stretched again.  Later, I decided to pursue a master's degree and then a doctorate.  Talk about being stretched outside my comfort zone!  Over and over again God has challenged me to stretch, and it was always to prepare me to become more useful to His kingdom.

Our churches are no different.  Many of our churches are still doing ministry today as they did fifty years ago.  They are comfortable in doing what they have always done even if it's not as effective today as it once was.  Until these churches are willing to be stretched into new ways of thinking about ministry and doing things that are not comfortable at first they are unlikely to ever regain their usefulness to the Kingdom.  They will continue to decline until they are finally only a memory in a few people's minds and a name on a long-ago abandoned church building.

Stretching always involves change, and many churches associate change with risk.  I've come to believe that refusing to change is actually riskier than change.  Everything in today's culture becomes obsolete much sooner than ever before, and that includes the systems and processes found in organizations.  The good news for churches is that we do not have to change our message, in fact we must not change that, we only have to find new ways to get that message out.  We have to find new ways to connect with those outside the church.  We have to find new ways to proclaim the only message that offers hope to hurting people.  But, doing any of these will stretch us and force us to change the way we go about ministry.  Like rubber bands, churches that are willing to be stretched will be useful.

Paper cuts to our souls

While driving to a meeting yesterday I listened to a podcast from Ravi Zacharias.  In it he told of a late night phone call he once received from a friend who was asking for his prayers.  The friend was an Emergency Room doctor and earlier that evening a woman who had been badly beaten by her boyfriend was brought into the hospital.  The woman was near death.  The doctor quickly scrubbed and began working on the woman.  He opened her up and began to massage her heart with his hand trying to keep it beating.  In a few minutes he realized she was gone.  As he was cleaning up a nurse brought in a bag that came in with the woman and told the doctor he needed to see it.  It was filled with dirty needles; the woman was a serious drug addict.  He told Zacharias that in the course of treating her he had cut his hand on a rib bone, and now if the woman had a drug-related disease he could be infected.  Zacharias asked if the cut was large, and the doctor said it was like a paper cut.  Zacharias said he asked if the doctor was saying that he could be exposed to a possible life-threatening disease from a paper cut, and the doctor said yes.

Zacharias went on to ask in his message how many Christians are damaged spiritually by paper cuts to their souls.  A small cut here, another small cut there as we compromise our values and beliefs little by little.  Few people fall into major sin all at once.  Most begin with a small compromise here and another one there, and then one day we find ourselves in major problems spiritually and wonder how we ever got there.

Society makes it easy for such paper cuts to occur.  We listen to the radio and hear a song we like, and although it may have some questionable lyrics we download it to our I-Pods so we listen to it as often as we want thereby feeding its message into our minds.   We reason that most of the song is OK so it's alright to listen to it.  We go to a movie and tell our friends how good it was and recommend they go see it.  We might even mention that there are just a couple of scenes that caused it to get an R rating.  We watch television and become immune to the growing amount of sexual scenes and foul language that is making its way into our living rooms.  Things aren't going well at home and we meet someone who seems to really understand us and even appreciate all we do, and soon an emotional connection is made that should not happen with someone other than our spouse.  We get up a little late and reason that we'll skip our morning devotions and Bible reading because we just have too much to do.  All small things no more than paper cuts, but over time they can create huge problems.

Do we stop listening to music or watching movies or television?  Should we all slip off somewhere to a monastery and hide out there until Jesus comes so we are not polluted by the world?  I don't think so.  Jesus said His disciples were to be in the world but not of the world.  Our ministry is right here in this imperfect, sin-filled world, and to abandon it is to abandon our mission.  But, we need to be aware of the paper cuts that can occur in our lives and take steps to deal with them immediately.  To pretend that this one thing is no big deal is like saying it's OK to drink just a little poison.  How much does it take to cause you great harm?

Maintaining the spiritual disciples is never easy is our fast-paced world, but they are essential if we are to protect ourselves from the paper cuts our society tries to inflict on us.  Even then, there will be times when we will realize we have been cut, we have allowed a measure of compromise into our lives, and at those times we thank God for His forgiveness and confess once again our failing.  Paper cuts do not have to lead to a damaged soul if we will remain vigilant and deal with them as soon as they occur.

An 8-Track Church in a CD World

The title of this blog post is also the title of one of my favorite books on ministry.  An 8-Track Church in a Cd World: The Modern Church in a Postmodern World by Robert N. Nash, Jr. describes the problem many churches have trying to do ministry in the 21st century.  I fell in love with the book as soon as I read the following on page 2.

We play a little game each week in church called "Let's Pretend."  We pretend that people want the same things from church in the 1990s that they wanted in the 1950s.  We pretend that the majority of Americans are churchgoing Christians who believe in the God of the Bible and who order their lives to reflect this reality.  We pretend that the spirituality of Americans in the 1990s is enhanced by a decades-old diet of practical faith, old-time religion, revivals, and personal "quiet time."  We pretend that the church is still the center of community life and that people will come back to church "when they get their lives straightened out."

This book was published in 1997; imagine what he might write today!  Our culture has changed even more since 1997, but his words are still true today.  And we wonder why society thinks the church is irrelevant.  Later, in his book Nash shares a study done by Barna that found that only about one-fourth of Americans believe that the churches in their area are relevant to the way they live.  If they perceive that what we do and teach is not relevant we should not be surprised that they are not interested in being a part of our churches.

Nash writes that "The number-one religious story of the next century will be the deaths of thousands of local Christian churches.  These churches will die slow and painful deaths brought on by changing demographics and their unwillingness to face the reality of their own spiritual inadequacy."  Of course, that is already happening with about 100 churches in the United States closing their doors every week.  Most of these are smaller churches that long ago forgot why they existed and had no vision for their future.  The good news is that does not have to happen to your church if you are willing to make the changes necessary to effectively reach out to your community with a Gospel message that speaks to the real needs of postmodern people.

The book offers some recommendations for such ministry.

• Churches must find their niche.  We should not attempt to copy what other churches are doing but identify the unique vision God has for our church and live into that vision.
• Churches must localize their ministry.  Our primary mission field is just outside our front door.  The 8-track church believes it is a mission-minded church because it sends money to the denomination to support mission work around the world.  While that remains important, it is not enough.  We must do our own mission work in our own communities.
• Churches must let leadership "trickle up."  Another writer calls this the second Reformation.  He wrote that the first Reformation gave the Word of God to the people, and the second Reformation will give the ministry back to the people.
• Churches will become more dependent upon lay ministers or bivocational ministers, many of whom will not have been to seminary.  Churches and judicatories must assume a more active role of training these individuals for ministry.

In my opinion, many smaller churches in the United States will have to make some major decisions in the next decade.  They will either decide to make the changes necessary to enjoy a productive, effective ministry or they will, by default, choose to die.  Some will die rather quickly.  For others, it may take several decades before the doors actually close but they will have been walking corpses for many of those years.  God will already have moved on and raised up other churches in their communities to achieve His purposes.  Which will your church choose?

The life of a writer

It is not uncommon for people to ask how they can become a writer.  They have an idea floating in their minds they would like to write about but don't know how to get started.  Since I've published a few books they want to know how I began and how they can start.

Many people don't believe me when I tell them that when I wanted to write my first book I literally went to Barnes and Noble and bought a book on how to write a book.  After reading the book I sat down in front of my computer and began writing.  A year later I had a manuscript finished and didn't know what to do with it.  I had no idea how to get it published, so I went to Barnes and Noble and bought on a book on how to get a book published.  I learned about query letters and after several attempts at writing one I sent it to a publisher.  It was at that point that I learned about rejection!  Several weeks after sending the letter I received a short response indicating the publisher was not interested.  I sent another query letter to another publisher, and this time it was accepted.  Then began the rewrites, editing, and more rewrites until it was finally accepted.  In 2000 my first book was published, about three years after I first began writing it.  Since then I've published seven more books and have the eighth one scheduled for release in September of this year.

Writing is hard work, and unless you are a well known writer or want to write about end times you probably won't make much money writing for a church audience like I do.  I read somewhere recently that the typical book in America sells an average of 500 copies.  I don't know if that's true or not, but if it is think of the books written by people like Max Lucado, Rick Warren, John Maxwell, Leonard Sweet, George Barna, and others of that caliber.  There must be a lot of books published that pull their numbers down to that 500 level.  While my books sell above that 500 average, believe me when I say my writing won't allow me to quit my day job.

Once I explain this, people then ask why I write.  The answer is that I am providing resources to meet a need that has mostly gone unmet in years past.  As a bivocational pastor for twenty years I was amazed at the lack of resources specifically developed for us and the churches we lead.  Nearly all the books I've written have been about bivocational and small church ministry.  I'm happy to say that there are now others who are writing for those leaders, but the available resources that address bivocational ministry are still limited.

I still believe the best reason to write is to add value to people's lives.  Give them tools and resources that will make their lives better.  Leave something behind that will outlive you.  My hope is that when I've gone on to meet my Lord that my writings will still impact people and churches.

If you want to write the best advice I can give up is to start writing.  When you finish your manuscript find a publisher interested in publishing books on your topic and find out how they want you to contact them.  Check out their websites and you'll get the information you need.  Even if you find a publisher, you still have a lot more work to do.  You'll have questionnaires to fill out, editing and rewrites to do, deadlines to meet, and maybe much more depending on the publisher.  But, if the day comes when your doorbell rings and sitting on your porch is a box of books fresh from the printer that you have written you'll quickly determine it was all worth it.  Then when people begin to send you e-mails and phone calls telling you how helpful your material was to them you'll forget about all the work that went into it, and you'll simply thank God for giving you the opportunity to bring encouragement and help to others.

With whom should you spend your time?

One of the things I believe in very strongly is the value of being a life-long learner.  There are various ways one can approach this: formal education that leads to degrees, attending workshops and seminars, taking courses at a community college to help develop areas that need improvement, reading good books, and spending time with persons who are ahead of us.  It is this last way that I want to focus on today.

I have read most of John Maxwell's books, and The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth: Live Them and Reach Your Potential is one of his best.  I read it for the first time last year, and I'm currently re-reading it now.  One of the laws he talks about is the Law of Environment, and one part of this law is being intentional about whom you spend most of your time with.  He quotes Charles "Tremendous" Jones who once said, "You are the same today that you are going to be in five years from now except for two things: the people with whom you associate and the books you read."  I completely agree with that observation.

Maxwell then goes on to write that, "It is not always comfortable, but it is always profitable to associate with people larger than ourselves...What kinds of "larger" people should we spend our time with?  People with integrity.  People who are positive.  People who are ahead of us professionally.  People who lift us up instead of knocking us down.  People who take the high road, never the low.  And, above all, people who are growing."

In Proverbs 13:20 Solomon wrote, "Walk with the wise and become wise, for a companion of fools suffers harm."  Jones, Maxwell, and Solomon would all agree that if we want to be life-long learners one important way is to intentionally spend time with people from whom we can learn, and that will be people who are ahead of us on the journeys we are taking.

If you are a bivocational minister you should seek others who successfully travelled that road before you to learn from them how they managed the land mines associated with such ministry.  Bivocational and fully-funded ministers alike should want to spend time with people who grew their churches, not necessarily to learn the "secret to growing a church" but to learn the heart and soul of the minister who has advanced the Kingdom of God.  Each of us needs to spend time with people who have the gift of encouragement.  There are so many people and circumstances that drag us down that we need to be surrounded by people who will lift us up just by their presence.

We not only need mentors in our lives who can give us direction, we also need coaches who will help us grow by asking tough questions and holding us accountable to do the things we say we will do.  We need friends who will love us unconditionally, encourage us in the things we attempt, and also challenge us when they think we are going in the wrong direction.  We also need persons who will inspire us by their success.  When I am with someone who has enjoyed true success in his or her life it always inspires me that I can experience similar success in my life.  By true success I refer to one who became successful with integrity, who always took the high road.  I will admit it is not always easy to find each of these kinds of people nor is it always easy to spend time with them.  We really do have to consider it an investment in our future to take the time to identify and spend time with each of these kinds of people.  But, if we will I believe we will find it to have been a good investment that yielded a high rate of return.