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Addressing the Challenges of Bivocational Ministry
This website is designed to provide you with the tools you need to fulfill the ministry God has given you. You have been called by God to serve as a bivocational minister, and you need to know that is an exciting ministry opportunity. I like to tell bivocational ministers in my workshops that theirs is a valid call of God on their lives and they should never feel like second-class ministers or that their ministry is less than that of a fully-funded minister. You should also know that you will face some unique challenges as a bivocational minister that can create problems for your church, your family, and your own personal well-being. On this page I want to address some of those challenges and provide you with some helpful resources that I have personally used and found helpful as a bivocational minister.
Your #1 Challenge!
In every workshop I lead the bivocational ministers tell me their greatest challenge is finding the time to do all the things they are required to do. Bivocational ministers have to balance five different areas of their lives: their relationship with God, their relationship with their families, their church work, the demands of their other job, and their own self-care. It's no wonder we feel wore out and frazzled! That is quite a juggling act that is required, and it is required every single day. One book that helped me more than any other in this area is Margin by Dr. Richard Swenson.
He defines margin as 'the amount that is needed beyond that which is needed." Each of us must intentionally create margin in our lives or there will be times when we feel overloaded. Swenson believes that in order for people to be healthy we must maintain margin in four areas of our lives: emotional energy, physical energy, time, and finances. I often say that I wish I had read this book much earlier in my ministry. It may have saved me a lot of problems.
Swenson's new book was released earlier this year titled In Search of Balance: Keys to a Stable Life. I have not yet read this book but plan to do so soon. Here are some other books I have found helpful in the area of time management as well.
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You will find that it becomes much easier to maintain balance in your life and your ministry when you have set clear goals for both. Goals help us live our lives with purpose and direction rather than just responding to whatever need seems greatest at the time. I find that without goals most people just kind of drift through life reacting to whatever life throws their way. At the end of the year such people realize they never really accomplished much, and the reason they didn't is because they never had any clear plans of what they wanted to accomplish. Even worse, they had never sought God's direction for what His goals for their lives may have been.
Several years ago I began a very intentional goal setting program using resources I obtained from Zig Ziglar. I heard Zig talk about this very issue at a leadership conference I attended and decided to invest in a goal setting series he made available. That series included a planner in which I recorded everything I did each day, and I did that for four years! It really didn't take as long as you might think. Each page also provided space for me to write down what goals I wanted to work on that day. At the end of each week I could immediately see whether or not I had done anything to achieve my goals or if that week was spent reacting to whatever came my way. I no longer track my daily activities, but I still use that goal setting format and have found that it has helped me accomplish a lot more in life and in ministry than I would have without it. It has also helped me keep those five areas of my life in better balance because I establish goals for each of those areas each year. I also periodically listen to that tape series by Ziglar just to help me stay motivated to intentionally set new goals each year.
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A third way you can help better manage your time is the way you prepare your sermons. I found that sermon preparation took a major piece of my time each week. Some weeks I was so busy with all the various demands on my time that I came to the end of the week without any sense of what I would be preaching Sunday which also meant that my message wasn't ready. That led to too many "Saturday night specials." These are tough emotionally and physically on the pastor and do a disservice to the congregation. They expect better than that, and they deserve better than something we've thrown together at 10:00 pm on Saturday.
I learned that planning my sermons ahead of time helped me avoid those kinds of problems. I would begin my planning each fall by taking four pieces of paper and writing down the Sundays for the upcoming year. Because we had Sunday evening services I would write down am on one line and pm on the next line below each date. That permitted me to have three months of sermon ideas on a sheet of paper. I would then go through the calendar and write down any special days such as Christmas, Easter, Palm Sunday, Mother's Day and Father's Day in the left hand margin. That reminded me that on that Sunday I would need an appropriate message for that special day. I could then begin to fill in the other Sundays with sermon ideas and potential titles. If I felt led to preach a series of messages on a particular topic I could look for a place in the schedule with that number of open Sundays. Most of the time I could plan my sermons out at least a quarter in advance. Did that take time? Yes, on the front end, but it also saved me a lot of time throughout the year.
It is much easier to prepare sermons if you know what you are wanting to preach. Instead of taking time each week to decide what I wanted to address in my message, I already knew. I could focus my time on the actual preparation of the message. It also helped me keep my radar up for items I could use in my sermons. For instance, I might be reading an article on evangelism that had a great illustration. If I knew I would be preaching a sermon on evangelism I could copy that illustration out to use in my sermon. When I began to actually prepare my sermons I usually had much more material than I needed.
When you know in advance what you are going to preach it also has benefits for your worship service. Congregational and special music can be selected that will go along with your message. If your church uses visuals the people responsible can be looking for some that will match the theme of your message. A common theme throughout a worship service can add much value to the message and make it more meaningful to your congregation.
I developed a simple sermon planning book that can be used to help you keep your sermon ideas and thoughts in one place. It provides space for you to record your sermon title, text, thesis, objective, and additional supporting texts and resources. There is additional space for you to record the main points you want to make in your message and where you can evaluate the congregation's response and your own personal feelings about the message. This simple, helpful tool can provide you with a single space to keep your sermon planning for the year in one place. It's easy to use, and I think it will help save busy ministers make better use of their sermon planning and preparation.
Another thing I do is to file everything. How many times have you read something in a book and then couldn't find it later when you wanted to refer to it? When I finish a book I go back through it and look for everything I highlighted. On my computer is a folder titled BOOK NOTES, and in that folder there are over 100 files on various subjects. Everything that is highlighted in the book I just finished reading is then filed in one or more of those files. Either the entire quote or a reference to the subject is put in that file along with the number of the book and the page number of the quote. I use the Dewey Decimal System to number all my books. Again, some of you are thinking this takes a lot of time. It does, but if I'm working on a sermon on evangelism I have about 5-6 pages of quotes that I can immediately access. How much time do you think that saves me in sermon preparation? It will save you time too.
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Your #2 Challenge!
Another challenge you will face in bivocational ministry is staying motivated in the face of the many roadblocks you will experience in your ministry. There will be people who will not understand the ministry God has called you to. They will question and even criticize your bivocational ministry. They will tell you that if God had really called you into the ministry then you should quit your other job and focus entirely on the ministry. There will be people in your congregation who will seemingly oppose almost everything you do. There will be times you will wonder if it's worth all the frustration and aggravation. On top of that you will experience times when preparing sermons is almost as much fun as going in for a root canal, when you don't feel you can take one more phone call or make another hospital visit, and when you're not sure you ever want to walk into a church ever again. It is during such times as these when you will need to dig deep to find the motivation you need to continue doing the work God has called you to do.
I meet a lot of ministers who are on the verge of burnout or they have already burned out and now they are just going through the motions. A pastor recently told me if he wasn't so close to retirement he didn't think he could keep going. Don't let that happen to you. Invest in your personal well-being so when things get a little tough you will have the inner resources to keep going. All real motivation comes from within a person, so continue to make deposits in yourself so when you have to go to that well of motivation it will be deep and will give you the sustenance you will need. How can you do that?
First and foremost, you need to find ways to grow deeper spiritually. Every day you need to spend time reading the Bible and in prayer. This time in your Bible should not be for sermon preparation but for your own personal spiritual growth. Find other ways that will add value to your devotional life. Along with my daily Bible reading I will read a chapter in another book that speaks to my own personal development. It may be a book on prayer, or one on spiritual disciplines, or one on holiness, or something else that I think will be beneficial. If you do not grow deeper spiritually you will soon find you will grow empty inside and will have nothing left to give to others.
Find some good workshops to attend each year. They don't necessarily have to be religious in nature. In recent years I have attended a number of success or business conferences with speakers like Zig Ziglar, Rudy Giuliani, Tom Hopkins, Colin Powell, John Maxwell, and others. You can't help but leave such events charged up. You will also find a lot of transferable principles at such events that you can use in your church leadership. Notice, I said find some to attend EACH year. You can't just attend a motivational event once and think that's all you will ever need.
I also find it helpful to read motivational books and articles on a regular basis to keep me pumped up. These books challenge me and encourage me when I'm feeling a little down or defeated. They remind me that, in Zig Ziglar's words, "Failure is an event...not a person." Maybe I did fail, but that doesn't mean I can't get back up and start over again. They help me focus on God's call on my life and not on what my critics may be saying. They remind me how much God loves me. They replenish my well so that when I need to draw from it sometime in the future there is plenty there to draw from. Let me share some of my favorite motivational books with you.
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As a bivocational minister you will likely serve smaller churches. One of the things you must always remember about small churches is that relationships are everything. One of the first questions people will ask if any change is suggested for the church is how that change will impact the relationships that exist in the church. If people believe it may have a negative impact on the relationships they have with others in the congregation it is likely that there will be resistance to the change. One of the first questions people will have for their pastor is "Do you love us?" You have to have their heart before you can ask for their hand. In other words, you cannot lead a small church unless the congregation of that church understands how much you care about them as individuals.
I occasionally meet people who tell me they do not do visitation or relate well with people. My advice to such folks is to never try to pastor a smaller church because they will not be successful. The small church pastor must be able to relate with a variety of people and be able to connect with them on a positive level. This isn't always easy to do because some people are just not very loveable. In fact, some people seem to go out of their way to frustrate you in all you do. Still, they are part of the people God has given you to shepherd, and it is important that you develop relationships with every person in your congregation.
We do that by being involved in people's lives. I meet a growing number of pastors today who tell me they don't visit people in the hospital. How does a person become a pastor if they are not with their congregation during their times of need? We need to be with members of our congregations when they are at their lowest points as well as when they are at the highest. We need to weep when they weep and laugh when they laugh. When I left my pastorate after serving in that church twenty years I told the congregation that I would not come back to do their weddings or their funerals unless specifically invited by their new pastor. I explained that his or her involvement in their lives during such times is how a person becomes a pastor.
Not only is it important that you spend time with members of your church, you must also spend time listening to them. They want to tell you stories to help you better understand them, the church, and their needs. They may not come out and directly tell you things you need to know in order to better minister to them, but they will tell you stories that have the information you need to know. This means that you must listen, really listen to them. This can be a challenge because most of us have not been taught listening skills. We do not practice active listening, and, as a result, we miss much of what people are telling us.
Why is it so important that we spend time and listen to our congregation? This time with people helps us better understand where they are on their faith journey. It gives us insight in how we can best minister to them and the needs that exist in their lives. It helps us with our sermon planning, not for illustrations (!), but for themes that we can address in our messages. It helps others develop trust in us which is essential for a pastor to have if he or she wishes to lead. Perhaps most important, it allows us to develop a relationship with those whom God has called us to serve. Here are some resources that have helped me build better relationships with others.
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Your next challenge is also somewhat related to the smaller size church many bivocational ministers serve. You will find that many of them are resistant to change. Some are more willing to change than others, but most churches find change to be very painful. It is not uncommon for many in the church to know in their minds they need to change, but that doesn't make it any less painful nor does it make it less likely they will resist many of the changes that are presented to them. It helps to understand why this resistance to change exists and some ways to address it. Entire books have been written on this problem, so we'll not be able to completely address it here, but we can touch on some of the primary reasons churches are often resistant to change.
As mentioned earlier, everything in the smaller church is built on relationships. One of the first things people in these churches will ask when asked to implement change is, "How will this impact the relationships that exist in the church?" If it is perceived that there is the potential for considerable impact, it is very unlikely that the change will be implemented. Many of these churches are willing to allow the doors of the church to close in the future than to risk harming the existing relationships in the church. Any attempt to introduce change into the church must address the impact it will have on current relationships.
Another thing that impacts a proposed change is who is doing the proposing. Some pastors go into a bivocational church believing that because they are the pastor the people should respect their position and follow their leadership. They might respect the office of the pastor, but that doesn't mean they are going to follow your leadership. Leadership has to be earned in a smaller church, and that doesn't happen just because the church votes to call you as their pastor. People in small churches follow people they know and trust, and it can take years before that includes the pastor. It took me seven years as the pastor of my bivocational church before the people trusted me enough to allow me to lead them. It seldom happens in less than three years.
So, what does the pastor do? The best advice I can give is to lead the church through the existing leaders. Who does your congregation trust? The pastor needs to identify those people and work with them to introduce change into the church. If you can convince them that the changes you want to implement in the church are positive, they can introduce them to the church, and it is much more likely those changes will be accepted.
Any change represents some measure of loss. There is always pain associated with change, and people will not agree to change until the pain of not changing becomes greater than the pain of change. It has been said that change management is really pain management, and I think there is much truth in that.
John Kotter writes that one reason many change efforts fail is because the leaders fail to create enough urgency. Successful change agents are able to clearly demonstrate to their congregations what it will cost them if the change isn't made. Once people feel the urgency behind the change, and recognize there will be painful loss if the change isn't implemented, they become more willing to approve it. Be able to state your reasons for the change in terms that touch the emotions of the congregation.
The final reason we'll address here is that many efforts to introduce change fail because the change process is rushed. It is not uncommon for a new idea to take five years before it becomes part of the DNA of the church. That is, it can take five years from the time you begin to think about a needed change to the final approval and implementation of the change. Many pastors do not stay at their church long enough to see needed change occur, and when they move away their attempts to bring about change in the church go with them. This only makes the smaller church more resistant to proposed changes in the future.
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