I recently published an article with Lifeway Research on Bi-Vocational Ministry (5 Things Bi-Vocational Pastors Wish You Knew) and will be writing some occasional posts here in the coming months considering the concept of bi-vo ministry. Some will be prescriptive, some observational, some personal narrative. This is the one of the latter.
SLY-lights
In the previous post in this series I discussed some of my earliest ministry opportunities, and I’m basically going to pick up where I left off there. So if you haven’t read that post…you might want to before reading this one.
In early 2010, South Lake Youth Ministries (SLY) began planning another worship tour for the Summer of that year. At the same time, I was talking non-stop to Andie—the girl from the internet who I found endlessly interesting, and who would eventually become my wife.
This tour was a lot more realistic in terms of pace, compared to the tour of the previous Summer. We spent four days each in four towns, with a full-day for travel and set up between each, and no one (especially idiot me) was allowed to come/go during the time. You were either in or out. I was very much in, with both feet, this time around.
In prep for this tour, we traveled to churches in each of the host communities to gather support for the tour, and spent time in local churches, doing what we called “pitching and preaching”—one of the other team members (usually the young lady who handled a lot of the trip coordination) would “pitch” the idea by explaining what we were planning to do, and then I would stand up and “preach”…which at this remove I would probably characterize less as preaching and more as trying to take verse or two out of context and guilt-trip people into seeing why if they didn’t want the young people in their community to go to hell, then they had best support what we were trying to do.
When the tour rolled around, I was again preaching one night in each of those stops—and while I’m sure those sermons were still objectively bad, the feedback of “I was helped” continued to come in. This was, to me, the sort of thing that makes a person scratch their head and go… “hm.”
During that trip I had a long conversation/experience that will be left for another time, but the result of it was Wayne, the director of South Lake Youth Ministries (SLY), essentially inviting me to come on staff with SLY. After about 7 and a half minutes of prayer, I was pretty certain that I was supposed to take that opportunity. That was a problem, though. Because talking to Andie all the time had moved to an “official” long-distance relationship (another story for another time), and I was planning to move to Iowa in August of 2010. I was driving out there in July, and had at least one job interview lined up, with hopes of more.
Instead, when I went out, I had to break the news to Andie that I was pretty sure I was supposed to stay in Idaho and work with SLY.
Providence
What I could never have planned, nor would I have even hoped to pray for, was that God was already working in Andie, via a couple of conversations I would have had no way of knowing about, to consider the idea of her moving, instead of me. And so it was, that when I said “I don’t know what this means for us—I don’t want us to end, but I understand if this is a deal-breaker…” that is was not, in fact, a deal-breaker. She flew out to Idaho over my 20th birthday, which was also the day when it was publicly announced that I was going on staff with SLY. Seven months later she would move to Idaho; four months after that, we were married.
There’s a whole lot more to that story than I’m going to get into, but at the same time I went on staff with SLY I also started taking classes though the Rocky Mountain Bible Mission’s Bible Training Center (BTC) in Missoula, Montana. Through these classes, and working with SLY to help rural churches, the Lord made clear to me that rural church ministry was where I was supposed to be. I thought at that point I was going to be in parachurch work long-term, but it became evident to me within a couple of years that I wasn’t really wired for that. I had had thoughts of moving to the city to be a church planter, because that was the sexy thing to do at the time. But it became obvious to me that the city idea was my pride thinking I needed something “bigger and better” and through BTC I was meeting pastors who were smarter than me and more godly than I was likely to be anytime within the next few decades, and here they were investing in rural people, rural churches, and rural places. If God had raised me in a rural place, and given me those instincts, why wouldn’t he want me to stay there? It was a clarifying time.
It was also clarifying on another front, because in that position with SLY I was support-raising, trying to raise money so that I could leave of my Post Office job and the dreaded status of “bi-vocational.” I just knew I needed to be “full-time” in ministry.
And then Jim Hunter, one of my BTC teachers and a pastor whom I greatly admire to this day, asked me what seemed a very rude question: “why do think God has prevented you from raising full-support?”
Now, looking backwards a decade and a half, there is a very simple human-centered answer to that question: he prevented me by not forcing me to actually learn how to raise support. We didn’t raise enough funds to live on because I was completely inept (I may also have simply lacked the network for that to be a reasonable goal at that time). But that really only answers the how, not the why. And I didn’t want to consider the why. How, if God wanted me in ministry, could it even be possible that he would only want me to do it “part-time”?
That question sat like a burr under my saddle for a very long time.
We’ll pick it up again in the future. If you want to keep following this and aren’t subscribed, please do so below to have new posts come to your inbox.
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