- The reach of the Church Universal would be hampered without these servants who work in their secular calling all week long and also carve time out every day and week to serve as pastors.
I just got back from meeting with a group of churches committed to bringing, in their words, “scriptural holiness to Eastern Kentucky.”
Theirs is a small but gallant movement dedicated to taking the gospel to a specific mountain region and proliferating the number of churches in order to make a real difference in a needy area.
Few of them are full-time pastors. They are, in nomenclature that matches their reality, bi-vocational. They work at other jobs, typically 40 hours a week, while also assuming pastoral responsibilities. For any pastor who has ever done this, and I have for over thirty years, encouragement is hard to come by but very appreciated!
Let’s start with Paul of Tarsus.
Scripture was the first thing mentioned in Genesis (“In the beginning, God created… And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done”) and was granted eternal significance. This realization should forever sanctify the idea of labor in the mind of the pastor. Work is a good thing, no less so in conjunction with ministry. The term “tentmaking” (Gk. skenopoios) occurs only once in the New Testament. Paul had just arrived in Corinth; Acts 18:2-3 says that he found Aquila and Priscilla “and because he was a tentmaker as they were, he stayed and worked with them.”
Paul and Aquila almost certainly learned this trade from their fathers, in accordance with the standard practice of the day. Such skill was handed down by their families so that God might use it throughout their lives in productive labor.
Paul’s rabbinical training undoubtedly consisted of significant teaching on work.
The famous Jewish sage and scholar Hillel warned, “He who makes a profit from the crown of the Torah shall waste away.” The rabbi Gamaliel (mentor of Paul) said, “All study of the Torah which is not combined with work will ultimately be futile and lead to sin.” Their ethic was substantially and nobly different from Greek culture, which tended to despise manual labor.
In the days of Jesus, there were some 15,000-20,000 ordinary priests. The vast majority of them engaged in another occupation to support their families. Rabbis at the time of Christ knew they couldn’t make a living teaching, for the Torah forbade charging disciples for the honor of learning. Rabbis, therefore, were bi-vocational, considering it a holy honor to both work and minister.
In the occasional exception to this rule, a teacher from a priestly family might receive a stipend; but this was for the most part uncommon. It would have been normative for disciples to huddle around their rabbis in the evening after a workday.
None of this data proposes that a bi-vocational or tent-making approach is the only way to conduct ministry. Jesus was apparently supported by donations and hospitality. Paul accepted gifts in order to devote himself to full-time ministry and even taught that workers have a right to be supported by those served. But for the apostle, bi-vocational ministry was a great “arrow” in the ministry “quiver” when money was short; indeed, Paul found much to commend the method. He seems to have viewed bi-vocational ministry far differently than much of the contemporary world does—not as a necessary evil to be endured until a better situation came along, but as an essential part of his Great Commission strategy. According to Steve Rundle, preaching the gospel “for free”
- Added credibility to his message
- Served as a ministry model for his converts
- Set a pattern for lay ministry and witness
- Made it a normative expectation for all Christians to make disciples where their work was found and
- Gave him opportunity to model a godly work ethic and a Christ-centered lifestyle for former pagans.
Although firm statistics are a bit hard to come by, it appears that about half of the pastors of Mississippi are bi-vocational. World-wide, the percentage is probably much higher. In other words, the reach of the Church Universal would be hampered without these servants who work in their secular calling all week long and also carve time out every day and week to serve as pastors.
These people are heroes, and the Church is stronger for them.
