Article
Why You Shouldn’t Be a Covocational Pastor
I want to see every guy considering covocational ministry for these reasons to banish them from his consideration.
Pastoring is full of thrilling highs and depressing lows. One of those lows came as my phone vibrated one evening.
Looking into the glow of my device, I read the email of a member who was stepping away from our church at a critical hour. His rationale was that I wasn’t sufficiently close to him as I once was. My heart sank. My first reaction was to spin through all the times when I should have texted or called and possible gaps in my calendar to meet up.
Then my mind moved to my responsibilities. Seeking to be a faithful husband and father. A full-time role leading web and social media teams. Travel for work. Involved in my small group. Investing time with my neighbors. Leading a men’s group. Discipling a young man. Casting vision for the church. Leading a small church staff. Preparing and preaching weekly sermons.
The more I processed, the creeping reality began to set in: I can’t be everything to everyone. In fact, one of the greatest assets I felt I was bringing to the table—my covocational leadership in a church plant—appeared to be directly responsible for the loss of a member. Time and again, I’ve had to rethink my covocational role and why I’m doing it. And as a result, I’ve had to become very clear on why I should be covocational and why I shouldn’t.
Here are six bad reasons for doing covocational ministry that I’ve had to see and reject over the years. And I want to see every guy considering covocational ministry for these reasons to banish them from his consideration.
1. I want to be a hero.
Okay, so you might never say these words. But if you’re like me, you probably function a bit like a superhero. You’re trying to be an example as a husband and father, working to advance your career, and leading in a church at the same time. The combo is particularly challenging when you’re in the lead role in a church. Most people can’t and shouldn’t attempt to do everything you’re doing.
Here’s how you know you’ve caught the superhero bug: when critiques that you’re not doing enough or not successful enough crush you. When that 11 p.m. email tells you that you weren’t present enough, when that pastor smirks at the slow growth of your church, when the budget has to be cut to align with giving, you will quickly learn that covocational ministry and a superhero mentality can’t go hand in hand.
2. I don’t have enough faith.
I once joked with a full-time, fundraised church planter that I didn’t have enough faith to do what he was doing. But five years of leading a church plant while maintaining another full-time role has led me to realize how wrong I was.
Covocational pastors need immense faith.
They need faith in ways that fundraising planters don’t. While fundraised planters need faith to believe God for the money needed to keep them full-time for the first few years, I need to have faith to believe God for the time needed to stretch between all my responsibilities for the indefinite future.
Hardly a week goes by that I don’t find myself crying out, “Lord, I need you. I can’t do this!” My faith has grown by leaps and bounds over the past five years, not because my paycheck wasn’t enough, but because I wasn’t enough. I needed the Holy Spirit to do in and through me what I did not have the capacity in myself to do.
3. I don’t like asking people for money.
As a millennial, I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about money-hungry ministries. I’ve seen a lot of waste. I’ve seen a lot of stomach-turning requests for giving. And I’ve allowed that thinking to lead me to a place where I never want to be seen shaking the tin cup and asking for money to fund my ministry or my family—especially since God has given me skills that enable me to avoid doing it. And I think there’ve been times where I’ve felt a bit of pride in not needing to ask people for money.
But one day, one of our elders raised the concern: “Phil, we don’t consistently ask people to give on Sundays.” The thing that was for me a source of pride had become a huge pitfall.
On the one hand, by failing to ask people to give on a regular basis, we were significantly behind the curve in terms of self-support. And on the other hand, by failing to ask people to give regularly, we were significantly undercutting our ministry to those who need to learn to give and be blessed by God as they invest themselves in the mission.
I’ve had to learn the hard way that covocational ministry doesn’t mean you get to opt out of asking people for money. Because you’re not out on the street corner ringing the bell, you’re actually opening your arms to invite people into the mission.
4. I don’t see the value of full-time staff.
I remember when one of our part-time staff members began to press me on my vision for the future. I didn’t understand what he was getting at. But he kept questioning my view of full-time ministry. I thought he was asking about my personal approach to covocational ministry, and I would answer with that. But what he was asking was actually something much deeper. He was really asking, “Do I have the future of being a full-time member of the church staff?”
Inadvertently, our commitment to covocational ministry can become handcuffs on those who don’t embrace our calling. We can, by our actions and our prioritization of covocational ministry, produce a perception that “this is the way.”
As I’ve come to know many covocational pastors, I’ve discovered that a significant percentage become caught in the part-time swamp, where their churches never really get to the point of hiring full-time team members, resulting in fractionalized attention by everyone.
Good covocational leadership requires a commitment to including those who have full-time ministry callings and providing them with an on-ramp onto the team.
5. I want to delegate my role to paid staff.
Here’s a related challenge—peculiar to my breed of covocational pastor—the lead covocational pastor. It’s the sneaky belief that I can little by little offload my responsibilities to others and get to a point where leading the church requires less and less time. It’s that One Minute Manager or 4-hour Workweek type mindset. And there’s a ton of truth to this mindset. You absolutely can’t do it alone. You absolutely need paid staff. I have no clue how I would have survived the past five years without a plural elder team, paid staff, and a robust team of deacons.
But there’s a dark side to the delegation mindset that covocational pastors need to know.
As you delegate, your church will grow, and so will your need to focus on more things or better things. The more you delegate, the more will grab your attention. And at some point, there are just some things you’ll never be able to delegate: your preaching load, your responsibility to cast vision, your personal discipleship of others, to name a few.
Beware of the “light at the end of the tunnel” thinking that will press you to overextend yourself with the notion that help is on its way in the form of a new staff hire or an additional elder. Learn to train yourself in the discipline of prioritization as if the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t what you’d hoped.
6. I want to earn the appreciation of my church.
And this has been the biggest lesson, and the hardest one, of them all.
When I set out on this journey, I think I had some sort of notion in the back of my head that people would deeply appreciate my commitment to covocational ministry. Surely people would see this kind of sacrifice for what it was and perhaps be prone to give me and my family extra grace or deference. But I’ve actually found it to be the opposite.
I’ve had staunch critics who’ve been absolutely supportive of everything the church does but have voted against the budget year after year because they believed I was side-stepping the biblical norm of paid pastoral ministry. The thinking was, if he really was called to ministry, he’d leap into a full-time role at the church.
I’ve also found that some of the people who know the deep sacrifices I make week after week have been some of my hardest critics over the years. Instead of gaining their honor and appreciation, it even becomes the thing that’s weaponized against me when they leave: “he wasn’t enough.”
The longer you go in covocational ministry, the more you begin to see why it was that the Apostle Paul wasn’t being attacked in spite of his bi-vocational efforts, but precisely because of his bi-vocational ministry in particular locales. Covocational ministry isn’t a silver bullet for an easy pastorate. It’s actually a recipe for a unique form of conflict.
If you’re going to last in covocational ministry, you must have a profound appreciation for the God who looks at you through Jesus Christ and says, “he is enough.” Perfect. Holy. Complete. Not because of what we do but because of what Jesus has done. If you’re looking for the appreciation of your church for your immense sacrifice, stop. You’ll never find it. Instead, bask in the appreciation of the one who delights over you day in and day out, paycheck or not.
