There may be no more under-appreciated person in the Kingdom that the bi-vocational pastor. Many of them are the only staff member of a small church. They work a job during the week and are still expected to perform most, if not all, of the ministry functions of a full-time pastor.
Through the years I have known bi-vocational pastors who had to take time off work to do funerals, did periodic weddings, and still had to preach two or three sermons a week. They did counseling, attended deacons meetings, and met with the personnel committee, finance committee or any number of other groups.
The week of a church planter was recently summarized like this:
Long days have become the standard for Nathan Vedoya. As a bi-vocational church planter, there’s no such thing as typical, but this may be as close as it gets. He wakes up early, shares the breakfast-making responsibilities with his wife and drops the kids off at school before heading to his full-time job as the shelter manager for Hope Mission in Edmonton, Alberta. His wife, Deen-Deen, also heads out to a full day of work at around the same time.
Vedoya spends every weekday—between 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.—working at Hope Mission. Then, as the family reconvenes at 5 p.m. for dinner, he spends much-needed time discipling and enjoying his family.
But on nights and weekends Vedoya’s focus shifts to planting a church in one of the toughest-to-reach cities in North America. Despite the busyness, this often-hectic lifestyle is not something the father of three regrets.
“I’m working 50 hours a week and planting a church. My wife is working, too,” said Vedoya
It may not be possible to save time at every point of the week, but here are a few time savers that might help with preparing sermons while also holding down a full-time job. I am currently a bi-vocational, part-time teaching pastor. As such I rarely feel the strain of a pastor who is shouldering the entire load. Obviously these suggestions are not intended to supplant spiritual preparation like prayer, but as these ideas help me on a practical level, I hope they will help others.
