Long ago, friends from the neighborhood dropped by to chat with my wife while I was off in the pastor’s study hammering away at some Sunday stuff.  

Learning the ropes of ministry was plenty of work in those early days.  Sunday was always coming.  But I wasn’t always confident that my pastoral work counted as a job.  I got to study, pray, write, preach, teach, and walk with people in their faith journeys.  On my better days, I counted my blessings.  But sometimes, in the midst of the strange time signature of pastoral ministry, I wondered if I ought to be filling my time with something else, something more, something out in the community that would allow me to connect with people hammering away for their daily bread.  Sometimes, I wondered if I should get a job.

Here I am twenty years on, with my Bible still before me and my books around me, my schedule held by prayer, awash with minutes, somehow both intense and luxurious.  In these last months, I’ve been learning about the promise and limitations of rural pastors who pay their bills with a second job, as well as the importance of grounding our vocation by living the Apostle Paul’s command to “work with your hands” (1 Thessalonians 4:11).

Plenty of leaders choose a dual career approach to rural ministry simply to pay the bills.  Writes small church guru Karl Vaters: “35 percent of pastors are bivocational, while 18 percent serve more than one congregation. And that number is getting bigger.”  Some rural congregations are small, and a second job helps pastors live their call. In the recent Lifeway survey of 1,003 rural Protestant pastors, 26% note that they rely on work outside of ministry to support their families.  They substitute teach or feed hogs or write commercial real estate contracts.  Their kids can go to college, and their congregations can stay in the black and have some overage for missions.  Necessity is the mother of bivocation.

Yet for many rural pastors, bivocational ministry is less about paying the bills and more a response of conviction.  

Rural pastors who work a second job can engage the community for the kingdom.  I’ve talked to pastors who have decided to take on a regular job because it allows them to get out of their offices, into the community, and connect with folks they might not normally rub elbows with.  Sometimes, this approach is termed “covocational ministry”–the other work isn’t just instrumental, but built into the calling.  Lyandon Warren, a Baptist church planter in rural Vermont, describes himself as someone who’s always been willing to “do whatever it takes” to make ministry possible.  Before coming to Vermont, Warren was a tool and die maker in North Carolina.  In seminary, he woke up before dawn to milk cows and then head to class.  As a church planter, he worked in a variety of roles before getting into the drywall business.  He talks about how drywalling allows him to “live with intentionality.”  Says Warren, “I’m going out every day expecting God to put people in my path that I need to minister to, whether to pray with them and share the gospel with them…or counsel them in some way.”  His hands are just as gypsum dust caked as the next guy’s, and that buys Warren a level of credibility and access he wouldn’t otherwise have.

Other pastors and leaders I’ve met describe how plugging into the school system through coaching or teaching, or serving their community as a first responder chaplain, EMT, or volunteer firefighter, has opened doors for them to meet people where they’re at and get outside the walls of their church.  In my experience, finding some way—any way—to roll up our sleeves and get to work is vitally important in rural communities.  Rural people value authenticity.  So practice what you preach.  It’s one thing to preach that you care about people and place.  It’s another matter entirely to start a nonprofit that channels USDA funds to fix up old houses to keep people warm and dry—like Paden Behrens, a pastor in small town Brady, Texas, did.

And yet, Behrens warns against getting spread too thin and failing to do the work God has called us to.  Even with his strongly entrepreneurial spirit, his history of launching new businesses and nonprofits, Behrens thinks that in many circumstances, bivocational ministry is “a recipe for a small church and an overworked [pastor.]”  The work of the church is more than enough for most pastors and leaders.  Says Behrens, “There’s ministry for days.”

At the same time, working with our hands grounds our vocation.  In the Apostle Paul’s earliest letter, he teaches the church to “work with your hands” (1 Thessalonians 4:11).  Paul lived it as a peripatetic tentmaker, preaching on the sabbath and sewing goat hide throughout the week.  But Paul was pointing to more than the necessity of work.  In the context of the little rule of life he teaches in this passage, working with your hands becomes a way of interacting with the world that affirms the basic goodness of creation.  In our time, an age in which others—and too often we ourselves—can plunk ministry into the basket of “knowledge work,” we need what philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Matthew Crawford terms “a new sort of anthropology.”  Writes Crawford: “the practice of building things, fixing things, and routinely tending to things…[is] an element of human flourishing” (Shopcraft As Soulcraft, p.63).  The vocation of ministry is internal: a life “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).  But we don’t want to get stuck inside our heads.  There’s a kind of grounding that comes when we build or fix or tend things—actual things—even if it’s just the washing machine in our basement.  “Manual competence,” writes Crawford, tends to make a person “quiet and easy” (p.15).  Our vocations benefit from that reserve of quiet ease.

There’s work enough for all of us in the rural church—pastors, leaders, God’s people together.  We have one job.  Whatever we do, as Paul writes elsewhere, let us do it “in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Colossians 3:17).

This post original appeared on the Town Square Collaborative Substack.

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