Boldly Bi-Vocational
Navigating Dual Callings in the Ministry and the Marketplace
By James M. Powell
Christian Focus, 152 pages, $12.99
Today’s priests and their congregants might welcome some freshly expansive models for thinking about clerical vocations. That’s because most Episcopal priests don’t have a traditional full-time cure, according to Church Pension Group data, and most Episcopal congregations don’t have a full-time position to offer. Roles that were assumed in seminary-based career planning often aren’t part of today’s lived experience.
What type of calling is it when a cleric has a second job? What does fidelity to such a calling require? What type of mindset and self-understanding gets a person through the tensions and rough patches that come with bi-vocational life?
These are questions James M. Powell answers from a distinctly Reformed evangelical perspective in Boldly Bi-Vocational. His thesis holds that the bi-vocational leader has only one calling, but it’s done on dual perches, one among the flock and another in the world. Together they afford rich opportunities to be both a shepherd and an ambassador for Christ.
A pastor in the Presbyterian Church in America, Powell writes as one who has lived the joys and strains of bi-vocationalism in Johnson City, Tennessee. After burning out in a full-time role as church-planting pastor, he took an executive director role at a Christian nonprofit agency that builds homes for people in need. That job comes with salary plus performance bonuses when his grant-writing generates extra revenue for his employer. It helps feed his family of eight, which had been difficult to do sometimes when all his pay came from the church.
Perhaps most importantly, in his view, the nonprofit job gives him freedom to lead a congregation without asking for any compensation. That’s what he sees the Apostle Paul doing in 1 Corinthians 9:14-15. And for Powell, every plank in a ministry life needs explicit scriptural sanction.
Powell’s book adds a plank of its own to the genre of “Business as Mission” literature, a category popularized by the Lausanne Movement, which seeks to bring the gospel to every country, sector, and person on the globe. He writes of being inspired by Western Christians who relocated to Asia and used their platforms as business owners to build trust and spread the gospel. Such techniques aren’t just for foreign missionaries; they can also grow God’s kingdom in the United States, Powell argues.
Powell gives pastors ways of understanding their lives as coherent and faithful wholes, even when they might sometimes feel pulled in disjointed or conflicting directions.
He highlights how ministry can be done in non-church workspaces, whether it’s by encouraging a coworker, discipling a mentee, or modeling a Christian way of owning a mistake. He wants bi-vocational pastors to believe they’re full-time pastors, which is how he describes himself, even though their churches don’t pay full-time support.
What matters is that they’re pastoring every day, no matter what merchandise or service they’re being paid to deliver. They can think of their congregations as “releasing” them for remunerative work that involves sharing Christ in the community. Such mindsets, Powell hopes, can keep bi-vocational pastors aware that they’re being faithful and are not, in fact, leading “divided lives.”
Some readers might stumble on Powell’s overarching vision if they don’t share his underlying assumptions. He supposes, for instance, that all pastors are men. He sees Christianity’s cultural foes lurking in diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and in critical race theory. He devotes a whole chapter to the idea of “plundering” the world’s resources for the Lord’s work.
“This is how we should view bi-vocational or tentmaking ministry whenever a minister of the gospel is positioned within a secular corporation or a civil vocation,” he writes. “It is modern-day plunder. God, who owns everything, provides for His servants through resources that, on the surface, appear to be owned by, managed by, or originating from the kingdom of this world. But they are not. They belong to the Lord.”
That’s how Powell justifies working for corporate clients who don’t share his Christian values and goals: whatever they pay is plunder. In language borrowed from Exodus 3:22, he recalls telling a board member: “We’re plundering the Egyptians, here.”
Powell’s understanding of bi-vocationalism leaves no room for a pastor to have multiple callings as, say, a vocational artist, teacher, or nurse alongside that of pastor. His pastor-above-all-else concept might equip some bi-vocationalists with a constructively unifying construct, but only if they can accept—or at least look past—his triumphalist understandings of the church and pastorate.
G. Jeffrey MacDonald is an award-winning religion reporter, United Church of Christ pastor, church consultant and author of Part-Time is Plenty: Thriving without Full-Time Clergy (WJK Press, 2020). His website is gjeffreymacdonald.com.
