Bi-Vocational Ministry Is Not About Cost Savings

It’s about shared responsibility and the priesthood of all believers.

As I dialogue with people about the priesthood of all believers and bi-vocational ministry, I often hear the perspective that the bi-vocational church leadership model is just a more cost-efficient version of a traditional ministry model.

In essence, when many people hear the term “bi-vocational leadership”, what they really hear is: “We expect the pastor to do the same thing they were doing before, but now for free.”

From a budgetary standpoint, this sounds like a bargain: same (or better) results for less money! A church board might jump at the opportunity, while the pastor quietly jumps on LinkedIn to search for a new position.

And so, the entire project and vision stalls out. But the issue stems from a foundational misunderstanding of what bi-vocational ministry actually is and why we might embrace it.

Bi-vocational ministry is not about a leader piecing their financial life together so they can survive while carrying the burdens of a community. We need to expand our missional imagination to picture something better and more biblical.

Rather than an incremental change to the financial model of the church, bi-vocational ministry is about a culture change that moves from a pastor-led approach to an approach rooted in the church being a family and the priesthood of all believers.

This isn’t just about changing one or two paid roles in a church. It’s about reimagining church relationships from the ground up.

Covenant Family, Not Contractual Bonds

The church is designed to be a family of covenant relationships is the starting point to understanding and building a bi-vocational church leadership culture.

Often, the starting point for thinking about bi-vocational leadership is how to shift currently paid positions to unpaid positions. But when bi-vocational leadership flows from a commitment to covenant family among a body of believers, the economic benefits take second place to the skills and gifts the believers have to contribute.

A bi-vocational church must begin with the biblical call to be a covenant family. Our relationships in the church must be rooted in deep love for one another and long-term commitment for a bi-vocational model to take root and grow healthily.

I was once asked by a denominational leader if I would consider applying to roles at other churches. But, how could a spiritual parent abandon their spiritual children for another “job”?

Too often, we cloak this contractual shuffling in the church with the spiritual language of “God’s leading.” Years ago, to my shame, I used this strategy to import leaders instead of raising my own sons and daughters. It didn’t work, and I have the scars to prove it.

The church is not a corporation offering employment. If a relationship is rooted in a contract, it will never be as strong as a covenant. They say blood is thicker than water, and it is. How much stronger, then, is the blood of covenant family in Christ than the ink of a contract?

Side Note: On this note, I believe that if a church leader is not willing to serve their church without pay, they should not be allowed to serve their church for pay. This is a non-negotiable from a heart standpoint. I don’t mean this as some kind of legalistic principle that churches can’t have any paid staff (we do have a staff team at LIFT Church!).

---

A Plurality of Leaders Under an Apostolic Head

Bi-vocational leadership means returning to a more apostolic and evangelistic model of leadership, where church leaders are focused on raising up and sending out others, not just stewarding an existing flock.

In a Christendom context, like the West was historically, it made some (limited) sense that the key leader of a church would function as a pastor to a flock. If the wider culture is oriented toward the church, then church leadership becomes about providing spaces for the people of that culture to gather.

However, we are not just post-Christian but, in many ways, post-post-Christian. We live in a strange space where the edifice of cultural Christianity is still present, but it's like an alternate reality or a forgotten past. We are, and have been for several decades, a pagan society.

This isn’t so different from first-century Christianity. We, as Christians, live as alien-citizens in our own land, and our church structures need to reflect that reality. This means rediscovering and redeploying the biblical pattern of leadership laid out in Ephesians, where apostles, prophets, evangelists, teachers, AND pastors work together to equip the saints for the work of ministry.

Effective bi-vocational leadership must exist within an apostolic context that values raising and sending leaders from the entire body. The bi-vocational leader is just one of many leaders in the church. As in the New Testament churches, the church is healthiest when there is a single key leader (or couple) who holds responsibility, but the burden of leadership is shared across the body. In this model, the role of church leadership is not to carry the burdens of running the church, but to raise up and equip the entire body to live out the mission of the church to raise and send disciples.. That’s my role in our church, even as a bi-vocational leader.

Many churches still operate with a “pastor carries the church” mentality. This is crazy. No one person, or even a small team, can bear the weight of an entire church. It’s no surprise that pastoral burnout is so common. It’s simply not God’s design for His body to be carried by one person.

---

Shared Responsibility and the Priesthood of All Believers

The combination of a shift away from the pastor-does-all model toward the priesthood of all believers and from contractual to covenantal church relationships are two essential ingredients in reframing our understanding of church leadership.

Integrating these two ideas is not easy. There are many prevailing models and justifications for why our models are the way they are that cause people to question this method and even be offended by it. But I believe that if we can ask ourselves what it would take to recreate it in our context, we would see the bi-vocational model as a viable, God-honoring way to reimagine the church in our post-post-Christian context.

Check out these amazing global movements of bi-vocational ministers or small-scale DMM for inspiration and examples: Acts 2 Network, Novo, Church Project, E3, Tampa Underground - there are many others in all shapes and sizes!

Shout out to my wife, Laura, who is my co-labourer in all things church, for her extra help editing this post to make it more winsome and coherent… she’s the magic behind the scenes that helps make it all happen!

Please subscribe, re-stack, share, or repost; we’ve got some important things to share with the Body, and your help getting the word out means the world.