One of the toughest decisions I have had to make in the last year for the leave vocational ministry and become a church volunteer!
Now notice I didn’t say leave full-time ministry, or leave the pastorate, just vocational ministry.
Getting paid to be a pastor is a perk, but it can also be the death of an authentic calling. One thing I noticed during my years of getting paid to be a pastor was that 80% of your job is doing something that you are not passionate about. You may say, well that’s ministry! I would say your wrong! That’s not ministry, that’s mans version of vocational ministry.
Since leaving the ranks of the paid I have realized that passion can so often be suffocated by ‘housekeeping items’. Hundreds of young pastors are leaving their calling every year because vocational ministry stuffed the life and passion out of them. Their calling was to be a preacher, yet they spent 95% of their week being a pastoral care counselor. Their calling may have been to evangelize but the constrains of administration zapped all their energy to tell others about God. Their calling may have been to pastor and shepherd those who are hurting, yet the planning of multiple events filled their schedule and their stress level that they no longer had time or patience with others.
Now I’m not saying it is wrong to be paid to be a pastor. I was and I think you have to be a very organized person to be bi-vocational. However, I do think that getting paid has caused us (the church) to think that pastors are the ones who do the everyday work and everyone else just volunteers on a Sunday. I wonder when this started to happen?
When I read the book of Acts I see a body of believers all working in their gifts, talents and callings. I mean Peter was called to lead and preach, he wasn’t organizing meals for the widows. John was called to be to public face of the church, he was found behind a desk crunching numbers. Stephen was called to coordinate meals, he wasn’t found sitting in vision casting meetings!
I wonder where the philosophy came that if you are paid staff then you are a counsellor, a teacher, a preacher, a pastor, an administrator, an event planner, a visionary, a CEO, a babysitter, a bookkeeper, a worship leader, an intercessor, a judge, a prophet, a janitor, and so on and so on.
I wonder what would happen if for a week there were no such thing as vocational ministers? I wonder what would happen if the church could no longer rely on the guy (or girl) who got paid to get the work of the church done. I bet either the church would fall flat on it’s back, or would rise up and work as a unique body with all the parts in motion.
I’m enjoying not getting paid, if only for one reason, I’m just one of the volunteers doing my unique part, everyone else on our team knows that they have to work just as hard as I am and it is creating a body that is starting to function just as the early church did, with all the individual parts working together to make an incredible whole!
Just because your Pastor gets paid doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be working any less hard than they do each week to make your church become all that Christ designed it to become!
