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In this episode of the Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, discusses models of bivocational and covocational ministry, challenging traditional views and highlighting their benefits. He shares personal experiences, such as his time at the Northwest Baptist Convention, where he expanded his staff significantly by integrating bivocational and covocational workers. He describes different models, including part-time ministry combined with secular jobs, retirees in ministry roles, and self-salaried staff. He emphasizes the importance of valuing and strategically utilizing these workers, noting their potential for significant contributions with minimal financial outlay. Iorg also discusses managing life balance for these workers and ensuring their ministry roles are impactful and sustainable.
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Ready to hone your leadership skills and unlock your full potential? Tune in to the Lead On Podcast, where Jeff Iorg dives deep into Biblical leadership.
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Welcome to the Lead On podcast. This is Jeff Ords, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, carrying on our continuing conversation about practical issues related to ministry leadership. On this podcast, we talk about the ins and outs, the ups and downs, the daily life of a ministry leader. We talk about ideas about how to do ministry more effectively and about possibilities of how we can expand God's kingdom around the world. Today, I wanna talk about models of bivocational ministry.
Jeff Iorg:And before you say, well, that really doesn't fit where we are because everyone in our church is a full time salaried position and all of that, don't turn me off too quick. I wanna talk to you today about a new perspective on bivocational or covocational ministry, which may expand your horizons and get you to think some new in some new ways about what it might look like to really deploy more people in what might be called bivocation or convocational roles, but maybe in ways that you've never really defined before. For example, what I mean is, when you say by vocational pastor or by vocational minister, most people immediately think of a small church in a rural area that simply cannot afford a full time pastor. And so because they can't afford a full time pastor, they're sort of second rate or they're sort of, second class or they're they're just, you know, sort of sad, but they have to have a bivocational pastor. I wanna shatter all those myths today on the podcast.
Jeff Iorg:I want you to think in a fresh way about what this really means to have a bivocational or a covocational perspective on ministry. Now, what motivated me about this is the same thing that still motivates many of us in trying to find ways to get more people involved in leadership and expand our ministries when we have very limited financial resources. I was faced with this when I became executive director of the Northwest Baptist Convention. I arrived at the convention. We had, a good staff, competent people, and we were spending as much money as we possibly could to afford them.
Jeff Iorg:We were not growing rapidly in our financial base. It was growing some every year, but it wasn't growing rapidly. So I concluded very quickly that if I were going to depend on hiring more and more full time people, that I was never going to have the staff that we needed to continue to grow and expand the ministry across the northwest. So I went to work creating a way to include multiple staff people on our team in bivocational and convocational roles. Meaning, that they worked, in some cases, full time for us, but did not receive compensation, or in other cases, part time for us and received some minimal compensation, and in a couple of cases, worked part time for us at compensation at a half time rate.
Jeff Iorg:But that entire process resulted in about 10 people being added to our staff, which took our staff from 25 to about 35 people over the time of my leadership. How did we add 10 people, many of them full time, some of them part time, without having the commiserate or the, equal increase in the compensation cost to the convention. Well, that's what I wanna talk about today is how you think about by vocational and covocational ministry in different ways, not just thinking about it in terms of a rural pastor and an out of the way place with some kind of a of a second class perspective that you may have. I wanna shatter that myth completely and you do think about this entire process in another way. So let's talk about, first of all, some models of this kind of bivocational or covocational ministry.
Jeff Iorg:Well, the first 1 is, again, the most obvious 1, and that is where you have a person who works a part time job and has a part time ministry assignment for which they're not compensated. Or if they are compensated, they're only compensated a small amount, a stipend amount if you will. So this is the part time part time model of bivocational or co vocational ministry. Now, there's another way to approach this and this is a person who has a full time secular job which gives them some flexibility. For example, they may have a full time job that doesn't require them to work a certain amount of set hours which then frees them up to devote time to ministry leadership, which gives them a full time, secular occupation, which provides all their livelihood and this sort of limited time ministry involvement which they're for which they're not compensated.
Jeff Iorg:Another kind or a model of bivocational or co vocational ministry is a retirement person who also continues to work in some part time ministry capacity. Now this can be person who's retired and provides all of their own resources to, support themselves and just does the ministry on a part time basis without compensation, or it can be a retired person who takes on some kind of ministry role in a part time capacity, with some limited compensation. And then there's the person who works full time in ministry, but does not receive any salary compensation for doing so. Now I actually created this, a phrase to describe these people when they worked for us at the Northwest Baptist Convention, and that is, I described them as self salaried staff. Self salaried staff.
Jeff Iorg:Meaning, that they had their own resources, they provided those to take care of themselves, and yet they work for us in several cases full time and fulfilled staff responsibilities, in some cases, even director level responsibilities without additional compensation. Now what kind of person does this and who were the people that I was able to involve? Let me just tell you a couple of stories. The first story is Bill and Martha. Bill and Martha had retired from a a successful career in construction management and wanted to devote themselves to helping churches with construction needs.
Jeff Iorg:1, through 1 means or another, I got in touch with him, got acquainted with him, developed a relationship with him, and invited them to come on the staff at the Northwest Baptist Convention with Bill being a full time consultant and Martha being his full time administrative support to help churches with construction related issues ranging, the full gamut from helping them develop building plans, helping them recruit volunteer teams, helping them find general contractors, helping them know how to raise the money. All aspects of church building programs, they were willing to consult with churches to help them get that done. They were self salaried. They had made enough income that they were able to support themselves and they were able to do this work full time. Now, this is where, I did something that, at the time, seemed unusual to, to do but really proved to be very effective.
Jeff Iorg:And that is while we did not provide Bill and Martha any salary compensation, we did pay their ministry expenses. So we paid for their travel, paid their hotels, their mileage, their meals, and this was a few $1, 000 a year. But think about what we were getting. For just a few $1, 000 a year of support for them in their travel and meals and, ministry responsibilities, we were getting 2 full time employees. 1 who was a construction specialist and 1 who was willing to be the administrative support for for her husband who were available and who worked hard every year helping churches with building projects and all that goes along with that.
Jeff Iorg:And in a church, or in a convention like the northwest where we had about 404125 churches, we always had about 10 churches somewhere, someway that we're building something. And so over the years that Bill and Martha worked for us in this capacity, and it was several years that they did this, they helped dozens of churches at no charge to the church for the service provided by the convention with very little financial outlay, only us paying their immediate, expenses. They were able to contribute to this our work in this way. Then there was another couple, Don and Theda. Don was a retired, air force colonel, and he came to us with all of the administrative and logistical skill that you would expect someone at that rank in the military.
Jeff Iorg:He had retired, so he had the financial means to support himself and to promote and to provide for their ministries. And I wanted someone to work with the convention of churches, helping them to develop, strategies for bringing in volunteers to help them with their ministries. Now many churches in the west host mission teams, youth teams, vacation bible school teams, church planning teams who are hosting all the time teams from outside that come in to provide help, assistance, support. That's a great thing. The problem is a lot of the churches did not know how to prepare to really adequately use a team that was coming in, and sometimes, the teams didn't really know, how to come in and make a really effective contribution.
Jeff Iorg:So we needed training. We needed someone who was at the cross point where the teams and the churches intersected who can make sure that we had a steady stream of volunteers coming, a steady stream of volunteers that were coming that were trained, and then churches that were trained and equipped to know how to use these volunteers most effectively when they receive them. I'm talking about several 100 volunteers coming every year to work in the various churches, and putting Don and Theda in charge of that was a wonderful experience of them as volunteers. Again, us paying only their travel expenses. They were living independently, providing for themselves, and yet working full time for us, making this volunteer, work happen across the Northwest Baptist Convention.
Jeff Iorg:These these 2 are the examples of self salaried people that paid their own way. They had either earned income or retirement income that made it possible for them to do this very effective ministry for us. Now I won't go through all 10 people that I was using like this. This is just 2 couples to give you some idea of what I'm trying to communicate. I had part time people.
Jeff Iorg:I had the limited time, full time people. I had the retirement and part time people. I had the part time, part time people. I had all these models I'm talking about with you, all working simultaneously on our staff and getting a tremendous amount of impact for a minimal financial outlay. Now let me underscore that there was some financial outlay.
Jeff Iorg:If you're thinking, oh, this sounds great. I'm just gonna go and get somebody to take on this role, and they're gonna give me 20 hours a week, and they're gonna pay their own way, and I'm not gonna have to think about it anymore. That is not realistic. It does require some investment in this kind of bivocational, covocational model to build your ministry team by putting some money forward for them to have gas money, meal money, hotel money, whatever is gonna take to make sure that they can do their ministry and do it well without the out of pocket expense and the, and the drain of that on their personal finances. They're willing to promote to pay for their own groceries and their own groceries and their own rent and their own travel in terms of their own family activities and things like that.
Jeff Iorg:No 1 ever groused to me or complained to me about paying for those things. But why would I have expected them to pay their own way also to do the ministry that was being provided? And you just think about these 2 examples I've given you. Here's 2 couples working full time. If you added their their salaries together, if I were having to pay them, easily, those salaries would as couples would have been, you know, up over a 100, 000 when you add the 2 salaries together.
Jeff Iorg:You add the 4 salaries together. Now we're up to 200, 250, 000 adding them all together. And then you have to put in their benefits and all the stuff that goes with that. I wasn't paying any of that. But I was setting aside maybe 8 to $10, 000 a year for each 1 of these to use in their ministries, for their travel, for their funding of meals, for their hotels, for these kinds of things.
Jeff Iorg:Think about that. For 8 to $10, 000 a year for each couple, I'm getting an incredible return on investment because they're paying their own way as self salaried staff making a difference for us. I want you to start thinking about these models, part time, part time, full time limited time, retirement part time, self salaried, full or part time. Think about all these different capacities of how you could use vivocational and covocational ministry leaders in your context where you are. Shift away from thinking about bivocational as a part time church that can't afford a pastor in a rural area and they have to settle for part for a bivocational.
Jeff Iorg:Just just blow that myth up. Alright? That is not that is not the only model. It's not even the best model or the healthiest model. It's not even the real model that's out there in most cases, but just forget about that for a second and think about other options of what you could do and how much you could gain by finding a way to create this kind of strategic plan for building the staff team that you need to accomplish the work you've been assigned.
Jeff Iorg:Now I've seen this done with several applications in churches. For example, I recently visited a church, and a person walked up to me and said, my name is so and so, and I wanna welcome you to our church today. Is this your first time to be here? That's a relatively large church, but I still wondered how did she know that I'm the that this is my first time to ever be here. And she said, I came back to greet you and welcome you.
Jeff Iorg:Is this your first time to be here? And I thought, well, yeah, I wonder how she knows that. And I said, yes, it is actually my first time. And she smiled and said, well, I'm, the director of our senior adult ministries, and I didn't think I'd ever met you before. Now I realized, she knew the senior adults of her own church and she had picked me out, and this was a large enough church that they had a lot of senior adults, and I later learned that she was co vocational.
Jeff Iorg:She worked part time for the church in this director of senior adults role and provided the rest of her support and the rest of her life by the means that she had separately from other income. She was bivocational, but just not in the traditional sense you're thinking of. You think, well, that's just part that's just having part time staff. No. It's more than that.
Jeff Iorg:It's seeing a person as having a vocation of calling and of commitment and of leadership and recognizing that and then placing them in a role where they're able to do it because they're providing the bulk of the financial support, but you're stepping in with some to make it happen. I've seen other models of this in local church ministry, for example. This is an unusual 1, but I actually know of a church that has multiple pastors that are bivocational. Now think about that. See, most of you are thinking that when a church has a bivocational pastor and it starts to grow or develop or get get a little larger and a little stronger financially, the first step would be to make the bivocational pastor into full time.
Jeff Iorg:That's not true. In this particular case, the pastor who was bivocational and who saw the church growing and flourishing around his leadership when it came time to add some additional help said, I don't wanna be full time. I I want to be co vocational. I want you to hire other by our ministers, put them into, into leadership with me and we'll share the burden and the load, but none of us will be full time, and they did that. Now what made this situation so unique was that the pastor had come to ministry later in life.
Jeff Iorg:He was now get this. He was a professor of veterinary medicine at a large state university. His specialty was arthroscopic surgery on, animals, small animals, particularly. And so when he felt God's call to ministry leadership, he first thought I have to step out of being a professor and step out of being a surgeon in order to devote myself to pastoral ministry. But when he started down that path, he realized that was not really a path that he felt, was going to fulfill him or that was gonna make the maximum use of the gifts that he had.
Jeff Iorg:So he came upon this idea. I will resign for my teaching responsibilities at the university and set myself up as a contract surgeon for the veterinarians in this area, many of which he, of course, had trained. And so he did this. He established a surgical practice that was only done there was only, he did only surgery on small animals by referral. And so this relieve some of the pressure on the veterinarians in the area who who really, you know, had other specialties or other interests or didn't, you know, have the time necessarily to do all the surgery that was needed to be done.
Jeff Iorg:And by them pooling together, they were able to support this 1 person who had surgery as his specialty. And it wasn't a full time responsibility either since he had didn't have to keep office hours, didn't have to interface really, with people who were coming in with sick animals, that kind of thing. He just did surgery. And so he developed this and never wanted to give it up and frankly, never did. And this is not an insignificant, ministry.
Jeff Iorg:This was a ministry that was growing. In fact, this pastor, was on boards for conventions. He was elected officers of conventions and of other responsibilities. This was a substantial leader with a substantial pastoral leadership in ministry who never became a full time pastor. In the sense that he drew all of his livelihood from pastoral ministry or devoted all of his time to pastoral ministry.
Jeff Iorg:He remained a contract surgeon who did pastoral ministry and then as his church grew, they hired other bivocational and covocational pastors to come alongside who also had similar work styles where they were in the community or in other professions, but also devoting significant time to ministry leadership. This is what I'm trying to get you to think about today. New models of what it looks like to have by vocational and co vocational ministry leaders so that you're bringing people onto your team who are intentionally going to be self salaried or who are going to have outside support or going to provide their own means or livelihood, or they're gonna provide most of it and you're gonna provide a little piece of it. But nevertheless, you're going to strategically build out your team, not waiting until you can hire more full time people and not seeing part time people as something you have to settle for or something that's just transitional until you can get enough money to get the right person. But, no, you're gonna begin to highly value these people who can come in these vivocational and convocational roles and even see them as long term solutions to what you're trying to build as you build out a ministry team.
Jeff Iorg:Now when you do this, there are some special challenges you have to address. And for the balance of the podcast, I wanna talk about some of these today. The first special challenge of all of these people involved in bivocational and covocational ministry are life balance issues primarily around family dynamics. It is very important that you have realistic expectations of people that you ask to take on these roles so that they can have life balance and particularly invest themselves appropriately in their families. Now I gave you 2 examples earlier of the, Bill and Martha and Don and Theda and how they worked, as I said, full time in their roles.
Jeff Iorg:Now a caveat to that. While they worked full time, I also gave them off every year from the middle of November until early January, at least 6, 7 weeks. And I would tell them during that time frame, I want you to step away and go be with your family. Go for Thanksgiving. Go for Christmas.
Jeff Iorg:Focus your entire attention during this holiday season and the extended vacation time around it on your family and on restoring some life balance to your work. And then I would encourage them to do the same thing either in the spring or the summer to take 2 to 3 weeks away around spring break or around summer vacation and to reinvest themselves in their families so that they made sure that they were having continuing contact with their children and grandchildren and investing themselves in them. So while I say they were full time, believe me, they were, we also gave them extended time away at key points during the year so they could really invest in finding that life balance that I'm talking about. Now this takes different forms with different people in different situations, but just recognize that you're asking a person to take on 1 of these roles and they're going to be juggling not only, their own lives and their own ministry challenges, but also family dynamics. And so work hard at helping them to have life balance.
Jeff Iorg:Second thing, recognize that 1 of the values that bivocational and covocational ministry workers bring is the importance of prioritizing what really matters in ministry. Do not clutter up the schedules of these dear people with unnecessary work or with meetings that don't matter. Help them stay focused narrowly on the task that they've been assigned to make sure that they are focused on that and getting that done so that they are not cluttered up with so many other distractions or things that just really aren't that important or helpful. Prioritize what really matters in ministry and what you really ask them to do and ruthlessly eliminate time wasters so that they can really focus on what you really need to have done from them to make your team really successful. Another thing is make sure that you're giving them a manageable ministry assignment.
Jeff Iorg:Now, some people like Don and PETA, and Don was a retired colonel, he had a lot of capacity. So to ask him to coordinate a convention wide program with 100 of volunteers, no problem. This man had been managing logistics all his career. He thrived on it, found it, fulfilling, and his work was helpful. He was able to do a significant amount of work because that's what he was made to do.
Jeff Iorg:So be sure that when you pair people up that you give them a manageable size ministry with a manageable set of expectations. But don't be don't be afraid to give them a lot. Okay? When you have high capacity people, they wanna be challenged to take on a lot of responsibility. I actually saw this in my family with my cousin, named Ron.
Jeff Iorg:Ron was a a remarkable guy. He he came back from serving in Vietnam and, went to college and got an engineering degree and, worked in engineering field for a couple of years and then realized, you know, I wanna do something else with this. Went back to school and got a law degree. So now he has a law degree and an engineering degree. And so quickly, he got employed as a general counsel for a pretty substantial construction company, which was a great match of his construction and legal backgrounds together.
Jeff Iorg:And he had a thriving lucrative career that lasted for about 25 years. He got to age about age 60 and, was in a position to to take early retirement and so he did. And, he started volunteering as at his church's community services center. Now the church was larger and it had a pretty substantial community services center. They provided food, clothing, social services, other things from this church, from this community center.
Jeff Iorg:Well, it wasn't very long after he started volunteering there that it popped up in his Christmas letter 1 year that he was now the director of this program. So I checked with him and I found out director meant he was working 4 days a week full time, again, paying his own way, self salaried staff, working only for some expense money that they provided to keep him going, and he had taken on the whole responsibility and was running this substantial ministry program reaching out into the community with food, clothing, social services, counseling, other kinds of things. I went there, it was like a huge warehouse type environment that they had. They were getting in shipments every day of food and other kinds of products that were coming from businesses across their city. He worked his networks to develop it even more significantly.
Jeff Iorg:It was quite an operation, and I marveled that he was a man who was doing this, again, convocationally, self salaried. He was paying his own way with some small expense money to help him along the way, and he was leading a ministry that involved 100 of 1, 000 of dollars of product going through every year to 100 and 100 of families. It was amazing to watch. So when I say keep it to a manageable size ministry, what I mean is not keep it small, but keep it in proportion to the capacity of the person that you've asked to work with you. Don't be afraid to give big assignments to big capacity people who can accomplish big things to get done what needs to be done in the kingdom of god.
Jeff Iorg:And then, as I've said repeatedly through the process, don't be afraid to invest some resources in these bivocational and covocational team members. It's perfectly acceptable to provide them with, expense accounts, to pay for gas, to pay for food, pay for hotels, to pay for ministry expenses that are incurred along the way. And you may think, well, I don't know. That's 6, 8, $10, 000 a year. I just don't know.
Jeff Iorg:Well, think about what you're getting for that. If you're getting 1 or 2 or 5 full time employees for 5 or 6 or 10 or 20 or 5th or or $1, 000 a year, think how valuable that impact is with that little bit of investment that you're making. And you may say, well, I've never really thought about putting money into people like this. I just thought you only paid, compensation for or you paid, ministry expense for people that you were compensating. There's no law about that.
Jeff Iorg:No rule about that. If it's a legitimate expense that a person is incurring to do the work, there's not any reason why the organization can't pay for that to be done. Now having said that, this might also surprise you, but when I've used these kind of volunteers, especially the full time ones, I've included them in team meetings. I've made them feel like staff in every way including giving them an annual review so that they knew what they were doing and how much it was we valued it and what they could do to do it better the following year, and included them in things like Christmas parties and other celebrations because they were part of the team. Well, today, on the lead on podcast, we've been talking about new models of bivocational and covocational ministry.
Jeff Iorg:If I say the word bivocational and all you think of is a part time pastor in a rural setting that can't afford a full time pastor and only will be legitimated when they do get a full time pastor, I wanna blow that myth up. That is not a good model of bivocational ministry. It's not the most common model of bivocational ministry and it certainly isn't the 1 that we should be limiting ourselves to thinking about. Instead, I want you to think about bivocational and covocational ministry leaders who can come on your team and be in that capacity for 2, 3, 5, 10 years if need be, who can serve with you in these kind of roles and be a valuable long term asset to your team and be the means by which you're gonna grow your team when finances are limited and you simply can't keep hiring more people, but you can create venues and opportunities for people to serve in all these different ways I'm describing with very limited financial, contribution or support on your part. Look, almost every 1 of us in ministry leadership, almost every 1 of us has more need than we have financial resources.
Jeff Iorg:Has more opportunity than we have full time people to staff up and meet. All of us have to think in terms of these kinds of bivocational and co vocational people to get the work done. You may say, yeah, but what the executive committee where you are now? I'll bet you've got all the money you need. Are you kidding me?
Jeff Iorg:We do not. I was pleased when I arrived at the executive committee to find out that we had a number of people who worked for us, particularly during the convention itself every summer, who came in, did their job, paid their own way, received a small stipend or expense, support to help them with the process and help make the whole event possible. That made my heart sing because now I can fine tune that, shape it, and make it even better, but it's already in place and I'm grateful that someone before me had the vision for bivocational and co vocational staff that make this kind of difference. Think about these models, think about how you can do them differently going forward, think about some of the ideas I've suggested as you think about new ways to staff for your future. Put it into practice today, as you lead on.