On Being a Bi-Vocational Pastor

I don’t preach verse by verse; I do passage by passage. That is, I don’t necessarily dwell on every single verse; I try to communicate the message of the passage. What is the hinge of Mark 8:27-33, when you consider the rest of the book? Clearly, it’s Peter’s confession. Everything else is white noise [emphasis mine].

Being a bi-vocational elder who just finished preaching Hebrews 10:1-10 this past Sunday to our congregation, I appreciate the dilemma of finding time in one’s week to handle the text in a sufficient manner given everything else one must get done. However, rightly dividing the Word of Truth is our primary responsibility. It’s not “white noise” to know, understand, and communicate more than just the main point of the passage to our people. I agree that there are just some things we can’t or shouldn’t cover from the pulpit. For example, in my passage the author of Hebrews quotes from Psalm 40:6-8 and makes a significant change from the original Hebrew. Why he does that is interesting, but not worth spending the time during the sermon to address it. However, it was needful that I know, understand, and be able to communicate that to my people if need be. It gives me a better grasp of the passage and of how the author of Hebrews views and cites the OT. That helps me ultimately to become a better exegete of God’s Word.

Tyler, I know you know and advocate this, but in a bi-vocational setting having more than one bi-vocational elder can be a tremendous blessing and help to us. It allows us to share the burden of leading, shepherding, teaching, and preaching. When we share the load, it provides more time for us to focus and prepare.

On the Paul Tripp quote: I think it actually works like that for some guys. And even for me sometimes it comes close. By “close,” I mean that often passages of Scripture and/or themes for preaching/teaching reach my consciousness long before I teach them, and I revisit them multiple times before anything like a sermon comes out of it.

But when I have regularly scheduled preaching duties, this is a process that happens parallel to preparation for those regular duties. It’s a bit like side roads along the freeway. The scheduled work is usually sequential through a book of the Bible, and each event arrives in a way that demands a focused, efficient, preparation process—it’s the freeway. But while that’s going on, these other studies are continuing in bits and pieces along the side roads. Often when a regularly scheduled event comes along something on the sideroads merges onto the freeway and becomes part of the understanding/message/context in that pulpit event.

I know some guys study texts well in advance as Tripp describes, but if you’re teaching regularly, that process results in overlap… you’re studying multiple texts at the same time. For me, because my mind has only so many front-burners, that just results in muddled thinking and sometimes outright confusion. I have to have stuff on the back burners all the time, but the front burner has to be exclusive for What’s Next.

The way that played out, when I was really busy with pulpit work, was that anything I was ruminating over, digging into, that didn’t have an event attached to it, was casual, intermittent, spontaneous… and early in the week. Then, as Sunday approached, all that had to be set aside to focus exclusively on What’s Next. With separate series going on in Sunday School, AM preaching and PM preaching, it was tough to keep things separated. But I could (still can) only focus on thing at a time, so I often had to have Sunday AM out of the way before I could really focus on Sunday PM the way I wanted to. This made for grueling Sundays! But I did find ways to assemble bits of preaching and teaching material well ahead of time so that the final assembly could be done pretty quickly very close to the event... with mind uncluttered by other studies.

(It actually started to get almost easy after about 8 years)

While in seminary, I happened upon the book Text-Driven Preaching, edited by Daniel Akin, David Allen, and Ned Mathews. It wasn’t a required text for my classes, but I picked it up from the Lifeway bookstore at SBTS while I was attending a conference. There are two books that have fundamentally changed how I view a biblical topic. The first book that fundamentally changed my view of theology was Grudem’s Systematic Theology. The second book that fundamentally changed my view and approach to sermon prep was Text-Driven Preaching. The basic premise: let the text of Scripture determine the main point(s) and flow of your sermon.

I appreciate the “big idea” guys like Robinson, but reducing every text to a single point robs the text of the contours and details that the author believed was important to his audience. For example, I could boil down Hebrews 10:1-18 to “The supremacy of Christ’s sacrifice.” But, if that is the only thing I communicate about this passage, my congregation misses the argumentation, emphasis, and nuance that the author communicates to his audience.

Instead, Hebrews 10:1-10 itself breaks down nicely into three main points: the necessity of Christ’s sacrifice (vv 1-4), the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice (vv 5-7), and the purpose of Christ’s sacrifice (vv. 8-10).

Now, I grant you, we can get bogged down quickly into sub-points and sub-sub-points (especially in the epistles) if we’re not careful. But, we should at least be communicating the main points as the author makes them in the text instead of subsuming them into one big idea for the sake of homiletic cleanness.

Yes, the “big idea” is not actually reducing the sermon to a single point. What it is, is finding the thematic unity in the text. Depending what sort of text it is (epistle vs. poetry vs narrative etc), there isn’t necessarily going to be anything like what we think of as an “outline” in the text, but there will be a primary theme or primary relevance to the congregation. That becomes the big idea and the other assertions/truths in the text are developments of that idea.

One of the best ways of deciding how big of a chunk of text to preach is finding that central theme/message. The ideal is to begin and the preaching text where the focus on that theme begins and ends.

This is also a way, probably the best way, to avoid the “miscellaneous commentary” sort of sermon… where the speaker does verse by verse analysis and makes more or less valid but always disconnected assertions from each verse or two until time runs out… . . this is very hard stuff to sit through on a regular basis and the biblical writers did not write that way. That is, they didn’t sit and pen the text with random principles in mind. There is a thematic, if not necessarily “logical,” progression in the text. That should focus the sermon.

As a bi-vocational pastor, I can relate to a lot of this. I’m currently transitioning from one “secular” job to another. In the long this should help my situation. But in the mean time it means I’m working three different jobs (does that make tri-vocational?). At times trying to fulfill all my responsibilities to the church, both my employers, my wife, and my daughter can be overwhelming. Sometimes I’ve felt like I’m doing so much and yet nothing well.

But God is good. I’ve found His grace to be there when I need it. It’s humbling to see God use a sermon or devotional despite the fact that I wasn’t able to spend as much time on it as I would have liked.

Tripp’s “I preach it aloud to myself some fifteen or twenty times” definitely takes up huge chunks of time that I can see a bi-vocational pastor not having. Just a 30 min. sermon would be 7.5 hours a week at the 15 count!

However, it seems lead time is doable. So when Tripp says “when I prepare the content of a message, it is the message that I’ll be preaching in three or four weeks” is without question doable, though maybe not immediately. What I mean is, if you plan a Sunday where someone else is preaching (be it a visiting pastor/missionary, a qualified elder, a young man with a desire to preach, or some other “special” presentation), but you still prepare a sermon that week for the following week, then that following week be working on the next, you gain a week’s lead time (you just keep working at the same “pace” as before). After two or three times of that in a year, then you have your 3-4 week lead.

Yes, you will have to spend a little bit of time “reviewing” (tweaking?) the sermon you wrote a few weeks before, but overall, gaining that lead time that way would not impose much more weekly time on the preacher, and I do think that such a lead time would be helpful and realistic.

I was bivocational for about eight years or so, maybe longer; I don’t remember when I started. I wouldn’t say Tripp is disconnected from “normal” ministry. That is normal for him. Normal for others is different. Tyler has given an excellent outline of why bivocational pastors, while sometimes necessary, is not a great way to go about it. He is constantly stressed for time and running last minute so that the sheep he is supposed to be feeding get second place to the nonsheep he is investigating. That’s normal life for him. But it comes at a cost.

I think the Scripture had a lot of wisdom in saying that those who preach the gospel should live of the gospel, and that elders who do it well are worth of double honor. I don’t think we “improve” on that by being bivocational. There is good reason to be suspect of the general model of intentionally bivocational where the 2nd vocation is a full-time job (actually the 1st vocation). The truth remains that those who preach the gospel should live of the gospel. In some cases, that won’t be possible. In some cases it is simply allowing churches to disobey the Scriptures. Sometimes churches get short shrift because they will tolerate what the 2nd job won’t tolerate. Churches will tolerate a lack of preparation; real jobs won’t. It’s a challenge, and there are not easy solutions, but sometimes, one has to choose between jobs. When I was bivocational, it was necessary for me to have a truly 2nd job—one that worked on my schedule and allowed me to do what I needed to do. The church shouldn’t have to take what’s left, as a general rule.

On to schedule, virtually everyone but the most disciplined struggle with it. But Tripp’s model is not unmanageable, nor out of the realm of possibility.

Let’s say a pastor spends 10 hours on a sermon. What if that is three hours three weeks out, four hours two weeks out, and three hours on Friday and Saturday just before preaching? That means any given week will have three hours on a message coming this week, four hours on a message coming next week, and three hours on a message coming two weeks from now.

The problem is that the tyranny of the urgent means it is difficult to keep ahead. A lack of focus and discipline means stuff gets pushed aside until it has to be done. So the three hours the first week gets pushed back because … Then it gets pushed again … Then the week of, it is crash time which means you can’t work three weeks out because you have to do this week what you should have done three weeks ago.

The reality is that it is ten hours in one week (or two days) or ten hours over three weeks. It’s the same amount of time. So Tripp’s view isn’t impossible, nor unreasonable. Such lead time also enables you to shape the current sermon in light of the sermons to come.

BTW, A good book (novel) on this is Bruce Mawhinney’s “Preaching with Freshness.” It is a fictional story that addresses this very issue.

In the end, people have different rhythms and study habits that work best for them. People are also unfocused and undisciplined. People encounter unexpected events. And people are busy. But ten hours (or 12 or 20) is ten hours (or 12 or 20) no matter how long ago it was. I can’t do much work three weeks ahead of time. It doesn’t do me a lot of good. But my study habits are mine and not someone else’s. My only point is that it can be done if one wants to and it works for them.

One more thought: When Tripp says he preaches it 15-20 times, that’s a lot. I don’t think he preaches every week so that is perhaps unrealistic. But consider all the time available for practice. Say you take a 5 minute shower twice a day. And there’s the dressing time of, call it, ten minutes.There’s 15-20 minutes of practice preaching. Say you have a 15 minute commute to work. There’s 30 minutes. That means every day, you could practice preaching your message, completely with starts and stops, redos and retrys.

Tyler takes a 30 minute walk. What if that 30 minute was preaching out loud and trying things out. If you do that 3 times a week, that’s another twice through. So that is 8-10 practices a week without changing anything you are already doing. If you add on all the “down time,” like going to sleep or walking from the car to the store or to the office. Or many other things.

Again, in the end, find something that works and then try to make it better.

[TylerR]

When you choose a passage, you have to do several things:

• Decide what the passage is. You can’t just carve out some verses; you have to select a natural unit of thought. You have to balance the preaching time you have with the context. You might be able to cover a passage in 5 minutes, but you may do violence to what Mark intended. Maybe the passage is so important that you’d better slow down, and do it in two sermons?
• Decide what the main point is. Assuming you chose a coherent thought-unit, that passage has a point, an emphasis, an overriding something that’s important to get across. For me, I chose Mark 8:27-33. I initially wanted to do 8:27-9:1, but decided to split it. What’s the point is Mark 8:27-33? It’s Peter’s confession, coupled with the fact that, despite the good confession, Peter still doesn’t understand everything about the Messiah - He has to die, too!
• Decide what you want the congregation to do; the ‘so what?’ question. I wanted the congregation to leave (1) knowing who the Messiah really is, and (2) challenged to be sure they believe in the real one, not a fake one (see the beginning portion of my sermon notes, or watch the first few minutes of the video).

My own method is to preach the sermon by asking questions about the text aloud, voicing some commonsense questions anyone would have as he go through it, then answering them. In this way, I walk the congregation through the passage. In my notes, the questions are in bright blue.

Tyler, not to belabor the point here, but expositional preaching that is text-driven allows the text itself to determine the first two “steps” you list above. In some cases, it also provides the third step for you. That is why spending time translating the Greek / Hebrew yields tremendous benefits to the (bi-vocational) preacher. It forces him to get into the text, see the indicative verbs (usually the main ideas communicated in the passage), the participles (usually the supporting points), the connective tissue (to help trace the arguments and thinking of the biblical writer), and the nuance and emphasis of the passage. Thus exegetical work is more valuable to me than reading 3 or 4 commentaries on the passage because I often discover for myself what the commentaries either mention or even miss. For example, in Hebrews 10:10, what does the phrase “once for all” describe? Most English translations (and many commentaries) make it seem like “once for all” is the description of “the offering of the body of Jesus Christ” because that is what the phrase describes in 7:27 and 9:12. However, as I translated this verse, I discovered that the writer of Hebrews actually uses this phrase in 10:10 to modify the periphrastic verb construction “we have been sanctified.” So, not only did Christ offer himself once-for-all-time as our sacrifice, but that resulted in once-for-all-time sanctification of the believer. What are the “so whats” of this passage? The author of Hebrews lays them out for us in 10:19-39.

I don’t need to spend time belaboring over deciding the passage, determining the “main idea” or “main point,” or even sometimes the significance of the passage to my congregation. I preach the text as it was meant to be understood. Now, I grant you, it’s much easier to do this with an epistle than with narrative. But, even within narrative, the author often uses literary devices to signal when he begins and ends the pericope.