Communitas 2013

Journal of Education Beyond the Walls

Volume 10

The Gifts of Bi-Vocational Ministry

2013

Communitas

Journal of Education Beyond the Walls 2013

Volume 10 Editor: Melissa Wiginton Production: Kathy Muenchow, Randal Whittington Communitas: Journal of Education Beyond the Walls is published annually by Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, 100 East 27th Street, Austin, TX 78705-5797. e-mail: ebw@austinseminary.edu

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COVER ART: “Borderless World” by chuck hoffman + peg carlson-hoffman; ©2008; acrylic on canvas, (30"x30”); In a private collection, used with permission of the artist. See http://www. genesisartstudio.com.

Communitas is a term anthropologist Victor Turner uses to describe the temporary but intense community that develops among pilgrims for the duration of the journey (remember the pilgrims of the Canterbury Tales). For us in the church, it might describe the community we develop with the successive churches we serve, the community of cohorts of the College of Pastoral Leaders, or the small groups of learners through Education Beyond the Walls who gather to study together for a brief period of time.

Turner also employs the concept of liminality to describe that pilgrim experience of leaving the domain of the familiar to travel and to experience new potentialities and powers that lie afield. We leave home, travel light, expose ourselves both to the unknowns in the world of the horizon and the unknowns within our own souls, now freed to be heard in the silence of the road. The learners and leaders we serve leave their ministry settings momentarily to hear the experiences of colleagues and the wisdom of teachers and to contemplate the ministries seeking to emerge from their own souls. So we are pilgrims beyond familiar boundaries, our experience shaped by communitas and liminalities.

Contents

2 4 6 14 18 21

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Theodore J. Wardlaw

From the Editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Melissa Wiginton

Making More of Us, Not Less . . . . . . . . . . Jason Byassee

Hello, Circumstance Calling . . . . . . . . . Kathryn Banakis Two Roads Converged . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Carrie Graham

I Am A Pastor, But That’s Not What I Do . . . . Adam Rao

The Gifts of Bi-Vocational Ministry

Introduction “I was thinking job while he was thinking vocation.”

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ears ago, when I was a parish pastor in Atlanta, I was invited by a presbytery in the Southwest to lead a weekend teaching event in the area of homiletics. My students would be persons undergoing that presbytery’s Commissioned Lay Pastor (C.L.P.) training. That’s what Presbyterians then called laypeople certified to serve congregations which could no longer afford full-time, seminaryeducated pastors; many of the C.L.P candidates were bi-vocational. We’ve since changed the name to Commissioned Ruling Elders, and every branch of mainline Protestantism in America has a similar office of credentialed laypeople offering leadership to smaller congregations. Out of my own supposed superiority, I didn’t initially have high expectations from these persons whom I imagined to be “substitute” pastors (sort of the ecclesial equivalents to E.M.T.’s in small towns that could no longer afford doctors or a “proper” hospital). I set about going through my homiletical resources, trying to figure out how to dumb down the material so it wouldn’t overwhelm these poor creatures. Finally the weekend arrived, and I met my students—some fourteen of them—at the presbytery’s conference center.

Wow…just Wow. These were talented, committed, curious people—a poet, a retired English professor, an investments broker, an economist, a funeral director, a public schoolteacher … even an E.M.T. They were voracious readers, learners, and, I discovered, dynamite preachers.

During some down-time at the end of our second day together, I said to one of them, “Why aren’t you thinking about going to seminary?” He looked at me blankly.

“Because I have a job. Why aren’t you thinking about being an investments broker?”

I realized then that I had been thinking inside a box too small. I didn’t have the current word “bi-vocational” in my head yet, but I was thinking job while he was thinking vocation. His job was that of an investments broker, but, theologically speaking, his vocation was far larger, far less quantifiable, than I had assumed. He was taking a homiletics class, he was preparing to be a Commissioned Lay Pastor, because of his vocation—because, I suspect, he couldn’t not serve in some sort of specialized ministry in addition to his job.

This experience prompted me to re-examine my pretentious notions of ministerial vocation. Over time, it led me to become better acquainted with bi-vocational ministers; and I discovered that a lot of them have Master of Divinity degrees, too—just like me! Many of them could be found in urban areas, serving in ministry settings more out-of-the-box than quaint, clapboard buildings where some dear

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The Gifts of Bi-Vocational Ministry octogenarian played the pump organ on Sunday mornings. Many of them were doing street ministries on weekends, even though their job was something altogether different. Many of them liked the unfettered faithful authenticity that came with doing ministry because they wanted to—not because they had to. Many of them saw a need in this or that alternative community of faith, and felt called (what a concept!) to serve that community without a paycheck.

I began to take a reverent look at these people who—but for the century in which they were living—might look more like an early disciple than I (with my ministerial ticket punched and my “orders” so thoroughly in order).

So, to wrap this up, I went through yet another minor conversion. And now I’m not disdainful of, but humbled by, these bi-vocational ministers.

What follows is worth reading. Look for Jason Byassee’s provocative Wendell Berry quote, and wait for the wince of recognition. Look for Kat Banakis’ encounter with an IRS guy, and see if you can distinguish one minister from the other. Read Carrie Graham’s piece, and then define the difference between job titles and wholehearted service. Consider Adam Rao’s article, and write a poem that distinguishes being from doing. In such ways as these, imagine “The Gifts of Bi-Vocational Ministry.” v

Theodore J. Wardlaw President, Austin Seminary

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The Gifts of Bi-Vocational Ministry

From the Editor … faith … work … ministry … a new/old story…

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his issue of Communitas marks a change, from a publication of the College of Pastoral Leaders to The Journal of Education Beyond the Walls. The College continues with the support of an endowment, allowing the Seminary to stand in a place of stability to view lifelong learning against a wider horizon. This publication invites our readers into the wider view; that is, into what we are teaching and learning in Education Beyond the Walls.

We open up this wider view by considering the gift of bi-vocational ministry.

Our readers who are members of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) are likely aware that the last General Assembly included a big push for education about and preparation for bi-vocational ministry. We know this is a live conversation across the church in the U.S., Presbyterian and otherwise. The topic came into focus last fall in partnership with the 25-year-old Association of Presbyterian Tentmakers (A.P.T.) in a conference, “Many Vocations, One Calling.”

Some advocates for bi-vocational ministry are convinced it is necessary because full-time pastoral positions are increasingly scarce. Others, particularly younger pastors and seminarians, are compelled by their energy stirring for new ways of crafting a life of ministry. Either way, we thought that exploring bi-vocational ministry could be exciting. And it was. We learned that God calls some people to do ministry in multiple kinds of paying work. We heard that such a call comes to people in many different ways—just like a call to traditional full-time ministry does. We saw that living out this call requires a particular set of skills and sensibilities not always accommodated by structures or understood by committees.

We were convinced that bi-vocational ministry is not by definition second-rate or second-class.

As Austin Seminary students who attended the conference considered the stories of the Tentmakers, and their own emerging visions for ministry, they began to talk about shaping lives of ministry in continuity across spheres of family, work, and church, where vocation flows across containers. They talked about ministry punctuated with ellipses rather than periods. And so, we will explore bi-vocational ministry again this fall at the “Ellipses Conference: On faith … work … ministry … a new/old story ...”

This is not the first time in the life of God’s church that those called to ministry have pondered these questions. In many families within the Christian tradition,

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The Gifts of Bi-Vocational Ministry pastors who work secular jobs and serve the church have been the norm. Mennonites, for one, have a wealth of resources and experiences to share from their long-standing practice. Many historically black denominations and African-American free churches have practical wisdom for those trying to develop bi-vocational ministry.

In the four essays presented here, we hope to stimulate the conversation about tentmaking ministry, by drawing on the tradition and by hearing from Generation Y and Millennial bi-vocational pastors. We want to open a view into the next chapter of a story started long ago when Paul left Athens and went to Corinth where he met Aquila and Priscilla “… and because he was of the same trade, he stayed with them, and they worked together—by trade they were tentmakers” Acts 18:1-3. v

Melissa Wiginton Vice President for Education Beyond the Walls Austin Seminary

November 1-3, 2013

Build community with people who want to do pastoral ministry and … something else. Learn how to tell your vocational story so that other people will be inspired. Decode the structures that impact non-traditional ways of being in ministry. Meet people who are making it happen.

ELLIPSES is for long-time tentmakers, bi-vocational pastors, seminary students, and all those who want to help create new stories of serving God in ministry.

Register at:

AustinSeminary.edu/ellipses 5

The Gifts of Bi-Vocational Ministry

Making More of Us, Not Less Jason Byassee

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n some ways, it is odd that as a full-time Methodist pastor I am working on this topic—in my church one is not allowed to have another job if one is appointed full-time as a pastor. It’s a mark of the professionalization of ministry that Brooks Holifield chronicles so well.1 For 400 years in this country our churches have sought professionally trained, credentialed, educated, full-time official ministers, on a par with doctors and lawyers. That’s what my denomination and many other mainline denominations have wanted and that is what we have—tens of thousands of ministers who are good for nothing else. Please don’t tell my bishop, but in addition to my pastoral work I write and teach and travel to speak. But then, as a Methodist friend, mentor, and expert in John Wesley, said, “It’s okay. Wesley was bi-vocational too.” Wesley was a “royal peculiary” as a priest in the Church of England. He was answerable to no bishop, but only directly to the king. So as he annoyed Anglican clergymen in the 18th century, they had no bishop who could yank his chain. Wesley could preach, teach, travel and speak, write and publish more, maybe, than anyone in his century, including books on health and wellness in addition to ones on the Bible. My church prohibits that which our founder, John Wesley, demonstrated.

My impression is that bi-vocational ministries, like those represented by the Association of Presbyterian Tentmakers, once got used to being a sort of niche ministry, confined to rural and underfunded parishes, out in the wilderness. Now it looks like some form of bi-vocational ministry is the future of the church of Jesus Christ as a whole. There is no more career ladder to climb from youth pastor to seminary associate to head of staff of ever-bigger churches. We just don’t have the churches anymore in the mainline: medium-sized ones have become small, small

Jason Byassee is the senior minister at Boone (North Carolina) United Methodist

Church. He also serves as an editor at Christian Century magazine and is a research fellow at Leadership Education at Duke Divinity School. He is the author of four books, including The Gifts of the Small Church (Abingdon, 2010), and dozens of articles and reviews. He served as the keynote speaker for EBW’s “Many Vocations, One Calling” conference. This article is adapted from his remarks.

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Making More of Us, Not Less ones are in danger of vanishing, and all of them have to pay costs they cannot control. Pension, health care, seminary debt repayments are already burdensome, with no relief in sight. Niche ministry no more, what can the wisdom of the ages of bivocational ministry teach us about more faithful missional forms of church life in the future? In the ancient church so many monks and nuns fled for the desert that they said “the desert became a city.” What if the “desert” of bi-vocational ministry is becoming the City of God?

The 1,400 member church I serve employs five full-time and six part-time staff.

Half the pastoral staff is bi-vocational. I had not thought of them that way; we just think of them as part-time folks. One leads fly-fishing tours, another works at a shoe store, another at a general store, another is partly retired, the other raises kids. Thinking of them as bi-vocational should make me a better head of staff and leader of my church. That is the argument for bi-vocational ministry: it is not double the work, it is work that overlaps, one job compounds another and makes more of us, rather than less.

I want to speak of bi-vocational ministry as a particularly graced calling.2 To respond to this calling, the church as a whole, not just individuals, must recover our gifts of founding institutions, generating entrepreneurship, and innovating in ways that are faithful to the gospel and that fund ministry. I want to treat these topics using my own multiple vocations. I will attend to the nature of human work wearing my hat as a theologian. Then I want to change to my journalist’s hat to address these matters by introducing you to some folks who do this work really well. Throughout I’ll make pastoral observations wearing my current hat as a senior minister, head of staff, and weekly preacher at a large church in the university town of Boone, North Carolina.

The Nature of Human Work One of the really interesting books on work in the last few years is written by an Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary professor, David Jensen.3 Thinking with Jenson, we might say God is a communal worker. God is always working, occasionally resting and celebrating Sabbath, and asks his creatures to do likewise. The man in the garden is to name the animals, till the soil. When Adam and Eve are cast out from the garden, one of their further punishments is that the soil will only yield fruit with backbreaking toil, through thorns. Yet even as people do such difficult work, there are hints in the prophets and Jesus of a miraculous crop, God’s doing.

Irenaeus looks forward to vines of 10,000 tendrils, each with 10,000 grapes, each producing oceans of wine, which would make for quite a eucharist. Work is a basic human good, original to Eden, continuing in the eschaton, dependent on God’s blessing. Human work is a reflection of God, the first worker. Psalm 104 describes in detail God’s work of creation: You stretch out the heavens like a tent, you set the beams of your chambers on the waters, you make the clouds your chariot, you ride on the wings of the wind, you make the winds your messengers, fire and flame your ministers.

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The Gifts of Bi-Vocational Ministry Here is God as the original tentmaker, stretching out the heavens like a tent. As the story unfolds, God refines Israel like a refiner, like a fuller. David is so bold as to think he’ll build a house for God and God says, “No, No, No. I’ll be building the house for you.” God is a builder, a temple maker, a priest houser. Every imaginable human act of ingenuity is taken up in the Old Testament to be blessed, all used to describe God as a worker. And amidst all this work God also rests. God is not ceaseless labor, God is useless delight, seen most clearly in practices of Sabbath.

The ancient church would have read the winds, fire, and flame of Psalm 104 as references to the Holy Spirit—God always works as Father, Son, and Spirit, not as a cumbersome committee, but as a communion of persons in perfect mutual regard.

David Jensen writes “Isolation in work is foreign to the triune God.” And neither is our human work done in isolation. Jesus joins our labors. Then he works on our behalf in salvation in a way we could never work. In salvation God is like an artist in the zone, creating beauty, all her media responding to her desires, making something beautiful of God’s world. Only God really works. God lets us join in, blesses our labors, takes them up into God’s saving work. Because God works, we can work, too.

The portrait of God working in creation and redemption, of our joining in by grace, of a city of God at the eschaton that’s a hum of human activity, can, like all theological portraits, be misused: “Just work more, we’ll turn this negative—not having parishes for all graduates—into a positive and claim your exhaustion is because you’re being like God!” The image of ceaseless, frenzied work threatens to splinter the particularly graced calling of bi-vocational ministry. Matthew 6:22 is translated in the King James “If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” How do we work bi-vocationally with a single eye, not with diffused or exhausting labor, but with multiple forms of the same work? How do we work multiply but have a single focus as Jesus commands?

The answer has to do with the practice of attention. Robert Benson, a retired English professor at the University of the South, helps us in his wonderful essay, “Wedding the Wild Particular.”4 Benson laments the loss of a culture of hunting at Sewanee, such as there was when he first arrived as a professor decades ago. He observes that one cannot read literature, at least a lot of it, if one has never hunted.

References from The Iliad to Hemingway are opaque. More importantly, hunting is about attentiveness. It is about submission to what is. The hunter has to read the ground, the water and land, the animal, and think what an animal would do. There is an element of mystery to hunting, of being fully alert for what might happen, fully aware of what could be wrong, ready to adapt on the fly, and humble when achieving success. Benson quotes Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset who says a hunter cannot presume anything, and must “avoid inattentiveness … There is a magnificent term for this, one that still conserves all its zest of vivacity and imminence: alertness. The hunter is the alert person.” So it is with literature. Because reading literature is also a matter of alertness, paying attention, readiness for what will happen. Benson distinguishes between a hobby like tennis and an avocation

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Making More of Us, Not Less like hunting. Being a better hunter makes him a better literature professor and teacher and writer. That is bi-vocational ministry: work that overlaps, altertness compounding one job upon another, making more of the human being.

The Charism of Traditioned Innovation At Leadership Education at Duke Divinity (LEADD), scholars and practitioners argue reclaiming entrepreneurship as a gift from the Holy Spirit. This business language cuts against the mainline rhetorical grain. But in fact, mainline churches have acted like mid-20th-century corporations that must be kept open when even the U.S. automakers do not act that way anymore. Our institutions have to become more nimble, more entrepreneurial, more missional, and such dramatic change could use the help of the Holy Spirit. If our heritage still has gifts to bear to the world so that we need to stay open for a bit, how do we make space for that? The Methodist campus minister at the college in my town is learning from evangelical campus ministries how to do fund-raising. It’s hard, it flexes muscles that have been dormant. But it can be done. If Campus Crusade and Intervarsity can hustle to fund themselves, why not mainliners? We’ve done it before. It might even be better to do things this way.

Thinkers at LEADD talk about traditioned innovation, what business people call social entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurs establish new institutions, or create innovations, to meet a social need using the best business practices. Habitat for Humanity is an obvious example of such an organization from the last generation, Teach for America one from this present generation. The church also used to found institutions: The Christian church brought the hospital. Sick people heard how Jesus healed, what he said about Christians’ responsibility to take care of the vulnerable, and they turned up. The church had to respond. The hospital was the answer. The church of Jesus Christ brought the university into existence. A place where all knowledge can be gathered, cultivated, and passed on, with an eye to how it relates to Christ, who is the head of all knowledge and wisdom. By whatever name, the charism of founding institutions to meet our neighbors’ needs in perpetuity may be one worth asking for in the effort to make space for the vitality of our heritage.

New Monasticism5 is an expression of the charism of traditioned innovation.

New Monasticism is a movement of young adults looking for a costly form of Christian faith that drives them to be neighbors with the vulnerable in places the American empire has abandoned. They pray and work and love like monks and nuns have done for centuries, yet they do so as married and single people. They pray without ceasing, with rules not unlike monasteries. They practice a combination of old and new for a new day, as Jesus foretold. It is beautiful, and it is what Christians do.

Quasi-monastic communities demand devotion. Traditioned innovation can call people to risky ventures in mission, experiments that ask for one’s all. Other institutions ask this of young adults, and they are not scared away. Ten percent of Duke University graduates from all fields apply for the chance to teach in failing schools

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The Gifts of Bi-Vocational Ministry through Teach for America. One of the members of my pastoral staff debated between accepting the offer from our congregation and living in a Chicago Christian Community Development Association community with no income. Can Christians trust in the charism of founding institutions to do what Christians do—in bold new forms—as they have so many times before?

Double Work, Single Eye Some very smart people working on bi-vocational ministry are part of the Missional Church movement, a network of churches and thinkers. Dave Fitch, a very fine theologian at Northern Seminary in Chicago, is a leading light. Another is a blogger named Erwin McManus, whose comment haunts me: he says seminaries produce graduates who need the church, rather than the leaders the church needs. These folks want to see more missional communities planted in urban areas than we have now by far. For most mainline churches, that means finding someone who will take a minimum salary and package for three years to plant a church—a cost of $75,000 a year or more just to start! McManus and company say no, find someone with a passion for church planting and turn them loose with a blessing, with creative missional friendships, with training and spiritual equipping, and let them go. That person is the leader the church needs, rather than a leader who needs the church.

Scholar and pastor Eugene Peterson in his recent memoir6 says artists taught him the difference between a job and a calling. They would find a job during the day so they could do what they were created to do—make art—at night. These new missionaries are doing that, too, for the church.

They point to the highlights of their day job. Secular employment gets Christians out of the bubble in which they only talk to one another. It allows pastors to relate to those to whom they pastor: Pastors in secular employment also have bosses who are a pain, hours that are unreasonable. This practice shows the rest of the church that folks have to offer pastoral nurture to one another. Which is exactly what the Bible expects of Christians, not that one person tends to all, but that parts of the body strengthen one another. This model of the church assumes no single leader, but rather multiple leaders working in community with one another.

Nobody spends forty hours on church. Everyone spends what they can.

Bi-vocational pastors in the Missional Church movement have many different kinds of employment. Some balk at the idea of working for minimum wage at Starbucks or UPS or in a factory with a seminary degree. Good, Fitch says, now you know what your people are also struggling with. It is good to work with and be the working poor. To work one’s way up. No experience can be more helpful. Why should people with MDiv degrees act like they are owed a job when no one else is?

The stakes are high here—for Fitch bi-vocational ministry is not just a way to keep the lights on, it’s the right way to do church in a new missional age.

One of Dave Fitch’s students, Jason Morriss, worked at a quarry through seminary, nevertheless incurring tens of thousands of dollars of debt. He hit a low after graduation when he offered to preach for free to a Spanish-speaking congregation

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Making More of Us, Not Less in downstate Illinois. They turned him down. He felt all his degree work was for nothing. Then he got a call that was like winning the lottery. Lakewood Church, Joel Osteen’s congregation in Houston, responded to Jason’s application and hired him to organize small groups for its Latino population. Jason is a missionary kid, a good Spanish speaker, with five kids, and now is employed at one of the world’s largest churches—and he is bi-vocational. He does what lots of pastors in Texas do. He gets hired by pharmaceutical companies to do speaking workshops for physicians.

Doctors are notoriously bad speakers (they think their expertise is enough), and drug companies want advocates for their products, not people reading PowerPoint presentations. So Jason flies out Thursday night to a conference for doctors, speaks Friday and Saturday, and is back for Sunday at Lakewood. This precise model is not for everyone, but perhaps his attitude might be. For Jason, this speaking training is ministry. He takes what he learned studying homiletics, what he’s learned seeding small groups among Latinos, and applies it to MDs. To know how to speak, you have to know what a human being is, what people want, how to offer it without coming off as salesy or pushy. And seeing the light go off over someone’s head is the same, Jason suggests, whether you’re teaching doctors or pastoring Hispanic high school kids and single moms. It is inviting a person more deeply into the imago dei, seeing the glory of God in a human being fully alive, as St. Irenaeus once put it.

Tim Conder pastors a very different sort of church in Durham, North Carolina.

Emmaus Way was an early leading light of the Emerging Church movement. It is a ten-year-old downtown church plant filled with artists and academics and pre-affluent (their language) professional students at Duke. Tim came out of megachurch culture, where on a monster-sized staff, members ignored one another on the way to the copy machine. His last years at the Chapel Hill Bible Church saw the bills paid by an increasingly small but affluent conservative minority. Tim wanted, instead, to do church organically, relationally. When a pastor leaves Emmaus Way, his or her position is collapsed and redesigned around the gifts of those who remain.

Now, they have four pastors, each bi-vocational, one in a music studio, several at the university, all with health care and benefits paid by someone else. A lay person leads the church’s council and Tim, as founding pastor, does not even attend. This is a way of doing church not revolving around one ego, one personality, but with distributed leadership. For Emmaus Way, that way matches the way authority looks in the scriptures—Jesus is Lord and the church is his body, not his head. Mainline friends, we have to be open to this model of church, not just because it is cheaper and so sustainable, but because it is a form of leadership that is human, small scale, communal, messy, and life-giving.

Bi-vocational ministry can also bring about longer pastorates. Dennis Bickers’ book The Bivocational Pastor7 makes this clear: Small churches offer lower pay, so they expect pastors to traipse off to a bigger church, or for their church to grow bigger. Bickers’ experience is that working another job not only distributes authority and ministry in ways others have reported, it also allows him to stay in one place as pastor. And longer pastorates make for greater faithfulness; they reduce the sort of

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The Gifts of Bi-Vocational Ministry ambition that uses a smaller church to gain a bigger one. For him, it allows Bickers to do ministry in his hometown, where he has connections, knows people, can draw in support and wisdom and ideas and encouragement. A second job strengthens the ecology around his first. Here we see St. Paul’s original vision for tentmaking— it allows him to serve with his whole heart, not to be dependent on the church he is serving.8 It also allows him to ask for money more full-throatedly; the money is not all going to his salary.

John Varden did myriad jobs before he went to seminary. He ran a hotel, he ran a resort, he worked in the business world in marketing, and he realized quickly that seminary is not a place friendly to those with multiple talents. When Wendell Berry was asked by a seminary president what schools should be teaching he said “Teach them a craft. That way they can eat if they lose their pulpit and won’t be afraid to tell the truth.” The seminary president changed the subject. John has long done what Berry said. His family had left behind rural southwestern Kentucky the way most of our families left behind isolated rural places and they still had land that they were not using. John and his family are back to the land, leaving the Research Triangle of North Carolina for a county of 4,000 people and unused fertile river bottom land. He wants to farm, first with goats, then with grass-fed cows. He’s not sure how it will work­—it is not a time friendly to organic farming and the locavore economy has not hit most of Dixie yet. But he has never been happier. John tells about a pastor he met when he was younger who was dead behind the eyes. He got to know him and learned he was a pastor still only because there was nothing else he could do. John vowed never to be like that. “I’m only a pastor because I don’t have to be,” John says. His ability to support himself with a trade is a way to be free to do ministry, to tell the truth. And it has allowed him to be part of a movement of people trying to love the land the way God loves it. God, after all, created us from dirt, became dirt himself in the incarnation, promises to blow life into dirt and remake us at the end of all things, grows things out of dirt for us to offer back to God in bread and wine, in goat and cow and ministry.

I’ll conclude with a story told by Katherine Leary Alsdorf, a former business executive who now works for Tim Keller at the Church of the Redeemer in New York.

It is of a grandfather who lets his granddaughter “help” him shave his face every day while she visits on vacation. She lathers him up, and he guides her hand with the razor. They both enjoy this. Until the day she is to leave, when she gets really worried. “What will grandpa do? How will he shave?”

Only God really works. But he graciously lets us join in. Not because he “needs” us to do the work. But because he likes being in our presence, we like being in his, doing what he does, becoming who he is. v NOTES

1. E. Brooks Holifield. God’s Ambassadors: A History of the Christian Clergy in America.

Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2007.

2. I want to distinguish it very sharply from multi-tasking, our age’s great distraction.

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Making More of Us, Not Less

3. David H. Jensen. Responsive Labor: A Theology of Work. 1st ed. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006.

4. Robert Benson. “Hunting the Wild Particular,� Sewanee Review, 120, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 292-303.

5. See www.newmonasticism.org.

6. Eugene H. Peterson. The Pastor: A Memoir. New York: HarperOne, 2011.

7. Dennis W. Bickers. The Bivocational Pastor: Two Jobs, One Ministry. Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 2004.

8. 2 Thessalonians 3:6; Colossians 3:23

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The Gifts of Bi-Vocational Ministry

Hello, Circumstance Calling Kat Banakis

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he same year that many of my friends from seminary were getting ordained, I was working in a small non-profit as an entry-level fund-raising assistant. I wanted to be my ordained friends, not me. But because of a lengthy ordination process, I was me. I called my (much younger) sister to bemoan my state. She gave an auditory eye roll. Then she said (with no compassion at all), “Kathryn, you just have to change your understanding of who you consider your church to be. You go to your office every single day. Minister to them. Be their pastor.”

“But I work as an entry-level fund-raising associate. I write grant proposals.”

My argument didn’t even deserve a response. She just waited silently until I realized the insanity of what I’d just said—that I couldn’t do ministry where I was.

So I engaged in the magic prayer formula: lifting up a question to God, working my rear end off to do my part, and then trying to remain vigilant for surprise answers to the prayer. The prayer I prayed for myself and asked my friends to pray on my behalf was something like, “God, give me eyes to see how I can minister to the people around me.” My part of the prayer work began with crawling in the attic of the converted auto-repair garage that now housed the non-profit where I worked. I dragged down some lamps, an old TV tray table, and a box labeled “Birthday” filled with candles. The candles went atop the rickety TV dinner table for ambience beside a dingy Ikea armchair in my office—previously a catch-all of old pamphlets—with soft lamp lighting beside. Voila! A pastoral care and counseling corner appeared.

Lucy of the Peanuts comic strip was open for business. Tell me your woes, and I will listen with my chaplaincy non-anxious presence.

I waited a long time to be surprised, and nothing happened. My co-workers would sometimes come in and sit on the chair for the novelty of it. I felt like a doofus—a doofus learning more and more about fund raising but a doofus nonethe-less.

Kat Banakis is a priest at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston, Illinois, and director for Strategic Implementation at the fund-raising consulting firm Grenzebach Glier and Associates Analytics. This is an adapted excerpt from Bubble Girl: An Irreverent Journey of Faith (Chalice, 2013).

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Hello, Circumstance Calling

A few months later, though, our bookkeeper quit. The organization’s director asked if I would like to take on the bookkeeping and human resources in addition to fund-raising work.1 The last time I took math was my junior year of high school, which is also, coincidentally, the last time I balanced my checkbook down to the penny. But I knew enough math to know that my loan payments from seminary, my therapy bills, and the costs of living in the Bay Area were more than I could handle on my fund-raising salary alone. Sure I’d do the finances.

The old bookkeeper handed over a Basic Principles of Accounting textbook, a binder of state labor regulations, and her cell phone number. I took a three-day training on how to use our accounting software, signed up for some one-hour webinars on California labor laws, and before I could say “No thanks, Jesus. This isn’t what I had in mind,” I was the completely ill-equipped Director of Finance, Resources, and Donor Relations.

I held fast to the Blanche DuBois management model in those first months— completely relying upon the kindness of strangers. People I had never met before were insanely good to me. There was the team of outside, private auditors who, along with my predecessor on speed dial, helped me to close the previous year’s books. Everyone makes mistakes in a new job, but when you make them as the director of finance it’s called fraud, and it’s illegal. This was very scary.

Then there was the uptight human resources consultant who stopped in the middle of his sales pitch to rearrange the Occupational Safety and Health Administration workplace safety posters in our break area to be in compliance because he “just couldn’t stand the mess.” His neurosis kept us from getting fined.

And then there was Fred, dear Fred the beleaguered IRS agent who appeared in our office unannounced to inform me that he was just getting around to some cold cases, and our organization had an outstanding violation from a decade earlier.

There I was, Director of Finance, and there he was, The IRS, the one thing I was working my hiney off to avoid. I reverted back to the last time I had been quite so panicked in a professional setting, when I was the chaplain on call at an inner-city trauma unit and two warring gangs came into the emergency room. I put into place what I’d learned that summer in the ER. I went completely chaplain on him.

I showed him to the Ikea chair and offered him tea. Then I engaged in reflective listening, which basically involved me saying back to him as a question exactly what he’d just said as a statement, as in, “Wow, so what I’m hearing is that you need some documentation from our checking account from ten years ago, is that right?

Gosh, tell me more.” He did, God bless him. He told me exactly the documentation he needed and in what format and what to say in the cover letter and which office to send it to. Fred the IRS agent ministered to me so, so very much.

Keeping in line with the state and federal finance and labor regulations was my external challenge. I was given the internal task of “communicating our austerity budget” to the staff, which meant informing everyone that they weren’t getting a raise; that we’d have to cut shared costs; and that each department’s expenditures were getting hacked. Adding insult to injury, the budgeting process had been pretty

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The Gifts of Bi-Vocational Ministry opaque before, so none of the managers knew what their expenditures had been in the past or how things were allocated. Super.

Whether I succeeded or failed, you’d have to ask my colleagues, but what I tried to do was approach the task as ministry by asking myself, “What would be the most loving and pastoral way to handle this with my colleagues?” I opened up the financial records and walked through what each category meant with each manager and gave them access to all past and current expenses. That way they could see exactly what they had spent before and were spending in the present in order to figure out how to cut. Each manager took a different austerity approach. One put off staff hiring. Another shook down a print shop in town to do her promotional materials at a discount. A third made client appreciation gifts from scratch instead of purchasing them. The entire staff decided which shared expenses to cut (print newspapers) and which to retain (coffee). Budgeting became a very public, very shared project. The money and the time was ours, together, and so were the solutions.

I prayed for my coworkers each morning as I swam laps at the community pool, going around the office cubicle-by-cubicle in my head. I lifted up their work and lives and families. Often I asked God to help me learn how best to encourage the young woman who reported to me, how managing might become part of my ministry so that I could guide her in a way that affirmed her gifts and made her most ready for her future. With each lap and with each day, so incrementally that I almost didn’t realize that it was happening, my life was becoming enmeshed with others.

I didn’t choose my situation, but I’m beginning to believe that this is how “call” or “vocation” happens, that we live into what God has called us to do and be when situations present themselves. I didn’t pursue doing non-profit administration and human resources because there was a distinct voice of God calling me to it. I needed to pay rent.

Our calls, our vocations, arise out of the contexts in which we find ourselves, whether chosen or not, and involve our lives’ colorful, real cast of characters. That’s what happened to me when my sister suggested I minister in my workplace. More often though in my life, it’s only after the fact, only in the retelling of some story that I tease out what just might have been the hand of God leading me into a role and giving me an opportunity in my daily life to do God’s work right where I was.

Maybe all those things happened for just such a reason as this. The vocation, the call, only comes into focus in the rearview.

Who knows? Maybe I was given the opportunity to do budgeting so that budgeting could mean something different for all of us in that office.

As Christians we are called to minister to one another wherever we are in whatever situation we find ourselves. Luther and others in the Protestant Reformation emphasized the notion of the priesthood of all believers, the idea that each of us is a minister of Christ’s church in our daily life. It’s a continual theme in Christianity. Pope Leo I (aka Leo the Great) wrote about the priesthood of all Christians in a beautiful fifth-century text: “The sign of the cross makes all those who are born again in Christ kings, and the anointing of the Holy Spirit consecrates them all as

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Hello, Circumstance Calling priests. As a result, apart from the particular service of our ministry, all spiritual and rational Christians are recognized as members of this royal people and sharers in the priestly office [of Christ].”

We are all ministers, priests, and kings in our lives and work. It’s like a modification of Abe Lincoln’s famous words to his sons, “Whatever you are, be a good one.” The Christian vocation version is, “Whatever you are, be a holy one.”

In the years since then, I found that I like being Christ’s priest in the workplace so much that I still have a secular day job even though I’m now ordained and serve a church. I’m a priest in every setting. My lifestyle is by choice. Sometimes it’s maddening and exhausting, but whose life isn’t? Mostly, it’s an incredible ride. v NOTE

1. Those of you schooled in best practices will note that the person who does fund raising (soliciting cash) is never supposed to be the person keeping the books (counting the cash). You would be right. See above on being a teeny tiny non-profit operating out of a garage. This is not an excuse but rather a statement of fact.

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The Gifts of Bi-Vocational Ministry

When Roads Converge

Carrie Graham

L

ike many “bi-vos,� my work life involves multiple environments, though one sense of calling. At first, this approach to ministry felt schizophrenic, but seeing the common calling among multiple jobs has helped me appreciate it. That said, just as I settled into bi-vocational life, my multiple work environments have begun to merge to create a new sense of calling altogether.

My Story During my time at Fuller Theological Seminary, where I trained to be a pastor, I discovered interfaith dialogue. I began facilitating interfaith dialogues in my home, and I became Fuller’s first interfaith dialogue intern. Out of this experience, I cofounded the Evangelical Interfaith Dialogue Journal.

I continued to facilitate interfaith dialogue twice a month after I moved to Austin and became a pastor at Mosaic. The dialogues were not a paying job; I simply loved doing it. I was certain a natural intersection would eventually emerge between my pastoral work and my calling to facilitate interfaith friendships.

Mosaic was a wonderful place to learn to be a pastor. But over a year ago as other staff changes were being made, I made an unplanned but healthy decision to leave. I was left without a job, prospects, money, or community and with a heart aching to return to pastoral ministry. December of 2011 was a numbing, albeit sharpening, time. I knew I was making a faithful decision, but I did not know what the future might bring.

The (Phone) Call About that time, my dear friend Rabbi Rachel Kobrin called to check on me. She graciously spent time with me on the phone, helping me find reasons to laugh in Carrie Graham currently has three jobs: developer and fund-raiser for The Church Lab, project coordinator for Ministers Facing Money at Austin Seminary, and communications and outreach specialist for the Austin District of the United Methodist Church. For more information on The Church Lab, the ministry she is planting, please visit: http:// churchlab.wix.com/thechurchlab

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When Roads Converge the midst of this difficult season. She challenged me to brainstorm what a church would be like if I could ever be convinced to plant one. I was a longtime, vocal proponent of not planting new churches unless they fit a specific unmet need; her many previous attempts to convince me to start a church had failed. But I indulged her in the name of fun and distraction. Before the conversation was over, I was startled by just how plausible the vision for this church plant sounded.

The Church Lab The fun brainstorming exercise operated in a world with no limits to time or money.

With this freedom, I spouted off a creative tale in which a church plant would respond to increasing cultural pressures for people to embrace either religiosity or diversity. This church would dedicate herself to the idea that deep roots and strong branches need each other. That is, we would encourage convicted, deeply rooted Christian faith as we intentionally partnered with neighbors of contrasting beliefs.

Our central missional activities would happen alongside those of other faiths and backgrounds. Interfaith dialogue small groups would be a primary focus and would accompany social justice activities. We would make church a place where we do not have to choose between loving Jesus and loving diverse neighbors but rather discover that they go hand in hand.

Our church identity would create a need for creative and thoughtful worship, Christian education, and spiritual formation. We would emphasize discipleship and biblical literacy so as to explore well our own tradition. Instead of having a partner church, we’d have a partner synagogue with Rachel’s congregation! Rachel and I would hold theological forums together, and I would facilitate dialogues with other traditions as an extension of that.

It was an alarmingly easy imaginative exercise that led me to the intersection between pastoral work and interfaith dialogue. It was a marvelous moment to realize this intersection had found me, not vice versa. Thanks be to God.

Beyond The Daydream My felt need for further exploring the church plant idea­—not to mention these intersections in general­­—was not going anywhere or getting less timely. My mentors, Dr. Richard Mouw, then president of Fuller Theological Seminary, and Rev. Thomas McKenzie, of Church of the Redeemer in Nashville, offered their supportive wisdom. They encouraged me to seek funding. I raised enough financial support to explore this vision part-time for ten hours a week during 2012 while also working part-time for the Austin District of the United Methodist Church doing communication and outreach. Thus, preparing for this church plant, which I call The Church Lab, became a job to add to my work for the UMC—two jobs.

Entrepreneurial Spirit, Holy Spirit A year later, I am fund raising for the launch of The Church Lab and on a quick timeline that will determine just how many jobs I will need this year. When I get

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The Gifts of Bi-Vocational Ministry nerve wracked about this idea, I remember an email from one of the co-founders of the dialogue journal. She did not know I needed encouragement when she referred to me in her message as a “spiritual entrepreneur.” That is how she sees my calling. I hold onto that enthusiastically, resonating deeply with that phrase and being thankful that someone spoke it into my life. It helps me understand the risks involved with my calling as inherent to entrepreneurial activity, rather than simply crazy. In fact, I have come to think of following the guidance of the Holy Spirit as startlingly similar to the nature of entrepreneurial work.

My friend’s comment also helped me realize the common thread among my multiple jobs: an entrepreneurial spirit. I could see that in the development of my role in the Austin District office. They reached out to me as a pastor who knows how to work with people on the periphery of church life and Austin life, originally asking me to become a mystery shopper of churches. I evaluated websites and reported on the experience of visiting a specified list of churches. Soon after, they asked me to plan an anti-malaria campaign event during South by Southwest. One project turned into another until I was revamping their communications systems, including transitioning the district office­—and over time its churches—into the realm of social media. Now I support social justice efforts to build a medical clinic in Africa and open Austin’s first Free Store.

Complementary or Schizophrenic?

My story is still unfolding. This vision for an integrated calling was fuzzy for years.

Now I have clarity, though at times my bi-vocational life feels more schizophrenic than complementary all over again. I am doing multiple projects for the district, pursuing interfaith work, coordinating a new project for Austin Seminary, and missing pastoral work. I am sometimes lost as to how to find funds to plant the Church Lab. Yet having work environments that allow me to use my gifts are testaments to God’s provision. I rest in the idea that the movement of service to God may often get messier before it gets cohesive.

When I first left Mosaic, I fixated on looking for the next right “position.” Without answers-upon-demand regarding where to go or what to do next, I am learning to follow paths not marked by good job titles, but rather guided by ways I can serve well and wholeheartedly. As I focus on chasing down faithful service, rather than a specific agenda, I have already seen that God will clarify for me a sense of how to serve, whether in one, two, or even three contexts. All in all, I’m committed to trusting God to have forged the path(s) I follow. v

20

I Am a Pastor, But That’s Not What I Do

I Am a Pastor, But That’s Not What I Do Adam Rao

I

have to go to the dentist later this month for a check-up and, in an effort to make sticking a sharp, metal object into my mouth a little less awkward, the hygienist, as always, is going to ask that question: “So … what do you do?”

I always hesitate for a moment or two—partly because there’s a sharp, metal object in my mouth—but, eventually, I’ll just come out and say it: “I’m a pastor.”

And, then, the typical response: an awkward silence followed by a single word, “Oh.”

People don’t trust pastors. When people have been surveyed about whom they trust most, pastors rank below politicians and corporations, those two titans of trustworthiness in our world. Even dentists, the people in charge of the weaponwielding hygienists, are significantly more trusted than pastors. (Pastors do rank above celebrities, however, so take heart.)

That lack of trust in pastors is a big reason why I always hesitate when responding to that question. But, for me, it goes deeper, too. Because, while I am a pastor, that’s not what I do. What I do is inspire people with the hope of the gospel and, for me, that has meant embracing work beyond the walls of the church and doing multi-vocational ministry.

For some, “multi-vocational ministry” has become a euphemism for the way in which pastors who do not receive a full-time salary work in other fields to make ends meet. Sadly, for many seminary students today, the rapid decline of church membership makes such a financial situation a likely reality. But, in my opinion, this isn’t what multi-vocational ministry is really about. At its best, multi-vocational ministry is about creative leaders, paid a full-time salary or not, who expand their horizons into disparate areas that form a cohesive whole for the sake of their calling. As the pastor of a new church, I understand the financial reality of needing to work outside the church to help make ends meet. But, what I’ve found is that

Adam Rao serves as the lead pastor at SafeHouse Church in Minneapolis, a community uniquely designed to reach 21st-century outcasts and outsiders with the hope of the gospel. A recipient of the Beatitudes Fellowship for 2012-2013, Adam is a passionate advocate for “progressive Christian faith made relevant” and a believer in bi-vocational ministry as the future of the pastorate.

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The Gifts of Bi-Vocational Ministry multi-vocational ministry is about far more than that. It really can be, and is, about ministry and not just financial reality.

Alongside my full-time role as a pastor, I tutor seminary students studying biblical Greek. Not only do I get a chance to keep up with the language, which is something I enjoy, but I also get to spend hours each week influencing future leaders of the church. For me, tutoring biblical Greek isn’t just about making money, it’s about inspiring people with the hope of the gospel. I truly believe that the conversations I have with these students are ones they carry with them into their ministries.

Likewise, I teach piano lessons to middle- and high-school students who want to study music as a major in college. As a post-evangelical, I often interact with people who have experienced a hermeneutic that has caused them great harm. Comparing the Bible to a musical score meant to be interpreted artistically has led so many of the people I’ve interacted with to a radical hope that maybe the Bible could be meaningful if it were just interpreted more like music. It’s a comparison I would have never used had I not kept one foot in the world of music. Keeping a foot in the world of music has helped me, in countless conversations, inspire people with the hope of the gospel.

One-third of American workers—more than 42 million men and women— work as free-lancers. Juggling different careers and a mosaic of incomes, they form the basis of what’s become known as “the gig economy.” Some do it because they have to. But, many, whether it’s by necessity or by choice, have taken their multivocational work as an opportunity to re-define their life as more than just their job.

For pastors faced with the financial and, often, denominational pressures to sustain the institutions they work for, multi-vocational ministry offers a way to re-capture the reality that our work is the mission of God—to inspire people, not sustain institutions.

Multi-vocational ministry isn’t about letting congregations avoid paying their pastors for their work. Nor is it an excuse for pastors to simply ignore a dying congregation and the work of revitalization or closure that needs to happen. Rather, it’s an opportunity to expand the horizons of what it means to be a pastor and to do ministry by embracing work beyond the walls of the church.

Even with a full-time salary, in the future, I imagine you’ll still find me pouring over a Greek paradigm with a seminary student or taking a closer look at a Mozart sonata with a budding musician because, while I am a pastor, what I do is inspire people with the hope of the gospel. v

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The Gifts of Bi-Vocational Ministry

Education Beyond the Walls Lifelong Learning at Austin Seminary

Education Beyond the Walls is the outward-

looking educational face of Austin Seminary, providing lifelong learning and fresh, innovative, and expansive theological education for clergy, church leaders, congregations, and communities. Established in 2011, Education Beyond the Walls (EBW) sits at the intersection of church and academy, and draws upon the deep resources of both to craft creative responses to emerging needs of church leaders.

The days when schools of theology can function solely in a receptive mode are over; that is, no seminary can serve the church most fully and faithfully only by taking in people with a call to ministry and providing them with a classical education.

Austin Seminary recognizes this need for a more expansive mission. As a school of the church, we seek to meet people called to many forms of ministry where they are, in their own journeys; and we invite them into communities of learning that will support their flourishing, as leaders of the church and as disciples of Jesus Christ. Many learners are formed explicitly and excellently through our degree programs (masters and doctoral levels) and the Certificate in Ministry. Other learners gather in settings beyond the degree-granting specifications of seminary curricula.

For information about current EBW opportunities visit AustinSeminary.edu/EBW or call 512-404-4867.

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Education Beyond the Walls Learning Communities for Practicing Clergy • The College of Pastoral Leaders offers financial support in the form of grants to self-selected groups of pastors so that they may pursue their own self-designed program for renewal, vitality, and pastoral excellence.

• Revaluing Money provides a deep dive into issues relating to money, possessions, and practical theology in a three-retreat experience for a cohort of pastors who are accepted into the program.

Short Courses for Practitioners • Christian education events are offered each fall and spring.

• Emerging issues in leadership are addressed each year. Topics have included bi-vocational ministry, storytelling as mission outreach, and developing diverse cultural capacities.

One Day Intensives • Crossing the Border, a ongoing program, provides a day of Scripture study, theology, and reflection led by prominent Hispanic professors to focus on the experience of Hispanic and Latina/o people in the Southwest.

• Worship is the focus of one intensive each fall and each spring.

• Innovative practitioners present a variety of topics, including art, biblical storytelling, and other creative explorations.

Partnerships EBW draws resources not only from the Austin Seminary faculty, but also from outside the Seminary community. We currently have partnerships with the Association of Presbyterian Tentmakers, Lutheran Seminary Program in the Southwest, SCRAPCE (South Central Region of the Association of Presbyterian Christian Educators), Seminary of the Southwest, Seton Family Healthcare Network, The University of Texas Office of Disability Studies, and The University of Texas School of Social Work Office of Continuing Education.

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President

Theodore J. Wardlaw

Board of Trustees Cassandra C. Carr, Chair

Karen C. Anderson Thomas L. Are Jr. Claudia D. Carroll Elizabeth Christian Joseph J. Clifford James G. Cooper Marvin L. Cooper James B. Crawley Consuelo Donahue (MDiv’96) Jackson Farrow Jr. Elizabeth Blanton Flowers G. Archer Frierson Richard D. Gillham Walter Harris Jr. John Hartman Roy M. Kim

James H. Lee (MDiv’00) Michael L. Lindvall Jennifer L. Lord Lyndon L. Olson Jr. B. W. Payne David Peeples Jeffrey Kyle Richard James C. Shaw Lita Simpson Anne Vickery Stevenson Karl Brian Travis John L. Van Osdall Sallie Sampsell Watson (MDiv’87) Carlton Wilde Jr. Elizabeth Currie Williams Hugh H. Williamson III

Trustees Emeriti Stephen A. Matthews John McCoy (MDiv’63) Max Sherman Louis Zbinden

2013

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