I have been serving appointments since 2021 but I have been working in the United Methodist Church for over 20 years in areas such as youth ministry, associate pastor, residency programs, and senior pastor roles. I am 44 and God willing I hope to keep serving as a pastor until I retire one day. However, that is probably not for another 25 years. Most likely in the U.S., the church will be changing quite a bit during that time. Most likely it will be more the norm for pastors to be bi-vocational (I know quite a lot of you already are). So, a question I had is what if instead of us waiting till we run into the issue of most pastors needing to be bi-vocational and then scrambling to find solutions or just leaving clergy with no place to go, what if conferences began allocating resources, training, and expertise to help pastors develop other skills, gain experience, and networking to find other types of employment that would make their skill set they have developed in the ministry, the experience they have had leading in various capacities, and network them with others they could learn from in a secular job? I have seen other people who were pastors who helped people learn important skills so they could be bi-vocational but I haven’t really heard about anything like that in the UMC conferences that I know about.

Now, I know for myself and probably many others we are not trying to hurry right now and be bi-vocational, but what if we were more prepared and trained to do that when the time came? What if we could be having these conversations with churches right now? I believe I heard the average attendance in a UMC right now is around 60, so what if we began equipping more churches now for the coming reality of having a bi-vocational pastor, so they were aware of what that pastor would and would not be doing with their time. So, they would be able to be eased into this transition instead of quickly going from a full-time to 3/4, to 1/2, to 1/4 pastor?

Lastly, I know the idea of more and more pastors being bi-vocational may be sad for some because it is a change from the familiar or what we hoped would happen, but I don’t necessarily see it as a bad thing, it would just be different and if we were more equipped for it we might be able to make a better transition into this form of ministry.

Once again I do not have the experience of being bi-vocational, I am not a Bishop, a District Superintendent, or on a Conference cabinet team, so there is much I do not know about what has been tried, what has been planned, or what is in the works for the future. I am merely a pastor who has served over 20 years and would like to thrive in the next 20.