Ray Gilder has written a book, “Intentionally Bivocational,” in which he stated the case for bivocational ministry. After reading his book and watching his instructional videos, I interviewed him.

Today, at 73, he is the full-time pastor of a Southern Baptist Convention church in Tennessee and says he has more spare time now than ever! For almost all of his ministry, he was a bivocational pastor in addition to being the national coordinator for the Bivocational and Small Church Leadership Network. He also worked for the Tennessee Baptist Convention.

“Our [SBC] goal of evangelizing and planting churches can only be fulfilled by men who invest their lives in bivocational ministry,” Gilder said. Years ago, he noted, bivocational ministry was looked upon as second-rate, but “the winds have changed.”

He says that the “future for the church in America is the bivocational pastor and that we need to provide training for them as well as encouragement.” In the years ahead, he believes that the exception will be fully funded ministers, while bivocational ministers will become the norm. He says, “There is a new breed of pastor coming along who feels called to bivocational ministry — regardless of the size of the church or finances.”

In June 2014, Frank Page appointed a 21-member advisory council and tasked members with issuing a report regarding bivocational and small membership churches. Gilder served on that committee, whose report was released in June of this year. (The full text of the report can be read at baptistcourier.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/BivoSmallChurch2016.pdf.) He emphasized that the local association is vitally important to a bivocational pastor. At least two things that deserve special attention in the report are:

1. Acknowledge that having a pastor who is bivocational is a biblical, proven, and accepted model for church leadership.
2. Make a paradigm shift from megachurch models to marketplace/bivocational models.

The report quotes 2013 statistics from the Leavell Center for Church Health at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. The center reports that 67.4 percent of SBC churches had 1 to 50 in worship, and 89.3 percent of churches had 250 or less. The conclusion was that the SBC is “a large convention of mostly small churches, and the size and spiritual health of the SBC relies on the fruitfulness of small churches.”

Gilder points out that churches are not bivocational —only ministers are — and that bivocational ministers all struggle with time management. Learning to delegate, he emphasizes, is essential for the bivocational pastor. “We are most effective when we work from our giftedness,” he pointed out.

Gilder says he would counsel young people preparing for ministry to consider dual careers, because more and more churches will not be able to pay a minister a “livable salary.”

Whether a pastor is a dual-career person or a fully funded individual, the task before him is the same: to preach and teach the Word, train and equip the saints, and lead the church to share the gospel and disciple converts.

It just may be that health and growth for SBC churches, as well as the development of new churches, will come largely from God working through bivocational servants.