For a long time, I carried an assumption I’m not proud of. Somewhere in the back of my mind, the “real” pastors were the ones who didn’t have to do anything else. Strong salary. Full-time study. No second inbox. The rest of us were making do until the church got big enough.
I don’t believe that anymore. I think that assumption had more to do with the way I thought about work than the way I thought about pastoral ministry.
My work history is a little unusual for a pastor. I framed houses and worked in a call center to get through college. Then I started a small landscaping business — it didn’t last long — before I took a job as a security guard so my wife and I could have some stability.
Within a year I was in management. Eventually I was running a branch with dozens of worksites across the Upstate and about 200 employees. Hiring, firing, payroll, contract negotiations, harassment claims — all of it. After that, I spent a little over five years with a Greenville startup doing marketing, sales, and logistics for secure executive transportation. Then The Gospel Coalition called. I sold my shares, took a 60 percent pay cut, and went.
Now I work for the North American Mission Board full-time as I pastor Christ Fellowship Eastside in Taylors alongside two other pastors. Some weeks the two roles fit together better than others. But I no longer think of one as ministry and the other as the thing I have to do so I can afford ministry.
For me, this kind of mental reset required I rethink ministry and work entirely. And this fresh approach came from reexamining Genesis.
Work Is Frustrating, Not Meaningless
Most of us don’t need much help understanding Genesis 3:17–19. Work can be frustrating.
Adam wanted to take the wheel, and now the ground fights back. Thorns. Sweat. Dust. He works the soil to eat, knowing that eventually he’ll go back into that same soil.
But there’s something else in the passage I missed for a long time. Three times God tells Adam that he “will eat.” The ground is cursed, but God still provides food from it. Human work after the fall is difficult and disordered, but it remains one of the ordinary ways God takes care of people.
That sounds a lot like most jobs I’ve had.
Sometimes the problem was the technology. I still remember a daylight savings time change turning our global dispatch system into a mess.
Sometimes it was ambition. That time when I got the promotion I wanted, only to discover the new rung on the ladder mostly came with more people calling me after hours.
Sometimes the problem was me and my need to prove I was right. When I always felt the need to justify my decisions and the decisions of upper management.
And sometimes it was simply working with difficult people. I once had a manager whose preferred method of communication was to call, yell for five or 10 minutes, and then finally let you talk.
All of our best strategies, systems, and structures will fail us.
Genesis 11 gives us another picture of the same thing. People discover a new technology — brick instead of stone — and immediately put it to work building something impressive enough to make a name for themselves. By the end of the story, they can’t even understand one another.
We haven’t changed much.
For the co-vocational pastor, that means a difficult job isn’t evidence that you’ve somehow missed God’s calling. Work has been frustrating for a very long time. And the paycheck that comes from somewhere outside the church is no less an expression of God’s provision than God’s curse-promise of “you will eat” in Genesis 3.
Your Work Says Something About God
Genesis 1 and 2 give us a better starting point for understanding what work is supposed to be as we work back from the challenge we experience it to be.
The first thing God tells us about human beings is that we are made in His image (Gen. 1:26–27). In the ancient world, kings placed images of themselves in the lands they ruled as reminders of their authority. Genesis does something remarkable with that idea. God doesn’t fill creation with statues of himself. He fills it with people.
That means the way we work matters.
I once had a security guard who would sit in the camera room reading his Bible instead of watching the monitors. Then he would interrupt his coworkers to tell them about Jesus. He was sincere, I think. But he was also being paid to watch those monitors.
It wasn’t until several years later that I could put words to what I saw. I met Donnie Smith, at a conference. He was CEO of Tyson Foods at the time, and I was arranging transportation for him. He put it roughly this way: The quality of your work won’t share the gospel for you, but poor work can make it difficult for anyone to take your witness seriously.
I wish I had understood that earlier.
I also wish someone had told me that a Christian testimony at work doesn’t mean never getting anything wrong. You will make bad decisions. You’ll lose your temper. You’ll misunderstand people. The question is what happens next. Christians ought to be unusually willing to admit when they were wrong, ask forgiveness and extend it. And you need this skill both in your pastoral and non-pastoral work.
People at Work Aren’t Problems to Solve
Being made in God’s image doesn’t just affect how we relate to God, it also changes the way we see the people around us.
At the security company, one of our employees missed work because he had Crohn’s disease. His absence was creating overtime at the site, and my regional manager wanted me to get rid of him. I wouldn’t do it. When he kept pushing, I went to the HR manager above him, and the issue went away.
I don’t remember feeling particularly courageous. I mostly remember thinking that we were talking about a man, not an overtime problem.
Your overbearing boss isn’t an obstacle. The guy who sabotaged your promotion isn’t your enemy. The employee who keeps taking shortcuts isn’t a waste of time. They’re image-bearers of the Almighty. Even the most frustrating of them, as C.S. Lewis would put it in The Weight of Glory, “may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a nightmare. … There are no ordinary people.”
The Office (or Workshop or Classroom) Belongs to God Too
Then there is the command in Genesis 1:28 to fill the earth, subdue it and rule over it. That rule is not permission to use creation however we want. We rule over that creation under someone else.
Abraham Kuyper famously said there isn’t a square inch of creation over which Christ does not say, “Mine.” That includes sanctuaries and pulpits, but it also includes warehouses, spreadsheets, delivery routes and conference rooms.
COVID made some of this easier to see for a while. Suddenly everybody noticed truck drivers, warehouse workers and grocery store employees because we needed toilet paper to make its way onto a shelf. The work itself hadn’t become more important overnight. We had simply noticed how much we depended on it.
Pastors can preach about the dignity of ordinary work and still quietly imagine pastoral work sits in a different category. I did.
Genesis doesn’t give us room to make that distinction.
You Are Still a Creature
Then, in Genesis 2, God rests.
That can be particularly difficult for co-vocational pastors. There is always another thing to do. You finish one job, and then you remember the sermon is still coming Sunday. There are texts you haven’t answered, people you need to call, and something around the house you promised you would fix three weeks ago.
I’m still learning this, but at some point you have to stop.
Rest is part of creatureliness, an admission of your dependence. The church can survive your day off. Your employer can survive it too. Your family may actually need you to take it.
Work Came Before Thorns
Before sin ever enters the story, Genesis 2:15 says God puts Adam in the garden “to work it and keep it.”
That matters. Work itself is not the punishment of Genesis 3. Adam was working before there were thorns.
We often talk as though the goal of work is eventually to escape it. Make enough money. Reach retirement. Get to the weekend. But Scripture gives us a different picture. Work belongs to the good world God made, even if the version of it we experience now is tangled up with sin and frustration.
Putting Genesis Into Pastoral Practice
Whether you’re a co-vocational pastor or not, most of your congregation spends more waking hours with coworkers than they do with anyone in their church.
They need more from us than warnings not to make an idol out of their careers, although plenty of us need that warning. They also need to know that the work itself matters to God.
Any faithful pastor can preach that. You don’t have to be co-vocational to understand the theology.
Still, there are things I’m grateful I’ve experienced firsthand. I know what a payroll problem feels like late on a Friday afternoon. I know what it’s like to have a boss yell at you. I know what it’s like to fire someone and then wonder all night whether you handled it rightly. I’ve worked alongside IT, video, social media, and editorial professionals — just to name a few. And all of that enhances my appreciation for the work others do.
Those experiences haven’t interrupted pastoral ministry. They’ve shaped it.
So, I don’t think of the co-vocational pastor as a pastor-in-waiting anymore.
Maybe the church grows and one day pays a pastor full-time. Maybe it doesn’t.
Either way, the years spent in another workplace are not wasted years, and the people across that second desk are not interruptions to the ministry God has given you.
They’re part of it.
— Phil Thompson is a pastor at Christ Fellowship Eastside. He currently serves as director of digital strategy for the North American Mission Board. He previously served for seven years with The Gospel Coalition, building and launching, among other resources, The Carson Center for Theological Renewal. He holds a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies from Columbia Biblical Seminary.