Spiritual Survival and Soul Care
You are busy. You are tired. You are giving energy to your job, your church, your family, and everyone who asks for your time. So where does your own soul fit in?
If you do not take care of your own spiritual life, everything else will eventually fall apart. This page is about how to stay spiritually alive when you are running on empty.
Two Unique Weights
Spencer Harmon, a bi-vocational pastor and student at Southern Seminary, describes two unique pressures that bi-vocational pastors carry.
1. Unique Spiritual Opposition
All Christians face spiritual warfare. But bi-vocational pastors often face it in isolation. You may serve a small church with limited or elderly congregants who cannot provide the kind of spiritual friendship and support a pastor needs. You can feel like a chaplain who preaches sermons, visits hospitals, and conducts funerals, but who has no one pouring into his own soul.
2. Unique Limits
Time and energy are finite. Even if you can make everything fit on paper, the grind of working two jobs while leading a church takes a toll. Burnout is the common result. Families get damaged. Churches get neglected. And the pastor’s own soul becomes bitter toward the people he is called to shepherd with joy.
Source: Spencer Harmon, Southern Equip (SBTS)
Get Low: Depend on Christ, Not Yourself
Harmon argues that bi-vocational pastors are actually in a unique position to experience the power of Christ. You walk weekly on the edge of your own limitations. You feel the gap between what your people need and what you can give. That gap is not a failure. It is an invitation to depend on God.
Paul had a thorn in the flesh, a persistent limitation that hindered his effectiveness but increased his dependence on Christ (2 Corinthians 12:9). Your bi-vocational constraints can serve the same purpose. They keep you humble. They keep you praying. They keep you leaning on the only One who can actually change hearts.
Embrace your limitations instead of fighting them. You are dust. God remembers that. He is not surprised that you are tired.
Four Steps to Spiritual Survival
Based on Harmon’s research and experience, here are four practices that can help bi-vocational pastors maintain a vibrant relationship with Christ.
1. Stay Vigilant Over Bible Meditation and Prayer
Get up earlier. Stay up later. Leave the email unanswered. Answer that text later. When you neglect your soul, you become disoriented and overwhelmed. When you drink daily from the fountain of life, it transforms the way you receive trials, handle weaknesses, and confront limitations.
This is not about adding another task to your schedule. It is about protecting the one thing that makes everything else possible.
2. Develop Leaders Who Can Pour Into You
Start a bi-weekly discipleship group. Invite anyone who is eager to serve and learn. Pray together. Share your burdens. Generate ideas. Dream about what God is doing in your church. This fights against the isolation that so many bi-vocational pastors feel.
You do not need young, seminary-trained men for this. Pour into that deacon who wants to see the church revive. Learn from the widow who has been praying for your congregation for 30 years. Let the body of Christ function as it was designed to function.
3. Build a Pseudo-Elder Board
Most bi-vocational pastors are solo pastors who serve with a handful of deacons. Find two or three like-minded pastors, whether in your area or across the country, and meet regularly. Face to face is best. Video calls work. Even a monthly phone call can make a difference.
Use this group to confess sin in safety, get trusted counsel, and build real friendships. Bi-vocational ministry often happens in isolation. You do not have to be alone.
4. Take Regular Preaching Breaks
When you take a Sunday off from preaching, use the time you would have spent on sermon preparation to pray, to sit in an extended time of Scripture, or to take your spouse out for the day. This will aid your ministry, not hinder it.
Let a lay leader teach. Bring in a guest preacher. Play a sermon from a trusted pastor online. Your church will survive, and you will come back refreshed.
You Are Not Alone
Bi-vocational ministry can feel lonely. But you are part of a long line of pastors who have served faithfully while working with their hands. Paul made tents. William Carey was a cobbler. Charles Spurgeon worked a day job in his early years.
God has not forgotten you. He sees the early mornings and the late nights. He knows the weight you carry. And he is sufficient for all of it.
“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:9)