"With Regrets, All My Love"

All of my life I've been around the ministry. When I was in high school & college, some of my most influential heroes have been pastors. And I even walked the aisle when I was 17 "surrendering" to full-time Christian service. It made my heroes proud. I was within a sub-culture of the hopeful; I was one of many "clones" who was primed to go in to the Glorious (thanks little Darrell!) ministry.

With that said, it struck a chord Wednesday when I read iMonk's latest blog entry With Regrets, All My Love. It's a powerful, personal apology from Michael Spencer to his family for going into full-time ministry.

It brings up another issue that I've been thinking about a lot for the past year. Bi-Vocational ministry.

iMonk commented:

I was only dimly aware of bivocational ministry as a young preacher. I became more aware of it as I met lots of small church pastors. The problem was this: the entire SBC approach to ministry was set in a “full time/church growth” context, with the big Texas churches and Evangelist style pastors held up as normal. Bivoc=failure.

I'm still chewing on this so, more thoughts later...