Welcome to Mortification of Spin, the casual conversation about things that count.

With Carl Truman, Todd Pruitt, and Amy Berg.

Mortification of Spin is a weekly podcast from the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

The times they are a change of, as tomorrow's pastor might be juggling two jobs instead of one.

Is full-time pastoral ministry soon to be a thing of the past?

It's a conversation we must be having in church as well as the seminary classroom,

and the spin team's already priming the pump.

Today we want to talk about a serious topic, something that I think is going to become of more relevance to the church in the West, certainly in the short to medium term.

And that is the issue of bivocational pastoring. The idea that the era of the full-time pastor is probably for a number of reasons coming to an end in many churches.

I first came across it a few years ago when I was dean at Westminster and would attend accreditation meetings,

chatting to colleagues

at liberal seminaries who were telling me that already within the liberal church circles within

which they operated, by vocational ministry, the idea that a minister could be called effectively

part-time while pursuing another job that actually provided their living wage was becoming

very commonplace, and they were even doing courses on it within the seminary curriculum now.

I think it's becoming more of a reality in conservative circles now as well, as the average

size of church, I think think even in the United States is

less than a hundred it's becoming more and more difficult for a congregation to put together a

financial package for a minister that allows him to have a livable wage and so many ministers are going to have to look

elsewhere to supplement their incomes. And that's going to bring a whole new range of expectations

to the church, the eldership, and to the pastoral calling. Todd, Amy, any immediate reflections

on that? Yeah, I think it's a reality that churches

...