Ever wondered what effective church ministry looks like with just half or quarter-time clergy? This is the reality for many churches today, and that trend is only increasing. Today’s guest is a bivocational pastor and author who discovered that shifting from full to part time clergy leadership actually led to healthy churches in numerous congregations. Join us to hear more about effective part time ministry, discipleship, bivocational ministry, and trusting the holy spirit’s activity today.

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Dwight Zscheile: Have you ever wondered what effective church ministry looks like with just half or quarter time clergy leadership? This is the reality for many congregations today and that trend is only increasing. Today's guest is a bi vocational pastor and author who discovered that shifting from full to part time clergy leadership actually led to increased vitality in numerous congregations. He's here to share the results of his study, and to help us think about what a lay leader clergy supported ministry model looks like in practice. Hello everyone. I'm Dwight shyly.

Alicia Granholm: And I'm Alicia Granholm. Welcome to the Pivot podcast. This is the podcast where we talk about how the church can faithfully navigate a changing world, and we are really excited to have with us today, Jeff MacDonald with us. Jeff is an award winning journalist and church educator who also does part time interim ministry in the United Church of Christ. Among other books, he is the author of Part Time is Plenty Thriving Without Full Time Clergy, which was published in 2020 by Westminster John Knox Press. Jeff, welcome to the Pivot podcast.

Jeff MacDonald: Thank you, Alicia and Dwight. Great to be with you.

Dwight Zscheile: So, Jeff, tell us a little bit about your own vocational story. Um, and how did you come to, um, to to balance these different vocations that you have?

Jeff MacDonald: Sure. Well, I started out as a reporter and began doing that in college and working full time as a newspaper journalist in the years after college. I did that for four years on staff at newspapers and felt a calling to kind of broaden my, my messaging or broaden my work as a communicator. Uh, not quite sure what that would lead to, but I, I did want to, kind of reinvent myself as a communicator and, and follow where God was leading. And it was in that that I discovered only about two years into my divinity school studies. I learned that this is a way that a person can serve the church and keep their day job, so to speak. That I could, I didn't have to give up journalism. In fact, I could do some reinventing of it. And instead of being a staffer, I could be a freelancer. And instead of covering business and politics, I could cover religion, and I could write, instead of for one outlet, I could write for a couple dozen outlets, and I could have a role in the church that is really needed in certain congregations. At the time, there were not as many as today that use this model, but when I learned that that's a way that you can do it, I, I felt like that was really the right fit for me.

Alicia Granholm: Jeff, I'm curious, when you first learned about, what it might look like to be, you know, by vocational, part time and ministry. Um, I'm curious if the the model that you originally learned about is similar to how you see it played out in many congregations today. And, and, um, if, if that's shifted at all or if it's similar to how you first engaged, part-time vocational ministry.

Jeff MacDonald: Yeah. I think the model has probably evolved some that, there is just there are more, so many more people doing it in the mainline churches today that there's, uh, there are more approaches to it. And I think, uh, in some cases we see that people are doing it in addition to having another role that's that's not, non employment, that's related to, to caregiving to parenting. That's increasingly feasible. And we see more jobs being flexible. Remote work is making it possible to work on more flexible schedules, which is ever more adaptable to a ministry life when a good, a good bit of one's ministry work can also be done outside of normal business hours. And so there are a lot more ways to put it together. That's in terms of the balancing part and in terms of the approach to the ministry work itself, I think that there is, a growing awareness that this needs to be done strategically, that it's not something that we have a one size fits all game plan for how to do it well. And and yet there's lots of opportunity in it. So I think that as we, as we learn more about how it's interpreted locally, we are finding more models that can be expanded upon and adapted in other settings.

Dwight Zscheile: So it's often the assumption that a church that moves from full time clergy leadership to part time, that that's sort of on an inevitable slide toward decline and a weakened ministry or weakened vitality and impact. You set out to explore, you know, actual congregations that have made this shift and you found actually the opposite in some of them. So tell us a bit about your research. What kind of congregations did you study and what did you find?

Jeff MacDonald: Sure. Yes. So I, I went out on this research because I, I urgently needed to learn the material, because I had, I was in a congregation that had gone from full time to quarter time, in, in a matter of a couple days. And, and I needed to learn how I was going to fill that role. And, and when I looked for resources on it, I didn't find any. There was only information about what the there was there were a few books out there about how do clergy balance multiple jobs and family and all of this, but how does the congregation do it really effectively? There weren't books on that. So I proposed a grant, and I got, uh, the funding from the BTS Center in Portland, Maine, to go and visit a couple dozen churches that had done better after making this switch. And what I learned was that they had they had made a switch that that would actually involve the people in a new way and in a different way. That sharing of ministry was a theme that I saw that people were were embracing that not as something that was really unfortunate. And isn't it too bad that we need to be part of this or, uh, or or shrugging their shoulders and saying, uh, there's all kinds of things we can't do now and giving up on whole swaths of church life. No, it wasn't like that. They were taking an approach and saying, there's there are more ways that we can do this. And and so they were being less, I would say less consumeristic and more like practitioners. That's how one of the Episcopal priests that I interviewed put it, she said that, this is reclaiming the practitioner role. And that really resonates, I think, in North America, where we are taught to be consumers. In almost every area of life. And, uh, we're often taught to come up with our wish list of what do you want and what do you not want? And how can you, find a professional specialist who will give it to you in the form that you are most desiring? That just that mentality, uh, doesn't hold sway in the churches that are embracing this, this ministry and embracing this way of being church. So you see an engagement, you see a sharing of roles, and you see a, a movement away from a really rigid idea of the pastor and what the pastor must do and what only the pastor can do. If you have, a very rigid concept that there's all this domain that can only be done by the clergy person, and it's really broad and wide, and we're going to be, we're going to really be flapping without it. That leaves you with your hands tied behind your back from the first moment that you begin. And so I think that's another important theme that that these churches realize we don't have to be tethered to that. There's a lot more ability for laypeople to minister. If only we will step into what our traditions afford and go with it.

Dwight Zscheile: Well, let me dig into that a little bit more, because one of the things I hear you emphasizing is or describing as a sense of agency on the part of people and ownership, really for the ministry as a shared endeavor. Um, and, and so let's think about that both biblically for a minute. And then in light of, I think this model that we've inherited, this kind of professional clerical model of ministry where ministry has gotten narrowed and kind of monopolized in some ways, perhaps in a codependent way, where sometimes people in congregations are perfectly happy for the clergy to do all the spiritual stuff for them, and they're off the hook. Um, but what you're describing is really a shift away from that and perhaps recovering some biblical understandings. Say more about that.

Jeff MacDonald: Yes, absolutely. What we see is something that really resonates with, things in the book of Acts where we see the clergy or not the clergy, but we see in the book of Acts, we see Christ followers, you know, the tent making ministries of Paul are famously encouraged. Uh, where meaning that there is a livelihood that the witness to Christ would, would be, would be earning alongside their witness and, the disciples, you know, they left their nets to follow him. But that doesn't mean they never fished again. If you keep reading far enough in the book of acts, you see, they're fishing toward the end of the book again. And so there's there's a lot in that. And on the lay person's side as well, there's like in 1 Corinthians 12, chapter verse seven is, is one place where we see a reference to, uh, that the spirit is not concentrated in only one member of the body, but is given to many members. And you put these together and there's more things we could say in Ephesians and elsewhere that really emphasize that the spirit is distributed and there's something intrinsic ecclesiology, ecclesiologically, in this model of ministry that kind of forces us to practice what we preach in that regard. It's easy to forget these biblical motifs when we have a full time professional whose job is to do to be competent in so many different areas, and, and a person who knows a little bit more than most everybody else in a whole lot of areas, and therefore people tend to defer and so. Well, you know, and and where it can lead us is nobody really feels comfortable leading a prayer at a, at a table full of people, unless it's a clergy person and nobody else feels comfortable leading a Bible study. And they say, well, if we need to get a pastor to do that. And so I would argue that there's something really valuable in, in where this is nudging us. And if, if economics needs to be the nudge, well, so be it.

Alicia Granholm: One of the challenges that we've seen, uh, in the church is a focus more on membership over and above discipling people in the congregation. So I'm curious, as more and more congregations, um, need or want part time clergy and then are looking to recruit and equip and empower others within the congregations, if, that emphasis on membership has been an issue in finding people to lead alongside of them or not necessarily, and there's plenty of people in a congregation that can lead. And so just curious about kind of that process that, that clergy can use to, to find and then equip people, um, within their congregation to lead alongside of them. And, if the emphasis on membership over and above discipleship has created a vacuum, if you will, within congregations.

Jeff MacDonald: Yeah. I think that there's I'm not sure that we've seen as as much focus on discipleship as as arguably we we would need to see that. Um, I think we're still living in that, area where it hasn't picked up, as a, as a real focus that, that there's there's still sometimes we're still kind of thin in the area of spiritual formation. And, and so and I think that applies in churches that are both led by part time clergy and led by full time clergy. Uh, so it becomes a question of, well, are we at a greater disadvantage in that challenge when we have less pastoral capacity? And the I think the on one level we would be if, if formation was dependent solely on one person kind of fulfilling that, and thinking that there's sort of a scarcity, uh, at work. But when we see this as a, an inherent shift that is, it invites greater and greater engagement. And that's something that we do see is in congregations that tend to be on the smaller side, tend to, you know, maybe have fewer than 50 average on a Sunday, uh, in worship that there is greater engagement among the people, the, the per capita giving the, the number of hours, the number of people involved in volunteering. There's just a thicker level of engagement that the sociological research shows. A nd that all bodes really well. It just depends on how we use that. If it's people being caught up with maintenance of the institution or maintaining and feeding carried over expectations that are kind of more customary than theologically driven or, or spiritually beneficial. Then then we're kind of still stuck. But but if we can harness that, then and, and channel it, channel that engagement into the making of beloved community, then we can we can do amazing things. And I have I have seen this. that's why I love writing about this. I love visiting these congregations that are doing it. Because once you move off the full time model, you're in a territory where everybody knows there's sort of flexibility. You need to be a bit more flexible. And the denominations know this, the bishops know this. Generally the laypeople know this, that you're going to be in a, in a mode where somebody steps up to do something in the church who hasn't done it before, and it's going to happen. And, everybody could, you know, clutch, clutch their pearls and panic, when that happens, or they can discover and rejoice and, and cheer them on, which is some of what I, I love to see, especially as they lean into their strengths and people begin to blossom. There's just countless stories to inspire around all that. So it's it's fun to write about.

Dwight Zscheile: Well. So speaking of those stories, you have a couple that you want to share of particular congregations that took this journey and how it went for them and what they discovered.

Jeff MacDonald: Sure. You know, there are. I could think of so many, but I'll mention a couple. One is a church in Tacoma, Washington, a Lutheran church that is called a Salishan Eastside Lutheran church. And they were in a, well, they're located in a housing project. They worship at an Episcopal church, and they had separate services. They were meeting in the afternoon. And, while the Episcopal Church was meeting in the morning and they realized, we have some flexibility and some options here. They had given their pastor a encouragement to go and and use his time to engage the community more widely. And, they said we can free him up for more of that if we combine services with the Episcopal Church. So they combined the services. And so the pastor is still leading worship sometimes, but not as much, because sometimes it's the Episcopal priest and the pastor goes out and does, World Vision distribution in the community and builds a lot of relationships there. And he's also a, a dancer, an urban competitive dancer. And so he draws on that by putting together this dance church that attracts the groups that are the hardest to reach, 15 to 25 year old men. Uh, there are also women who come, but it's it's more men than women, black, Asian and indigenous primarily. And it's church. They hear the they hear the gospel. He gives a sermon. It's always on either conflict resolution or mental health. And so it's very relevant. People really listen. It's the only spirituality or the only sort of church, formal church that any of them get for the most part. And it's just an example of a very local adaptation for a pastor who's a financial advisor. He earns most of his living outside the church. But that has done so well that it went from being an outreach ministry to being its own church. Fear No Evil is now its own church. And there's more to say on that, but there's, so that's I mean, that's one example. There are, there are other other congregations where I'll give you one other example from the opposite coast in Vermont. The the people had all these building expenses and they had not one, but two older church buildings that they had maintained, uh, that they still maintain. And they realized we can't afford a priest we can't even afford a part time priest. So, we need voluntary priests in our setting, and they have opened that up, and the diocese has worked with them to develop people who can take an unorthodox path to or an alternative path to ordination. And they've ordained three out of this small church. So they have three priests and they only preach when they want to. This is Christ Church in Bethel, Vermont. They only preach when they want to, because there's a cadre of 10 or 12 laypeople who sign up to preach, and they work with the diocese on what does it mean to follow the lectionary and to prepare? So everybody takes it seriously. And the people in the church say. This is exactly what we would do. They told me if we if someone left them $1 million, they would not hire even a part time priest. To say nothing of a full time priest. They would not hire somebody. Because they aren't looking to go backwards. They don't want to regress in their spiritual formation, and they don't want to listen to the same person every week. They like the multiplicity of voices. They like hearing the gospel refracted through all these different practitioners. And isn't that kind of a beautiful example of the Pentecostal reality?

Dwight Zscheile: I love that. That's a great, those are both great stories. So in your book, you talk about kind of three primary ways to conceptualize what part time clergy leadership is, is really focused on. Um, tell us about those three.

Jeff MacDonald: Sure. Yes. T hese three come out of my visits when I pulled out my various notebooks and tried to see the patterns. I began to see these models. And so that's what I've boiled this into. And these three models that. So so I point that out because they weren't it wasn't like they opened a book and said, we're going to use this model. It was they were doing something. And I see that this is akin to what others are doing. And so I package them as these models, that others can learn. So the the way I would put it is there are there are three main models that I saw and they're all geared toward empowerment, a sense of the part time clergy person as not trying to be Superman or superwoman and, you know, work full time for part time pay or something like that, which is not the way to do this. The part time person recognizing that they have a supporting role to play in empowering others and. And can strategically do that. And the three models are: One is the pastor as equipper. Another is the pastor as ambassador. And the third, I would call the the pastor as a collaborator or a collaborative model. And I'll tell you briefly what each each consists of. We can think of the first as pastor as equipper of the laity. And so there the pastor is empowering the the people of the congregation to cover the areas and be engaged in ways that they feel called to do and but that maybe they haven't traditionally done because maybe it was done by a full time pastor in the past. And so, like one example of this Saint John's Episcopal in Gloucester, Massachusetts, has a 30 hour a week, part time pastor who strategically uses a portion of his time to build up the people in, in areas that, that they want to develop. And so the, the people have become the evangelists. The people have become the leaders of the stewardship campaign. And the people have become the facilitators of adult education or, or spiritual formation through learning. All of those things used to be the domain of the priest. But through intensive, dedicated times like, you know, maybe an eight week or a 10 or 12 week series, you can move a cohort into competency. And now the priest is freed up to do some of the other things that the priest is needed to do. And so that's where the distribution looks like in that. Second, so moving on to the ambassador model with the ambassador model, that's kind of like what we see at Salishan in Tacoma, where essentially you're thinking of pastor as ambassador to say, how can we send the pastor out and build relationships in the community and grow the church in some cases, use those to actually recruit people and bring them into the congregation? Um, as well as building partnerships and building thicker missional relationships. And I get excited about that model in part, among the others, because people tend to assume that when you have part time clergy, there's no capacity for outreach. The pastor's time all gets consumed with planning worship, preaching, or leading worship and pastoral care with an aging congregation. And they're, all their time is spoken for. That's the way that if you fall into ministry and you're not strategic and you just do that, then you're going to lop off your lifeblood. And because you're not engaging the the energy of the wider community, you're becoming an insular congregation, an inward looking group. And it doesn't have to go that way. The way they pull it off at, at Salishan and at other churches is they trust the laypeople can do a lot of sort of what it takes to to run the church, so to speak, which the laypeople can do, including planning and and leading worship. In morning prayer in the Episcopal tradition. But but others, you know, can can preach and, and there's lots that can be done. Uh, and, and so it's a matter of you might say there's no capacity for it, but what if the lay people led worship once a month? Now, you just bought yourself 12 hours of pastor time. That can be used to something else. And so that's kind of how that plays out. One quick example. And then the third, this collaborator model is where you're really empowering a third community, which is your colleagues. I've seen this. I was kind of surprised to see this that, that there were churches that had multiple part time people on staff, but in some cases, that's what really draws on their gifts and, and what they have in their communities. So, you might have a part time lead pastor at 20 hours, and you might have someone else who is working with the youth or working with the elders or, something else in, or missions in, in that, in another maybe, you know, a ten hour capacity. And interestingly, I've seen this also done where you have collaboratives across congregations where you're, you're seeing groups where you say, okay, there's 3 or 4 congregations in proximity, and all the pastors are part time. Do they all need to be preparing a sermon on the same lectionary text for that same week? Or could we give that week's material to one person who then preaches it in three different settings? If you do that next. Now you just. You just bought yourself a bunch of pastor time, so to speak. The pastors get to hear. Another voice which is interesting and stimulating. And and you and you get to know and the people get build a relationship with not just one clergy person, but with several in the area. The congregations feel more connected. And the pastor's time is used much more efficiently because you're not all trying to build the wheel by yourselves the same week build, you know, we're all going to build the same wheel or our own version of it. And so it's a matter of reimagining the the role of the pastor as, as one of several ministering on a campus, so to speak, in a, in a geographic area. So. That's a glimpse of those three models. I can say more if you are interested on any part of that.

Alicia Granholm: Oh, Jeff, then I love hearing about those. And I want to circle back to something that you mentioned and that is, trust of the people. And I'm so curious what in your research, what you've seen, not just of the, the trust in the people, but also the trust in the Holy Spirit's work as you, you know, connected with these congregations, really engaging a different model of church today.

Jeff MacDonald: Yeah. Glad you asked that. Alicia, it's so important because there's a nervousness around this that starts out. There's a real kind of trepidation and fear that, people told me time and again, we don't think we're we're a real church, or we were afraid before we did this that we might not be a real church if we didn't have a full time pastor. And. I heard that enough times that I thought, wow, that that is a real fear that people have. And think about the where trust comes into this. Of course, trust is. And trust and fear are kind of opposites, aren't they? Uh, and and trust that God is doing something new, that the spirit is doing something here and bringing us to a place where we have to overcome our fears and be bold and be brave and be adaptable, or be in the trenches in a new way, that once they take some of these steps, they surprise themselves with what they can do. And. And you see in congregations, these individuals, including in churches that I've led, who started out just so shy that they couldn't even stand up and make an announcement in front of 15 people in worship, you know, they would be mortified to do it. And now they. They lead. They lead things. They they speak regularly. They have just kind of come into their own and, and they flourish. And um, so I think there is really something, something in this and that has to do with trust and learning. What does it mean to trust? Well, there's some kind of action involved. It's not just a mental or emotional state, but there's an action involved. And and this model of ministry invites that. But you have to take it because you can. You can go to this model of ministry and have everybody kind of say, well, I guess we don't do half of what we used to do because the pastor isn't here to organize it, so I guess it won't happen. Or we could say, actually, it'll still happen and we'll do it ourselves, or we'll do something different and. It's that kind of wheel spinning that makes this, puts the trust into motion. Galvanizes it, I would say, catalyzes it somehow. Yeah.

Dwight Zscheile: So, Jeff, what you've described involves a lot of wonderful spiritual opportunities for really empowering and animating all the spiritual gifts in the body of Christ, people stepping in and taking agency and ownership of the ministry. I suspect also simplifying some things perhaps, and really focusing on what are we really here to do is together as church, right? Um, and really, this is a very hopeful story, I think. So those of us, those of our listeners who are thinking about maybe having been either having to navigate the shift or being invited into it, either for their own life circumstances or for financial reasons in their congregations or whatever's going on, your work really, you know, lifts up how promising this move can be. So I want to thank you for both for the work you've done and for joining us today. It's really great having you on the show.

Jeff MacDonald: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Alicia Granholm: Yeah. So, Jeff, we've loved having you. And listeners, thank you so much for joining us today. We hope that you found it inspiring and encouraging. We know that we have. We would love to have you join us again next week, as we take another dive into how the church can faithfully navigate a changing world. Alicia Granholm and Dwight Zscheile signing off on another episode of The Pivot podcast. We'll see you next week.

Faith+lead: The Pivot podcast is a production of Luther Seminary's Faith lead. Faith lead is an ecosystem of theological resources and training designed to equip Christian disciples and leaders to follow God into a faithful future. Learn more at Faithlead.org.