Thanks you, James.
I did wonder if for the sake of brevity I could shorten this to just meth tent
makers but it kind of puts a Breaking Bad spin on the whole talk.
So I don't think we'll do that.
What we're wanting to do in this
afternoon's presentation is kind of go through get you oriented to some of what
we've heard from tent makers, some of the dialogue that's resulted from this.
Every once in a while you're going to see this very subtly placed product placement.
I do have some of the tent maker books available if you are interested.
But sort of the flow that I'm going to be
drawing from in terms of information is we were involved in an interdenominational
research project and from that research project we got some
reports out, some of which are available for free on the website there.
And then a group of us sort of got
together to collaborate on creating a book.
And so it's a combination of reflection on
the research and then also drawing on the stories of current tent makers.
We were able to draw upon a number of
tyndale professors to write chapters as tent makers.
The joke I heard was it's because
Tyndale's pay is so low, everyone has to have another job as a pastor.
Anyway.
So here are the three questions that we
tried to use to frame our research project.
So this was a multi methods research project.
We used some focus groups, literature review, then we talked to a number of tent
makers and then we also had a quantitative component with pastoral psychologist Dr.
Wanda Malcolm at Wycliffe College.
So the three questions we use to frame the
overall research project are what are the key features of the diverse expressions of
bivocational ministry in Canada trying to surface what's going on here?
What are significant biblical theological emphasis to consider and how can promotion
of the opportunities and resourcing of the challenges take place?
Strategically, we are using a community based research approach.
So sort of we're thinking about three phases.
You have the regular kind of research of getting information,
the knowledge generation phase and then you have the knowledge mobilization phase
where you start sharing with people here's what we learned.
And then you have community mobilization, right?
So we drew upon people like myself who
have previous experience as tent makers and also people who are currently tent
makers to speak into the design to be part of framing the questions.
But the end result is we actually want some kind of mobilization taking place.
How can we better help people who are
balancing both congregational leadership and other work?
How can we engage people meaningfully in
the discernment of is this the right path forward for you as you pursue your calling
and what does that mean for us as a church at large?
So you folks are coming in on the community mobilization phase.
I'm seeing you folks as some of the participants and the workers here.
And that's where I want to reach in this conversation.
So I'm going to talk fast.
For those of you who are my Salvation Army
employees, you haven't often been exposed to fast talking.
James, you may never want to be again, but talk fast through the presentation.
Just to get you guys prepped so we can have some conversation at the end,
I put up the COVID page for our larger research report.
There's a lot of people on here.
This is just a fraction of the number of
people from the different denominations, parachurches who participate in helping
inform us, help things happen for any of the Free Methodists in the crowd.
I do have to underline Amy Bratton's name.
Amy has been like our administrative quarterback.
She's really been the centerpiece of making everything, everything go forward.
If you know Amy, you understand why that would be possible.
But we had a number of partners involved.
So who did we talk to?
We talked to 16 women, 24 men from a bunch of different provinces.
We talked to people who self identified in their congregational role as being like, a
leader, solo pastor, or an associate pastor.
People who are specialists.
So someone who is, for example, a youth
pastor and a multistaff team church planters.
We had a number of church planters in our interviews.
Copastors, so often that was spouses that they are
pastoring together and volunteer ministers.
So people are getting no pay from the church.
About 20% were born outside of Canada.
So that's approximating Canadian national averages.
I know that feels low for those of you in the GTA, but that's sort of the national.
And about half of them were free.
Methodists or salvationists? So there we go.
That's our wesleyan content.
So some of these people we're talking to,
when they describe their congregation, we really didn't apply a filter.
Like to ask them, are you a big church? Are you small church?
But as they're sharing their story, you start to realize some of them were small
enough that we might call them just an incarnational ministry.
Like, my wife and I invite people from our apartment building into our apartment.
We're trying to make our apartment in this
building the community center, the community hub, right?
That kind of an entity.
And then we had some people who said,
yeah, they're part of a multistaff team at a congregation.
We had a mix of urban and rural churches in the study.
What are key features of the diverse expressions?
So when we were asking people, who do you know?
Who's a tent maker?
It was an awkward question of Salvation
Army because the whole tent maker bivocational doesn't resonate.
We had to talk about multirole.
If you're managing a thrift store and you're also, functionally the pastor of
your congregation and you're also providing a food bank for your community,
other denominations consider that more than one job.
But in the Salvation Army.
There's sort of a theology around.
Well, we're called to the community and do
whatever right, so we had to adjust the language a little bit.
But as we were hunting for people, we were
looking for people who had a diversity of tasks.
We knew we weren't in this study going to be able to be representative and do sort
of a sample of everybody in Canada who's involved.
But we tried to find people who had
diverse combinations of congregational leadership and other work.
So what did they do?
There are 44 different roles.
Those of you who are good at math.
If we interviewed 40 people and there's 44
roles, we had to shift the language partway
through the study from bivocational to multivocational.
Some of our people were identifying they had like more than one other side gig
or sometimes their church was one of the multiple side gigs that they had.
I tried to, for Brevity's sake, kind of
categorize some of the roles that we heard.
This is just a rough categorization, but some of the work they were doing was
stuff that we might recognize in one way or another as ministry.
Right.
One person was an editor for their denominational Sunday school material.
We had a variety of different chaplains.
Someone was a coach for church planters and their denomination.
But it was like a fraction of their time in a week.
The funeral and wedding officials were not doing that for a church.
They were doing that for a business.
The funeral official said, yeah, I'm on a 24 hours call.
Funeral home contacts me and I have to decide right away, can I take this funeral
from someone in the community or do they need to call somebody else?
The wedding official had set up their own company to do weddings.
Here's an example of the week of one of our tent makers.
So this person is a business analyst by day and pastor by night.
So they share preaching with someone else
who actually serves multiple churches in their network of churches.
They're one of those churches that always has food.
You might want to go there.
And the day pre COVID started with a 05:00 a.m. Wake
up in order to be able to do the 1 hour commute.
So they said, yeah, sometimes I can study during my break time in the evenings.
This lighter pink is sort of it depends on
the week as to whether or not they're doing this.
But it could be home visitation or it could be permitting.
Wednesday nights.
We're always committed to mentoring or permitting.
This is a church that invests heavily in mentoring of other leaders.
You might want to take note of that when
we start talking about what can congregations be doing.
Light tank here, home visitation and the
Friday evenings, as always, youth they're prayer meeting Saturday.
They didn't want to tell me what they're doing.
I'm hoping they're taking some time for themselves.
This example, the person
is a chaplain, but they're in a rural area and they do
chaplaincy on Monday at the Regional Health Center.
They go into a hospital and they meet with people.
Tuesday morning they're doing telehealth
chaplaincy, which I didn't know was a thing
then you can see they're doing church stuff in the afternoon at the office.
They're in at the church office on Wednesday.
On Thursday they have prayer meeting and church office work.
And Friday they actually would do mobile
palliative care where they drive to the person's house and offer chaplaincy to
them in their own home as they're sort of in palliative care.
And Saturday they reserve for hanging out with their kids.
This particular individual,
they start at 445 in the morning with their devotions and go to the gym.
They're very disciplined people.
It's almost like they work for an army.
08:00 a.m to 08:00 a.m to 09:00 a.m. They go to the gym
and then they're doing social service stuff for the rest of the day.
Tuesday they're doing some social service stuff, but because it's an integrated kind
of facility, they can do Bible study as part of that.
They have chapel.
Wednesday is their day off, but they're doing a master's degree.
And so part of their day off, their
recreational activity is getting papers written.
And then in the Wednesday and Friday evenings they're doing community meals.
Thursday intercession, they have a bunch more.
There's a very multifaceted social service
work that they were providing within their city.
And then on Saturday they might have a
men's or women's group and some visitation.
So this one, everything is light colored because they said there is no pattern.
My week flexes from week to week.
They said, usually in the morning I'm working as a freelance marketer and I make
a ton of money so I can do whatever I want with the rest of my day.
So everyone's googling now, freelance marketing, how do I get into it?
So they were part of a Christian community and they said, yes, sometimes we might go
out to a community art thing and then we'll get together and reflect on what we
experienced, or we might hold a dance, or we might like these were the kinds of
spiritual activities they're organizing for their small community.
And in the evenings they said, yeah, that's usually time where we can sort of
prep, keep the community together, keep things flowing.
And they had a co colleague who was doing this leadership with them.
So if I could make two observations to you.
A lot of the people were highly, highly structured in their week.
Like, this day, I'm doing this for this
many hours, this day I'm doing this for this many hours.
And then there's a few people who they had worked things out in such a way that they
had a high degree of flexibility in their week.
So we partnered with the Wellness Project
at Wycliffe and what they found as they invited the multivocational folks to
participate in their diagnostic survey around wellness.
So how close are you as a minister to burnout?
They found that the aspects that they
found were significant to people there's a ghost.
Here we go.
Were cultivating personal spiritual depth, vocation and calling,
building work relationships and trust and time and diversity of tasks.
Interestingly, if you read the research report, the time and diversity tasks also
showed up as one of the negative aspects the challenge of organizing things,
scheduling things, keeping things on track.
For the book, wanda, Bethanne and Alvira did a statistical comparative study of the
sample they already had of univocational ministers.
So people who say, yeah, my main thing is I'm the minister, preacher, pastor,
whatever, and compared that with the findings from our multivocational group.
And so if you actually read that chapter in the book, you have to take the mindset
of some kind of procedural detective drama where they're trying to figure out, well,
what is the difference between being multivocational and univocational?
Well, imagine a
procedural drama that actually expected you to not get tired of math.
Okay?
That's more like what that chapter is like.
And the spoiler alert is, at the end, they
said, we don't see a statistically significant difference
between univocational and multivocational people on wellness.
So it's not like if you have more than one job, you're necessarily closer to burnout.
For me, I believe that raises a lot of interesting questions.
Are there people who are drawn towards
needing multiple things on the go all the time?
A couple of our interviewees said that was true.
One guy said, yeah, my mind actually slows down when I'm in crisis mode.
He said, I was in a business call and the
snow caved in my roof while I was on the call.
I finished the call, and at the end I laughed and I said, oh, yeah, now I have
to go deal with the fact that my roof is caved in.
And the other people and my other
coworkers in the call were saying, what, you didn't stop everything?
No, that's fine.
But this was an individual who claimed that.
And when he went through his week, I believe the numbers kind of work out of
saying, yeah, I work 100 hours a week, but this is okay.
This is how I'm wired.
It's kind of the way they describe that.
I don't think that was true of everyone in the study.
I think that person was probably an outlier.
But we hope
there's someone who cares about pastor's well being who's laughing right now.
But it does raise interesting questions.
Are certain people drawn to the diversity of tasks?
And do they enjoy having these different
work environments where they get to build relationships?
So I'm not going to get into all the biblical theological things.
And we didn't try to separate the salvationists and free Methodists from the
rest of the group to figure out this out, but I'm going to just lay a few in front
of you just to sort of spark some conversation.
So here's a quote from someone about calling.
Well, one of the first things I would want
to say is that bivocational ministry is something that will only work if you have
a very clear sense of call to the demands that you'll face.
Because there is seasons and moments where bivocational trivocational work.
You're exhausted, you're depleted.
And it's that sense of calling that you
rely on the trust that God by Spirit is going to enable you and empower you and
that this is your reasonable act of service and love for God and for Jesus.
So just take a moment and think about how
many situations you've been in where you've gone deep in exploring with someone
what their calling is and what that means for them.
Is that something that we need to for
those of us who do mentor, for those of us who do train, for those of us who do
encourage, is that something we need to sort of bring into the conversation?
Every once in a while?
We asked them a specific question what is your theology of work?
One of the interviewees was very brief, said it's it's all spiritual.
All the stuff that I'm doing through my week is spiritual.
That's one response.
Here's another response.
This person said, oh yeah, I just preached on that.
So this was like the pop quiz they were already prepared for.
So I think doing your work as unto the
Lord as the Scripture would encourage us to do is really we are faced with that
daily and then also understanding that people watch, right?
People knowing the pastor, the minister,
they're watching how they respond to things and how I treat people and how I
treat customers and how I speak to managers, how I deal with challenges.
It's just daily life.
Another interview, he said, and this is sort of switching this a
little bit like where does theology arise within your other work?
He said, What I've learned in my
agricultural career informs my church ministry.
Like, there are things I've learned agricultural and farming that are really
quite vital for me and I'm a better pastor because I do this other stuff.
And also, on the other hand, my church
ministry informs my farming and so they mesh.
And I think both careers are richer because of that.
Many of my sermon topics have come from my
agricultural experience and they're contemplated on the tractor seat.
For the record, there's like one farmer
out of the 40, but this is a very you can imagine this
kind of reflection taking place for other forms of work.
So as we think about
how can we engage folks around the opportunities and resourcing the
challenges, I think one of the things we could consider and I've actually done this
in my conversation with planters, with core planters or church planters
is to ask them, well, these different parts of your life, are they integrated?
Or is there a way in which the other work you do sort of complements?
It gives you a break from pastoral
ministry, it gives you something different that you do.
It helps you engage in a different way.
Is it just the money? Right?
So you're doing other work because it brings in some income and addresses
financial sustainability issues for your ministry or church?
Or are you feeling like there's some
tension that these pieces aren't working well together?
And then what do we need to talk about in terms of sorting that out?
We sort of anticipated that
I do this other work for money conversation would come up, and it did.
There was a few people who said, yeah, I took on the school bus driving job
in order to do my doctorate ministry and to pay for tuition.
But now that I'm done that, I'm expecting
I'll get a full time pastoral position and I'm going to leave that behind.
There's another individual said, yeah, I'm planting the church right now.
And so I'm working as a chaplain in
industry and also driving a truck for deliveries.
And I know that as the church plant grows, it's going to demand more of my time,
there's going to be more tithes, and so I'm going to leave the trucking job.
But they said, But I'm not going to ever stop being a chaplain in
that industry because my dad worked in that industry.
And I know there's people who work there who are never going to hear the gospel
unless someone's meeting with them on their own terms.
Right?
So for that individual, they saw sort of a complementary and integrated thing.
It upheld their family tradition in that
industry, and it also gave them an opportunity to connect with people that
they wouldn't necessarily be able to just with their identity of pastor.
One of the other things that came up when we asked about what kind of training or
resources would you recommend, one of the responses I received from
someone who's very articulate was, you know, my Bible interpretation and social
context interpretation from Bible college actually helps me every day.
So they sort of emphasize some of those
things that we consider typically foundational.
You'll find that most ministry training
programs, but others said, I wish someone would have offered
something on how do you start another career outside of ministry or how do you
do budgeting, how do you talk about finances with your spouse?
There's some very sort of general life skills kinds of things that came up.
We didn't get into a lot of discussion of,
do you wish that your ministry training had been paired with your other career?
Ironically, before this book ever was published,
my son decided that he would start and master divinity online.
And he's also going to do his his graduate
education degree in England where he and my daughter in law are living.
And so I realized, oh, my son actually has already started doing this, trying to
integrate both so that he can be a pastor who also teaches.
So there's kind of some options there we could talk about.
Here's my currently favorite overdeveloped and overly complicated diagram.
So if you think about Pedagogy being you
giving information to someone who doesn't know what they need to know.
And if you think about andragogi as being
the learner actually gets to participate in shaping what it is they need to learn.
And you think about Hudagogi, which comes from sort of the idea of self learner that
they actually get to design what it is that they need to learn.
They get to actually create their own educational program.
Where does that fit for us in our academic?
Like when we're thinking about what systems do we need in place, what kinds of
supports, what kind of environment do we need to be encouraging people to pursue to
find their right need for training or development?
Here are some of the ideas that I tried to draw forward from those discussions and
from some of the presentations I've been doing.
So we think about someone may ask for specific things.
Do we as friends or as pastors or as
denominational staff have access to helping direct them into things that are
going to help them develop in the areas that they've identified?
When we know we have people who have
capacity to both be the leader of a congregation and also have another career,
do we have ways to set up, facilitate, possibly fund, I don't know,
some of the specific skills they'll need to develop in the future?
We do some of this right for ministry.
On the ministry side of the equation, we try to provide some training for people
who are entering into ministry and may need some skill development to help them
that are there ways that we can expand that?
Continuing education.
Probably most of us do something in continuing education.
What are the kinds of themes, subjects we could address?
One of the items that was identified that
I found interesting was this idea of team leadership.
Team leadership, you need to do that in
congregational settings, but probably most workplaces.
That's a valuable skill for you to develop.
On the Hudagogi side, like how does
someone actually participate in designing their own experience?
Currently in the Salvation Army, we're
experimenting with communities of practice and so we actually have like a little
learning contract that the group will form.
Here's what we want to focus on for this time.
Here's what we want to learn about together.
So there are some possibilities and I'd be
excited to hear what you folks have to say.
James Pedler raises the brilliant
theological imperative that's contractually obligated to include
brilliant, that multivocational should be normalized across all walks of life for
Christians, that the various vocations we are committed to should be recognized as
contributing to human flourishing and or building up the church.
So to what degree can we actually find ways in which to affirm to normalize?
Wherever you're working, God is already at
work and Jesus has something for you to do.
There in the book, there's chapters where Ashur
Yusuf and who's a professor here at Tyndale and Cam Roxborough who's the
director of Forge Canada both describe their journey.
And both of them say that their congregations were designed
with the intent that everyone who's part of that congregation recognizes that God
has stuff for them to do through the rest of the week.
And so the only reason that they have tent
makers as pastors is because they need to be modeling that as leaders so that the
whole congregation understands that this as feasible and normal as Christians.