My Experience as a Bivocational Pastor | Gerald Cook
In this edition of Pastor’s Notes, Gerald Cook, bivocational pastor of College Grove Baptist Church, shares his experience balancing ministry with a career in the corporate world and how God used both to prepare him to serve. Gerald challenges the idea that ministry begins when you land a ministry job. Instead, he encourages leaders to recognize their calling, equip themselves, and look for opportunities to serve wherever God has placed them.
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My name is Gerald Cook. I am the bi-vocational pastor or co-vocational pastor, as some might call it, of College Grove Baptist Church in College Grove, Tennessee. I say bi-vocational or co-vocational because I also work as a global sales training manager in the medical device space. I have had a 25-plus-year career in pharmaceutical regulatory writing, sales, training, leadership development, sales management. I've done all those things in my career. But a couple of years ago, after leading myself through an equipping process, I showed up at College Grove Baptist Church to help them revitalize a congregation and a church that was declining and revitalize the spiritual health of the church as well as the population of the church. A lot of people call this bi-vocational or co-vocational because they use it as two vocations, two jobs I really didn't see it as a second job. I saw it as an opportunity to shepherd the flock of God that is amongst me, as scriptures told me. I had been developing my professional speaking and developing my business awareness elsewhere, and living life as anybody in a secular career would live. But also equipping myself, filling myself up in such a way that when the need presented itself, when the opportunity presented itself to go and work with people, whether that be in a group setting, in a hospitality setting, in a teaching format to help people better understand how they can serve the church or better understand theology and doctrine, I was naturally able to go in and serve in that manner. Because I'd been filled up with it, I could spill it out on others. So that bivocational or co-vocational experience for me happened really naturally, but it all happened because I answered that call. A lot of people feel that call, and they think that they want to enter into this vocation, but they haven't spent enough time discerning it either. So the opportunity presents, the need is there, and they hesitate, they stall. They're not ready for what they might be wanting to do. Others might be ready, but they haven't discerned the call, and they haven't surrounded themselves with disciple-making ministers or, or those that would help them listen, hear, understand, and apply what they had been learned. A lot of people in the ministry space might be looking for the job. I wasn't looking for a job. I was looking for an opportunity to serve. That's important because now in my balance of working globally and traveling to serve my nine-to-five, sometimes I have to ask somebody to fill in for me in the bivocational space. They need to come in and teach a Wednesday night class or even preach on a Sunday morning, and they think they want to preach until they find out that it's not a big church. There aren't 2,000 people paying attention to them. There's no video recording It's just 25 to 35 people that have gathered to worship because what they've seen God do in their lives that week The bivocational future of the church might look like that. It might look very small, it might look unrewarding, but if you feel that call, you answer that call regardless of where it is Equipping for that is something that, in my case, took a little longer because I had to balance my 9:00 to 5:00. I, I couldn't go back to full-time seminary. I had to take night classes. I had to travel on weekends for what we called hybrid weekends at the seminary. I started, in fact, in a lay leader program at Brentwood Baptist Church called Timothy and Titus, or affectionately known as T and T. I built my structure, my curriculum, and I equipped myself as the opportunities presented themselves. One of the really unique and neat things about that is I was able to apply my learning as I was learning it. I wasn't reading and then moving to the next book. I wasn't, uh, practicing a sermon and then moving to the next sermon. I was actually applying it every day. That's where life and ministry blend together in such that your life becomes your ministry, and next thing you know, you're in a bivocational role, and you, you have to actually sit down and remember how I got here Uh, oftentimes I think, you know, when I, when I see opportunities arise or I hear statistics, the ... I think everybody's favorite statistic is, depending on where you're standing, whether you're in North Carolina or you're in Tennessee, somebody will say there's 400 churches out there that are looking for a preacher. And eventually you will ask, "Where are those churches?" You don't see them on LinkedIn. You don't see them on Indeed. You might see one or two. But what you fail to recognize is that that's a very fluid need in a lot of different places. There's always somebody moving into one role or out of another role. And what they're looking for is somebody who recognizes their calling, answers their calling, equips themselves, and ministers from the overflow of what God's been doing in their own life. Now, if you have been a lifelong practitioner, so to speak, in the ministry, you're gonna draw from different experiences. And if the church is looking for someone who is a, and I'm gonna put air quotes on this because I'm still understanding what this means, a professional minister, you're gonna get a certain experience, and you're gonna get a certain skill set, and you're gonna get a certain perspective. That doesn't mean that the guy who's been nurturing relationships for 25 years in the secular world doesn't have anything to offer. In fact, sometimes the people in the pew are looking for someone who's walked their life, who sat in those boardrooms, who's been in those, those blue collar jobs, who has faced the, the question outside the church where they have to make a decision based on character, integrity, discipleship, and their understanding of who God is and what He's doing in their life. That lands different when I say it Now, oftentimes I'd have no trouble coming up with analogies, coming up with illustrations, because I've been in those shoes. I think that brings a different perspective for those who are going to church looking for someone with discernment and wisdom in their context. Now, my experience isn't perfect. I've had life. I've made decisions that made me wonder, "What was I thinking at that time?" So now I understand a little differently what it means to disciple somebody, to walk through forgiveness with somebody, because I've had to relive the sin. Jesus has walked me through the valley of the shadow of death and walked me back through choices I've made, decisions I've made, to understand how they equipped me to better teach and lean and, and lead somebody and shepherd somebody in that situation in life. I have a different experience. It's different. It's not less than, and in fact, it's continuing. I don't have it all figured out. I have a master's in church revitalization. I've taken every type of lay leadership program that's been offered near me, but I'm continuing to take the steps that God has called me to. And as Mike Glenn has often said, "God doesn't show you the second step until you take the first." And what I'm learning is that once I step through that shadow, the other side looks nothing like I thought it would. It's better. If you think, "God might be calling me to this," your first step is to stop Remove all the clutter and the static and the, the voices in your head that might try to drown that out. You know, we're in, it's summertime. It's summer vacation, and a lot of times during summer vacation, we seem to step away from discipleship a little bit. In fact, it's one of the criticisms that's easy to poke, poke at a little bit because we, we might suspend the Wednesday nights, we might suspend some of the activities around the church because it's summer break. Now, the criticism would be, "Well, God doesn't take a vacation. Why should we?" The realization is that the devil doesn't take a vacation either. He's constantly telling you you're not good enough. He's constantly telling you you're broken. And when you start to discern a call, you need to drown out everything else. You need to get into the spiritual disciplines of Bible intake. When you open up that Bible and you start reading, God will meet you there and explain what that means in your context and your life, and you will hear your call in reading Scripture. Meditate on that Scripture. Spend time praying Scripture back to God, and let Him explain it back to you Spend time in solitude. Go into the spiritual disciplines and ask, "God, what are you telling me?" The other thing I'd encourage you to do is find somebody who knows you and knows why you were designed. Find somebody who can recognize your gifts differently than they recognize your skills. The world's gonna recognize your skill. They're gonna recognize your speed. They're gonna recognize the fluidity at which you do things, how good you look doing it. They recognize all the surface things. But somebody who can walk with you as a dis- as a disciple maker will recognize your gifting, the things that God has gifted and equipped you for to build up the body around you. Mike says often that the First Reformation gave the Bible back to the people, and the Second Reformation is bringing the ministry back to the people. One of the things I get to see as a bi-vocational pastor is that my role is to equip the saints for the work of the ministry. I get to see the saints find their ministry. When they do that, I encourage it. I point out things that they take for granted. For example, when you play the piano, it frees people up to speak to God and thank Him for what they've seen Him do that week in ways that I would never be able to do leading a hymn, for example. I get to see those who have spent a life in construction or in, uh, project management meet a young man behind the church, in an activity, and they realize that they have something in common. Most recently, it was somebody teaching my young boys Sunday school class and realized that his, because his father was deceased, he couldn't speak to him anymore on earth, just like a couple of these boys whose father was absent, they couldn't speak to them either. That's a moment I couldn't have planned, but that's somebody hearing a call, answering the call, and putting themselves into a Sunday school class where they can build up the body. They can speak into somebody else in a way that nobody else can, but it's God speaking through them because they were obedient to answer the call and show up when God said, "I have an opportunity for you here at this time."
