Should Pastors Who Can't Afford to Feed Their Families Learn to Code?

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Welcome to Bible Bash, where we aim to equip the saints for the works of ministry by answering the questions you're not allowed to ask.

01:38

We're your hosts, Harrison Kerrig and Pastor Tim Mullett, and today we'll answer the age -old question, should pastors who can't afford to feed their families learn to code?

01:48

Now, as we start this episode, Tim, what Bible verse do you have to read for us? Yeah, Acts 18 .2

01:57

says, And he found a Jew named Achilla, a native of Pontus, recently come from Italy with his wife

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Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome, and he went to see them. And because he was of the same trade, he stayed with them and worked, for they were tentmakers by trade.

02:14

So, that's just a verse basically saying that Paul was a tentmaker, along with Achilla and Priscilla. So, basically, along with Paul's skills as a spiritual leader and as a church planner, he also had some useful skills too, huh?

02:32

He had some skills of value. Yeah, I mean, it's funny, yeah, because one of the jokes about going into ministry,

02:44

I mean, particularly the way that I did. So, I mean, I went to Bible college and I went to seminary, and I have a general

02:50

Bible degree, and then I have a Master's of Divinity degree. And when it comes to trying to find a normal job with those two degrees,

02:59

I mean, they really are liabilities in a lot of ways to trying to find just normal employment that is not very specific to religious kind of endeavors there.

03:14

So, this seems like it might be sort of a given based off of the passage you just read, but I want to ask this anyway just so we can have it out there and it's hopefully clear for everyone.

03:28

Is a pastor who is unable to pay all their bills just through being a pastor, is it better for them to be bivocational rather than trying to struggle along and trim a lot of the fat out of their budget to just the bare bones kind of thing and try and only be a pastor that way?

03:59

Is it better to just give some of their time to trying to learn a quote -unquote useful skill to society?

04:13

Well, there's a lot going on with a question like this and it's difficult to know how to answer it in a short and concise way.

04:21

Meaning, one of the things that's happened particularly as it relates to seminary education within America in particular, one of the problems is that you have a lot of big box seminaries like the kind that I went to that seem to have very little to no standards as to who they're going to let in to get a seminary degree.

04:48

Meaning, when I went to seminary, I'll be honest,

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I was a little bit nervous that they would actually let me in. I mean, you think, hey,

05:00

I'm going to go and I'm going to be a pastor and I don't know what they expect. But then, when you think about just the standard big box seminary,

05:09

I'm not trying to slander them, but it's very obvious that when you go to seminary and you see the kind of people who are there, there's basically almost no standards that are being exercised as to who they're going to let in to seminary.

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And a lot of the recruiters for these seminaries, a lot of what they do is they basically, they know that there's a market for young people who particularly don't really know what they want to do with their life.

05:40

And so there's been, I mean, there's a lot of, like if you're in certain kinds of church circles, there's a lot of pressure that people put on a certain kind of people, a certain demographic of person to say, hey, you don't want to waste your life, right?

05:59

You don't want to waste your life by doing something mundane. You don't want to live your whole life collecting CCLs and all that in order to retire.

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But you want to make something of your life, and so there's pressure that young people feel just at your standard youth pastor kind of message that's pushed forward over and over again.

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You want to do something with your life, and you go into ministry, and that'll be the answer. And so what you have is you have a lot of young people who are going into seminary with just zero life skills that they've ever developed.

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A lot of the guys I went to with seminary, they had never really even worked real jobs before, right?

06:39

So they didn't have any skills. This was their, they kind of made a mess of their life in certain areas.

06:46

I got to stop you real quick, Tim. Are you talking about ministry right now, or are you talking about the military?

06:53

Because they sound pretty similar right now. A lot of times the military, they go after those guys that don't really have any ambition or any purpose in their life at the moment.

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These young guys right out of high school, 18, 19 years old who don't really have a plan, aren't really planning on going to college at least immediately.

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And so these guys come along, and they're like, Hey man, if you enlist, man, you get this type of bonus.

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You get this signing bonus immediately. You've just got to do these things, and then you get that, and you get a guaranteed job getting paid at least this much money.

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So it's a lot like the... It sounds in a lot of ways like the same thing, just when you go to the seminary, you're not getting that signing bonus.

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You're typically going into debt instead. Yeah, and that's part of the problem.

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So part of the problem is that you have these seminaries who are charging these exorbitant amounts of money in order to get educated, right?

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And then they're basically marketing themselves to a bunch of young guys who really don't have a lot of plan in their life, who just maybe get out of college.

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So I mean, the vast majority of guys that went to seminary with me were just straight out of college, no plan in their life, want to do something with their life.

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They maybe feel some charismatic sense of calling to the ministry or something along those lines, and they were talked into at some point thinking they need to go into the ministry.

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They'd never preached a sermon before. They've never done a... A lot of the guys

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I'm talking about, they never even read their Bible before. They just had some experience that they had at some point where they were persuaded that they needed to surrender their life to ministry or something like that.

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And then you have a seminary who just is coming along and saying, hey, you're not going to turn away a cash cow, right?

09:07

So this is how you exist. We've got professors to pay, man. Yeah, we've got professors.

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I mean, it's just absolutely true, and I don't... I'm not saying all seminaries are like that, but a lot of them are like that.

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But then the issue is then you have a bunch of guys who have no life skills, no plan with their life, who are then...

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Then you go to seminary, and then there's this pressure put on you to say, hey, if you quit, you're letting

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God down, right? Because once a pastor, always a pastor, right?

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Once you feel called, once you feel called to the ministry, right? This is a quasi -command that God gave you, that He's telling you, not only what you have to do with the rest of your life, you have to be a pastor for the rest of your life, but then it's also this implicit kind of promise that somehow

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He's going to provide a place for ministry for you, right? So He's going to provide... And then He's going to provide a particular type of ministry for you, so He's going to provide a church that is able to support you financially, full -time, right?

10:17

So He's promising a future full -time ministry placement. And so basically, you go to seminary, you go to Bible college, you go to seminary, whatever else, you get this degree, you get into a bunch of debt, and with no plan on how you're going to pay for it, all in the hopes that maybe you'll be ready to be a pastor by the end of it, right?

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And then the funny part, so what's really funny about that is then you just get down with your seminary, you conquer the seminary experience and all that, which is something else.

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I mean, it's just like three, maybe four years of your life in intense reading all day long, studying and everything else.

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So you still don't have any marketable skills, right? You've been kind of ignoring the church, like very little involvement in the church the whole time because you're trying to figure out how to get through this thing.

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You're at time to learn and all that. But then you get out from there, and then you look at the job openings for the first time.

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This is like a few months before you graduate seminary. You start looking at all the job openings. And I mean, they're the funniest kind of things in the world.

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They want this pastor with this dynamic vision that's going to lead the congregation in entirely the same direction that they're going, but it's going to work.

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But then they have a very specific thing they want.

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It's like none of it hardly is concerned with any doctrinal issues for the most part, but then it's just like, hey, we want you to make the church grow while not doing anything different than we're already doing.

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Pete Hey, don't turn the ship at all, but make us more successful. Jared That's right. But then like the funny, what's funny about it, though, is you look at all these advertisements or these ads or whatever for the pastor or whatever, and it's like they want someone who has like 10 years of pastoral experience.

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10 years of pastoral experience, and here's a salary, like $30 ,000 a year with a parsonage or something like that.

12:13

It's like if you have someone who has 10 years of pastoral experience, why would they leave their church to go to your church for $30 ,000 a year with a parsonage or something like that?

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They may not even be able to live on that, right? So then the issue is like there's like this whole church shopper or church hopping kind of culture among pastors to where you just take a job in order to get experience, and then you hop to the next job.

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And you think about like all the financial constraints that are put on individuals like the ones

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I'm describing going through this system. It's like it's a system that's just absurd when you think about it.

12:55

It's like it's a system that basically says, hey, you get into $50 ,000 to $100 ,000 worth of debt going to seminary or whatever, and then you're going to come out with no marketable skills with the expectation that you already have 10 years of experience doing this thing.

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And none of this, like the seminary, like the nice, friendly seminary recruiters they didn't tell anyone about any of this, like how it actually works.

13:20

But then, I mean, you can imagine like what that does to the doctrinal integrity of the people coming out of seminary, right?

13:28

Like meaning like if you're looking for a pastor job, you're going to go to the places with money, and typically the places with money are,

13:35

I mean, not because you're greedy, but because you want to survive, right? But then like the issue there is then to say, hey, like the churches with the money, with all the funds, they're often the ones that are just like absolutely and utterly filled with compromise, right?

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So they're the ones who are just like doctrinally a mess, like their philosophy of ministry is a mess, like it's all a mess.

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But then they're the only ones who have the jobs, who have the money. And so then you learn from the very beginning, hey, if I take this job, like this is the only way

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I'm going to survive because I don't have any skills that I can rely on to take care of me because I'm utterly dependent upon churches to do it, right?

14:18

So I've set up my life in such a way that I didn't have anything productive to do on the front end, and now

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I'm utterly and completely and totally at the mercy of what a church is going to be able to do or not, like at that point.

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And then typically it's like, yeah, it is the ones that have the money that are going to, and they have certain expectations of you that are going to be filled with compromise.

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And I mean, that's why you get systems like the SBC and everything else. They're just filled with a bunch of people who they realize that their paycheck is dependent upon them not rocking the boat and being a politician more than they are a pastor and trying to keep the peace.

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And then what you have is you have a situation where you just have a bunch of people who they started out ministry in a dumb way, and then they're at the mercy of the system, right?

15:11

Which is just, which rewards fall in line, be a yes, you know, a yes man or whatever.

15:19

And it really discourages anyone saying anything that might, you know. Petey Yeah, and isn't it interesting too that, you know, often you were talking earlier about, you know, people, young people going into seminary feeling this sort of like, hey,

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I've been called to the ministry in some sort of charismatic way.

15:41

Isn't it funny that that translates over to, you know, pastors who are moving on to other churches?

15:48

Typically, they're only ever called to the ones that are going to pay them more money. You know, they're only ever called to go to those bigger churches.

15:58

You know, the youth pastor, you know, he's only ever called to go be the, you know, the adult ministry pastor or the, you know, great commission pastor, the hospitality.

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He's not called to go be another youth pastor somewhere else because that's sort of, yeah, because that's sort of the,

16:22

I mean, he's an entry point, man. God's not going to call him to someplace that's not paying more money. Jared Yes, I mean, part of the big problem is you have this charismatic sense of culling that is directing the whole project, and there's no wisdom involved in any of it, right?

16:39

There's no thought put into, like a Bible says, no one sets out to build a tower unless they first count the cost, and then if they discover they don't have enough to do it, then they're going to get mocked or whatever, right?

16:54

But the whole charismatic thing is driving the whole thing. But then you're asking me, well, should pastors think about having some sort of marketable skill before going into ministry?

17:05

Like, should they be thinking along those lines? And I think in an ideal world, like, no, right?

17:12

So, I mean, you have like Paul talking about, you know, no one entangles himself in his letters to Timothy or whatever.

17:22

No one entangles themselves in civilian pursuits, right? But then the enlisted one, like, seeks to serve the one above, right?

17:28

So, like, when you think about the time it takes to be a pastor, I mean, there's like very real, like, being a pastor requires time, and there's only 24 hours in a day, and you do have responsibilities that you're going to have to have.

17:40

Like, so you have responsibilities to your family, meaning, like, in order to even be qualified to be a pastor, you have to be shepherding your family well.

17:49

That means bringing your kids up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. That means living with your wife in an understanding way.

17:55

That means trying to present your wife spotless and blameless before the Lord. That's time, like, and that's the thing that qualifies you to be a pastor is getting your house in order and shepherding what you have, right?

18:08

So, like, that all requires a certain amount of time. And then you think about, like, the demands at a standard church.

18:16

I mean, there's just never enough time, right? I mean, you have to teach, you have to preach, you have to visit people, you have to counsel, you have to, like, disciple people, you have, like, whatever things your church is doing, like, there's just a bunch of time sink.

18:30

And so, I mean, like, in an ideal world, yeah, sure, it'd be great if you could be in a situation where you're just, like, the apostles say, hey, it's not desirable for us to wait tables, but we're going to devote ourselves to the ministry of the

18:43

Word and to prayer. Like, it would be the best kind of situation to have a pastor who's completely freed up to disciple his flock, to preach the

18:51

Word of God, right? In season and out of season, everything else, to shepherd his home, and isn't entangled in civilian pursuits.

18:59

I mean, that would be absolutely ideal, but then the reality is, like, if you look at, like, the way that ministry actually works,

19:08

I mean, if Paul himself, like, was a tentmaker, then the ideal isn't, you know, necessarily biblical.

19:14

I mean, what I mean is, it's not like it's wrong to be a full -time paid vocational pastor.

19:19

That's, like, Paul puts that forward as an ideal, right? He puts that forward as the ideal so that you're not entangled in civilian pursuits, but then the reality is, like, if you're doing it right, right?

19:32

Like, if you're doing the thing right, Jesus says, like, the servant is not above his master. If they hated me, they're going to hate you, right?

19:40

And, like, the issue is, like, if you're a pastor who has any sorts of convictions about anything whatsoever,

19:45

I mean, you may have a hard time Like, I mean, it's easy to build a church if you just give all the people everything that they want and tell them that they're, you know, not step on their toes, not teach anything that's hard, you know, stay away from the controversial issues, like, don't speak to where they're at, don't challenge them in any way, don't push them in any way, and just, you know, anything they want to do, you do, you make it happen, give them a bunch of programs, give them a bunch of activities, you know, all that kind of stuff.

20:15

Anything that they want to do, you just let them do. You know, if they want to teach, let them teach, whatever else. Like, that's, like,

20:22

I'm not saying that that's not without headaches, but, I mean, at least there's a lot less...

20:29

Yeah, yeah, I mean, you can build a... You can, you know, you entertain the goats...

20:35

And you get reputation from it, too, you know. Yeah, you get reputation, and, you know, there's more goats than there are sheep.

20:45

So, like, there's an easy way to build a flock of goats, you know. And just look at all your big churches, most of your big churches out there, and you'll find out how you do it.

20:54

It's pretty easy to see. But, you know, not all of them, but, like, a lot of them.

21:00

Like, the biggest, I mean, I don't know, Joel Osteen has how many people in his church? He has a whole, like, stadium, a literal stadium.

21:11

There's a way that seems right under man, but in the end, it leads to death. You know,

21:16

I mean, the last days, they'll heap up for themselves, teachers who are going to tickle their ears and all that.

21:22

I mean, certainly, there are ways to build, you know, build a church full of non -regenerate people, for sure.

21:31

But, I mean, you do have to think about, well, is it worth the money, you know? And I think that money is a big hurdle for many people, particularly in ministry.

21:40

And there's so many people who are bought by their salary. And particularly,

21:46

I mean, you can just, you can look at the SVC and you can see all this happening. I mean, there's a reason why Barber got elected president of the

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SVC. And it's not because he's qualified or even remotely got it. Yeah, the things

21:59

I've heard from him are not very impressive. I mean, it's utterly humiliating to lose to someone like Barber.

22:11

But, I mean, you think about it, like, he's bought, man. Like, those votes were bought, and they're bought by people who are in a system that's bought, right?

22:21

And that's the way it works. So, I mean, you think about the whole thing from start to finish is set up in a way to compromise your loyalty because you're dependent upon money.

22:32

Right? And so, yeah, I mean, I think particularly the more hostile, you know, our culture and society becomes to truth, the more post -Christian we're becoming as a society, it may be that there's just fewer and far, like the church jobs, like the nice full -time paid church jobs are fewer and further in between.

22:56

And, you know, people who want to be faithful, they may have to really, like, think about, well, in order to be faithful and to actually say the things

23:05

God wants me to say, I might have to put myself in some sort of position where I'm not utterly dependent upon, you know, this congregation who may be mad at me tomorrow, right?

23:22

I'm not, you know, it's either that or you just, like, you do the get run out of your church every few years kind of thing, you know?

23:29

So, I mean, and I'm not saying that that's everyone's experience, but I'm just trying to say that, you know, if there were just so many solid doctrinal good churches out there filled with godly people who want to hear the truth, then we wouldn't be in the mess we're in, you know?

23:46

So, I mean, just look around the world, and everyone knows this. I mean, it's so hard to find a good church.

23:51

It's so hard to find good pastors who aren't filled with compromise. And the reason why is because the moment they say anything, like, they're going to be at churches who are going to kick them out, okay?

24:02

So, yeah, I mean, I think in an ideal world, it would be the best thing for people to do, completely devote themselves to the ministry of the word and prayer, but your integrity is not worth that.

24:13

And if the only way to get in that kind of situation is to tell the goats what they want to hear and give the goats what they want, then you might as well not do it.

24:27

I mean, towards the beginning, you know, hey, it's time to get some useful skills. Don't just be a pastor, you know, because you're going to graduate seminary with no real skills whatsoever.

24:39

But then, you know, are we being serious there, or is that just, you know, being facetious to say that having the, you know, not necessarily someone coming out of seminary, because,

24:52

I mean, that was my experience too in seminary is you had a lot of young guys and even girls going into the school that I was at, and they don't know anything.

25:06

They don't know anything about the Bible. They don't have their own convictions. You know, thankfully,

25:12

I didn't have all my convictions formed, but I at least had enough to, you know, pick out what

25:21

I thought my teachers were saying that was right and what I thought that they were saying was wrong. But then a lot of the guys that were younger than me,

25:29

I mean, they would just drink every word that every single one of their, you know, their teachers would say, and some of it was bad.

25:40

Some of it was really bad. Jared Well, what's funny about that is that, you know, most of the people

25:48

I knew were that kind of people. Pete They wouldn't question anything, and I would ask them about it sometimes. So, I'm like, hey, did you think any of that was weird?

25:55

And they're like, no, what, why? Why would you think any of that was weird? Jared The interesting thing about it, too, is like they would do that at class

26:05

A, and then they would go to class B, which would absolutely agree with class A, and they would have no sense in which the two things were contradictory.

26:13

You know, what I'm trying to say is that there's a lot of pressure in seminary from the very beginning to conform, right, to be a yes man, to be, because, like, these people hold the keys to your livelihood in the future, and you're giving them all that, you know?

26:34

So, it's like you have to play ball in order to network and get where you want to go and climb certain ladders.

26:41

And, you know, the people who were in it the longest were the worst, you know, at that kind of thing, because that's how your livelihood is so tied to this, and you have no other plan, you know?

26:51

And so, I mean, I think it's just the worst. You're saying, hey, you know, seminary, we're joking a little bit about how it's not a real skill or whatever.

27:02

It's like, well, no, it's a great skill. It's a wonderful skill to, I mean, to know the

27:08

Bible, to know eternal things, to know the words of life, to have answers to give people.

27:13

You'll, you know, obviously, I mean, it's a wonderful thing to devote yourself to, and we need more people who devote themselves to knowing the book way better than what they do, and there will be rewards in heaven for all of that, like, for sure, right?

27:28

But then at the same time, seeing where we're at, I think you might want to put some thought, if you're struggling to provide for a family, like, you might want to put some thought into, like, hey, maybe there's a better way to go about getting my theological education.

27:48

And I think for most people, it would probably involve, like, getting married, like, just starting out like a normal human being.

27:54

Getting a normal skill, you know, that you can have in order to, like, demonstrating a track record of responsible living, you know, getting married, having kids, learning how to raise them, and then at a certain point saying, hey, you know,

28:11

I'm going to operate as an individual who has been involved in church, has faithfully served the church, has been tested to some degree, and then after all that, then, yeah,

28:21

I'm going to devote myself to more full -time study. But I'm not doing so as some person with no plan, with no skills, like, never been tested before in any area of my life, kind of messed up every other area of my life, now

28:37

I'm going to go after that. That's my last resort. It's either this or the military, so. That's for sure. And I hate doing push -ups.

28:43

Yeah. So, I mean, you know, sadly, there's, yeah,

28:49

I mean, that's just not a joke. I mean, that seems like a joke, but it's just, it's not. So, that's, yeah.

28:56

Okay, well, I think that's a good place for us to wrap up the conversation on, and certainly it's, you know, it's a helpful conversation for people who are either thinking about going into ministry or people who already are in ministry, and, you know, are really trying to deal with the fact that, you know, hey, dealing with the struggle that you were bringing up earlier, where it's like, hey, do

29:22

I give all my convictions and be able to feed my family, or do I hold to them and put my family in a situation that we might not be in, you know, if I had just become an accountant or something, right?

29:37

And so this is certainly something that needs to be thought through, and just trying to answer the questions about convictions and how do

29:45

I feed my family and what do I do with this, and am I going to feel guilty because, you know,

29:51

I'm not devoting 100 % of the time that I have to my family and my church alone, the ministry that I'm involved in right now.

29:59

Now I've got to sell a lot of my time to some third party to go, you know, be a garbage man or something.

30:06

You know, there's a lot to all of that. So it's certainly a helpful conversation.

30:12

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We appreciate you guys, and it goes a long way in helping us being able to put out these episodes week in and week out.

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So with all that being said, we appreciate the support, and we'll see you on the next one. Say the truth in the midst of a biblically illiterate world who will be perpetually offended by your every move.