Tentmaking
Those who have read what I have written for some years may recall that as a young man I served as pastor to a very distressed mainline Protestant church. It was a place in which I quickly and forcibly learned lessons I have never forgotten, a bootcamp experience that altered my perceptual world, and which has provided a deep well of sympathy for faithful ministers as men who take seriously the responsibility for speaking the truth (that is, for speaking Christ) "in season and out." It was something I needed.
Because my own pastoral experience was sad, hard, and short, I have been attentive to those who managed to survive in the office for many years. I wanted to know how they had managed. At a meeting of the local ministerium (destroyed in that town by progressive clergy who insisted on making public prayers in the name of God our Father and Mother), I spoke at some length to a conservative (now, alas, one has to add that adjective) Evangelical pastor who had mentioned a sermon lately preached to his congregation on a topic which I was sure it would not like—even though it was a perfectly Christian message. I asked him what kind of opposition he encountered. Wasn't he afraid of losing his job?
He told me that when he was confident he was speaking the Word, he didn't care about opposition. The reason was not that he was mighty in prayer, or had a faithfully interceding sainted grandmother (which both may have been so), or had the goods on three of his elders, but because he was rich, and didn't give a hoot if they put him out on the street. If they did, he'd just walk down to the bank.
It surprised me that my first thought upon hearing this was not that he was some kind of hireling, but of what freedom an independent income would provide a man to perform his ordination vows. He only needed the spiritual strength to maintain faithfulness though rich, and to risk unpopularity.
These are great and difficult strengths, and really, one should not say "only" about them, but what is subtracted from this scenario by pecuniary wealth is the straw that so frequently breaks the pastoral camel's back: the multitude of miseries that are a regular part of the married pastor's life that are added by the devil's presence in congregations and denominations, a Presence to whom faithful, truth-speaking ministers are a genuine threat, and who loves nothing better than to bind and slay them. Since those days I have always prescribed for all who wish to enter the pastorate that if they wish to survive in it and do their jobs right, they should be comfortably wealthy before even starting.
Get & Keep a Skill
Now the reader will know that I am being facetious here, or at least partly facetious, because I do think such low considerations should actually be considered, especially where clergy are allowed to marry and have families—which, for some churches is just a little too low altogether (but not without good reason—reason that has to do with freedom for service, as St. Paul plainly said). As for me, I have learned by both observation and personal experience to place no trust in any body of people that decides to constitute itself "a church," whatever its method of organization. There are no exceptions. Michael Rose has provided in Goodbye, Good Men copious examples of the virtuous and faithful expelled from their ministries by wicked politics in the Catholic Church. No one familiar with how things operate in other churches can deny that there are analogous forces at work such that a minister who actually preaches and teaches the Word of God puts himself in grave danger of corruption or exclusion by the powers that
installed him.
I suggest we are provided an example of how to prepare for ministry by St. Paul, who practiced his family trade of tentmaking when he needed funds not received from the churches, and recall that the Lord and his apostles were likewise experienced tradesmen. The foremost of the latter, when he thought Jesus' project had failed, announced to his friends that he was going back to fishing.
I advise that before one enters the ministry, he get a commercially valuable skill and keep current in it for the Lord's sake, for the good of his soul and those of others, and for the perpetuation of his ministry as a Christian man. Illegitimati non carborundum! (Besides, it is my impression that most men enter the ministry too young, before they have sufficient years of experience in dealing with people under their belts. No one is to despise their youth, but there is more to be said than that on the subject.)
Hidden Difficulties
These suggestions about freedom to speak from the School of the Lord I have published before, but I am rehearsing them again here prompted by another consideration that I have noticed among friends and acquaintances in the ministry who have (wittingly or not) shared this hidden piece of their lives with me:
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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more on ministry from the online archives
32.1—January/February 2019
Sex, Women's Ordination & the Rejection of Hierarchy & Equality by James A. Altena
more from the online archives
36.4—Jul/Aug 2023
Our Political Void & the Disintegration of Truth by Michael Hanby
28.2—March/April 2015
Man, Woman & the Mystery of Christ
An Evangelical Protestant Perspective by Russell D. Moore
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