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Pastoral Ministry as a Second Career
Is it possible to enter ministry as a second career?
Not exactly. My concern is more about the word “career” than it is about the possibility of a midlife change of direction. Ministry is a calling, not a career. It must be directed by God, but God can direct any time He chooses.
We need to break free of single-process thinking regarding ministry preparation. The standard formula goes something like this: a young man, usually a teen, has a “come-to-Jesus” moment and surrenders to the call of full-time ministry. He then goes away to Bible college and finishes an undergrad degree in Bible or a field that would be useful in ministry. He then enrolls in seminary and spends the next four years navigating nearly full-time educational responsibilities, a new marriage, and young children while trying to pay for it all with a full-time secular job. If he can survive that difficult process, he might be called to ministry. Most who start do not finish. Still, if he graduates from seminary at twenty-five or twenty-six years old, he has spent that time well in preparation. Most young men are novices at twenty-one or twenty-two and should not be serving yet as a pastor or on a pastoral staff.
While it is extremely difficult for a young man to follow that path, it is nearly impossible for a forty-year-old to do it. Does that mean that God does not call forty-year-olds to ministry? He absolutely calls them, and we cannot let our traditionally determined ministry preparation track turn God-called men away from serving. What, then, could be the circumstances in which someone might enter the ministry later in life?
Called Earlier, Following Later
God might extend a second chance to some who would not follow earlier in life. The fault for this might not always lie where we think it does.
“If you can do anything else, don’t go into pastoral ministry.”
I wish we had not given that advice to young men considering a call to ministry. The advice was intended to communicate the idea that you need to be so committed to the call to ministry that you cannot be content doing anything else. However, what many young men heard was, “If you are interested in anything else, or you can be successful at doing anything else, then you are not called to ministry.”
I was meeting Kevin at our local Denny’s at 6 AM on Thursdays for discipleship. Kevin was vice president of a major auto-parts retailer headquartered in our area. During the conversation he said, “I think I was once called to ministry.” Almost without thinking, I responded with, “When did God un-call you?” He then described how he had been discouraged from going into ministry because of an issue that came up when attending a Bible institute as a new believer. The Holy Spirit used that conversation to spark a renewed call for Kevin’s life. He enrolled in Bible college and finished his degree while continuing his work as a business executive. After graduating he left the secular work world and served the Lord dynamically in full-time ministry for several years before God called him home to heaven. He accomplished more for God in five years of full-time ministry than many do in a lifetime. The gifts that made him extremely successful in business translated easily into ministry effectiveness—or maybe it was really the other way around.
There are various reasons why a man might not initially answer the call to ministry. Most pastors I know have intellectual gifts and talents that would make them quite successful in many careers. Like Kevin in the business world, Mike Redick, missionary to Southeast Asia, was a successful chef (in some of the most high-end restaurants in the world) before entering the ministry. Others have come from the trades, military, teaching, performing arts, and many other fields of occupation. Advice that discourages our best, brightest, and most talented people from giving their lives in full-time service needs to be discarded.
Saved Later and Called
God sometimes saves a person later in life and then calls him to ministry. About thirty years ago an elderly man entered our tiny church building for the first time. He was one of the most enthusiastic believers I have ever met. “Brother Wade” was one of those hanky-waving preachers from the hills of North Carolina—the type that can be quite intimidating to a rather reserved Midwestern personality like mine. He was retired when he joined our church, but he had preached the gospel faithfully for thirty years. He described himself as a wild and ungodly rascal when God saved him in his early forties. God immediately called him to ministry, and he got all the on-the-job education he could over the next thirty years while he pastored remote mountain churches ignored by the more educated pastoral candidates.
We do have to be careful that we do not make the educational requirements for full-time ministry so carefully structured that men like Brother Wade would be barred from serving. I am not discounting the need for a man to be prepared educationally for ministry, but I am calling into question our present prescribed process. Peter was probably in midlife and fairly uneducated when Jesus called him from the fishing boat. The New Testament church prepared men much faster than we do now. How would the requirement of four years of undergrad education plus three or four years of seminary sound to the church of Acts? But those men were prepared. They spent three years with Jesus. Jesus took the time to disciple Peter and prepare him for a productive second life of service. Other disciples had a similar story.
Called Later
There is also biblical precedent for God changing the direction of His servants as they serve. God calls people to be accountants, medical doctors, and farmers too. We seem to be willing to accept the idea that God could call a man to be an evangelist and then redirect him to become a college president at some point later. If God can do that, why could God not call a man to be a schoolteacher for twenty years and then redirect him into pastoral ministry? It is not about gifts. Successful pastors often have a wide variety of gifts, and believers in other professions also often have those gifts. Moses had three different careers during his life. He was a royal and military leader during his first forty years (according to Josephus), a herdsman during his second forty years, and the pastor of history’s most difficult congregation in his last forty years. Dr. Bob Wood, for so many years a fixture in the administration at Bob Jones University, had been a successful businessman before answering the call to pastoral ministry at thirty-four years old.
We need to be very careful about questioning the call of men because their circumstances do not fit our preconceived ideas. Jesus told us to pray for laborers for the harvest field. We desperately need a new generation of leaders to fill the pulpits of churches, plant new churches, and do the work of missions around the world. I don’t think God planned to leave His people without leadership. The next generation of ministerial leadership in our local churches might come from places that we do not expect. Let’s welcome those men, encourage them, and find a way to prepare them.
Kevin Schaal pastors Northwest Valley Baptist Church in Glendale, Arizona, and is president of FBFI.
(Originally published in FrontLine • January/February 2021. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.)