I started this in 1999. I’m writing now in the second half of my fifties. The math is uncomfortable.
Twenty-five years of 4 AM alarms. Twenty-five years of full days at a day job followed by full evenings of ministry. Twenty-five years of trying to give my wife the attention she deserves while giving the church the leadership it needs. Twenty-five years of a pace that was never quite sustainable, somehow sustained anyway.
If you’re thinking about long-term pastoral ministry, especially the bi-vocational kind, I want to tell you what changes over that span. Not to scare you. To help you plan.
What got harder: the body
I’m older. I don’t have the energy I had at thirty-five. Six hours of sleep used to feel like enough. Now it often doesn’t. The pace that felt exhilarating at the beginning feels genuinely taxing now.
I’ve had to admit something: trying to keep the same pace at fifty-five that I kept at thirty-five is a form of denial, not faithfulness.
What I’d tell you: Build a pace you can keep for decades, not one you can survive for a few years. If you’re young, the rhythm you set now is the one you’ll be tempted to defend later. Set it with your fifty-five-year-old self in mind. Protect sleep. Protect Sabbath. Your body will tell you the truth whether you listen or not.
What got harder: the relational volume
This one surprised me. Twenty-five years of ministry means twenty-five years of accumulated relationships, and many of them come with expectations. Everyone wants a mentor. Everyone believes you can help them.
Saying no to people you genuinely care about is harder than any of the pastoral work itself.
What I’d tell you: Learn to say no early, while the list is short. Develop other leaders who can say yes in your place. The goal isn’t to be needed by everyone. It’s to make sure people are cared for, and that doesn’t always have to be by you.
What got easier: the church
Living Faith is healthy now. It has real leadership, real community, and real spiritual depth. The people who came through the bonfires and the bar conversations and the service projects and years of worship have become mature followers of Jesus who don’t need me to hold everything together.
If I walked away tomorrow, the church would endure. That isn’t a threat. It’s the goal.
As I put it in the book: “The church that can survive without the founder is the greatest achievement of the founder.”
What I’d tell you: From the beginning, build for the day you’re not there. Give ministry away. Raise up people who can lead without you. Early on it will feel slower than doing it yourself. Twenty-five years later, it’s the thing you’ll be most grateful for.
What got easier: the integration
For a long time I felt like two people: a business self and a pastor self. Performing one identity at work and another at church is exhausting.
After twenty-five years, that divide has narrowed. I’m one person with one calling expressed in two places. That integration took time. It’s one of the gifts of the long obedience, and I don’t think there’s a shortcut to it.
What I’d tell you: Be patient with the tension in the early years. Keep asking how your faith shapes your work and how your work shapes your preaching. The seams will get smaller.
What never changed
Some things have stayed exactly the same since 1999.
The conviction that it’s worth it. Not because it’s easy, but because what faithful, ordinary, sustained bi-vocational ministry has built is genuinely extraordinary: a church full of people who were once far from God, hundreds of families whose cars have been fixed and whose lives have been touched by the gospel at The Garage, a community that knows the church cares because it has seen the church show up.
The confidence that God was in it. Not just in the big moments, but in the ordinary Wednesday evenings, the 4 AM prayer times, the sermon nobody responded to, and the counseling session that felt like it went nowhere. God was working in all of it, in ways I couldn’t see and won’t fully know until eternity.
Would I do it again?
Yes. Knowing the tired seasons, the lonely road, and the marriage moments I didn’t get right. Yes.
The alternative would have been twenty-five years safely inside church buildings with church people, telling other Christians to go reach the lost. For me, that would have been a waste of a calling.
A question for year one
If you’re at the beginning, try this: write a short letter to yourself twenty-five years from now. What do you hope will be true of your body, your marriage, your church, and your soul? Then look at this week’s calendar and ask whether it’s moving you toward that letter or away from it.
If you’re married, write the letters separately and read them to each other. You may learn something.
I wrote Second Fiddle as the book I wish someone had handed me in 1999. It’s honest about the cost and hopeful about the fruit. If you’re earlier on the road, it’s written for you.