Making Peace with the Career You Won't Have

Sooner or later it happens to every bi-vocational pastor. A colleague you trained gets the promotion, or a guy from your first job now has a title you could have had. Someone asks, kindly, why you never went after that director role, and you don’t quite know how to answer without sounding either pious or bitter.

That’s the pastor career sacrifice nobody puts in the recruitment brochure. I want to talk about it honestly, because pretending it costs nothing would be a lie, and lies don’t hold up for twenty-five years.

The cost is real

I’m good at what I do in the marketplace. I’ve run companies and led teams, and I have the skills and the track record to have gone further than I have.

And I chose, again and again, not to. Going further would have taken a kind of focused ambition and availability that the church also needed from me. There were only so many early mornings and late evenings, and I’d already promised them.

There’s grief in that. It isn’t crushing, but it’s there, the kind of grief you feel over a road not taken. If you’re a bi-vocational pastor, or thinking about becoming one, you’re allowed to feel that. You don’t have to paste on a smile about it. Naming the loss is the first step toward being free of it.

Two scoreboards

What’s helped me most is getting clear on what I’m actually building. I’m building a kingdom, not a career, and those two run on different scoreboards.

Career success is measured in titles, compensation, and institutional influence. Kingdom success is measured in lives changed and disciples formed and communities transformed, and in God’s reign spreading, mostly unnoticed, into places it hasn’t reached yet.

The two aren’t always in conflict. Plenty of Christians serve God faithfully by climbing high in their field. But for the bi-vocational pastor the conflict comes up a lot, and when it does, the choice has to be clear, or whichever demand shouts loudest will make it for you.

And there’s a trap here. If you keep score on the career scoreboard while living by the kingdom one, you’ll always feel behind. You’ll look at your résumé and see a man who stalled out. The kingdom scoreboard is harder to read, because its results come slower and are mostly hidden, but it’s the one that lasts.

Contentment is learned

Paul wrote, “I have learned, in whatever situation I am, to be content” (Philippians 4:11). Look at the word learned. Contentment wasn’t Paul’s default setting. He learned it the way you learn anything hard, through seasons of plenty and seasons of need, by practice, over years. “I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound” (Philippians 4:12).

For most high-achieving people, contentment doesn’t come naturally, and it sure didn’t for me. In business I’m less aggressive than my peers. I’m not chasing more responsibility or more status. I’m trying to keep a job that pays my family’s bills and keeps me credible in the marketplace and still leaves enough of me for the church. That’s a measured pace, and it takes a contentment I’ve had to work at.

Contentment doesn’t mean you have no ambition. It’s ambition aimed at the right things. You can still work hard and still do excellent work (Colossians 3:23 would insist on it). You just stop measuring your worth by how high you climb.

The Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs wrote a whole book on this, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment. His definition is worth reading slowly. Twice, even.

What happens if you don’t make peace

The bi-vocational pastor who never makes peace with the career he won’t have becomes resentful. He resents the church for taking time that could have gone to advancement. He resents his peers for moving up while he stays put. And eventually, if he’s honest, he resents God for calling him to something that cost him something real.

That resentment leaks out. You hear it in sermons that have an edge to them, and you see it at home in a short temper, and at work in a man doing his job with half his heart, which helps nobody and damages his witness with his coworkers.

The fix isn’t pretending the cost away. It’s choosing it on purpose. A sacrifice that was taken from you and a sacrifice you laid down are two very different things.

The freedom on the other side

People don’t expect this part, but once you make peace with it, there’s real freedom.

You’re out of the rat race. You don’t have to position yourself for the next move or worry about who’s getting noticed. You can do honest work and go home and give the rest of yourself to people who need the gospel. As I wrote in Second Fiddle, “You are not keeping up with the Joneses. You are building something the Joneses will never build.”

The career will be forgotten, and the titles get handed to the next guy. Lives changed by the gospel don’t get forgotten.

Name it together

If you’re married, this isn’t only your sacrifice. A career ceiling affects your household’s income and your spouse’s plans, and sometimes your family’s sense of security. So talk about it together. These four questions from the couples’ discussion guide are a good place to start:

1. What career ambitions are you genuinely releasing? Name them specifically.
2. How do you define success right now? Does that definition need to change?
3. Spouse: are you genuinely at peace with the career ceiling this calling creates? What would help you get there if you’re not?
4. What does contentment look like for you: not the absence of ambition, but the right kind of ambition directed at the right things?

Take the first one seriously. Write the ambitions down by name and pray over the list, and grieve it if you need to. Then choose, clearly and together, what you’re building instead.

If you’re working through the book as a couple, the free discussion guide will walk you through the rest of the conversation. It won’t make the choice easy, but it’ll help you make it with your eyes open.