Guest commentary by Shawn Hyska
“If you can see yourself doing something else and being happy at it, you should not enter the ministry.” This was the sound, sage-filled advice I received my first night on campus at Princeton Theological Seminary from a senior student, just days before I would plunge into the depths of biblical Greek. This comment, shared as we new students walked with this guide around downtown Princeton, struck me at my core. There was something else I could see myself doing as a career and enjoying it. I had just spent the past five years at Drexel University getting degrees in accounting not because it was a good field to study, but because I loved it. Don’t ask me how or why. It just clicked with me and felt a part of who I was ever since I first started to study it in high school. I felt like one of those answers you’d get on an older SAT exam – Michael Jordan : Basketball player :: Shawn Hyska : Accountant. So here I was, about to embark on this journey of seminary because I was responding to a call by God, but feeling torn. Over my first two years at seminary, every time I would go back home to Philadelphia and visit Drexel’s campus and the business school, I would break down in tears, longing to be back, wondering why God would call me away from something I was so passionate about.
What was lacking wasn’t my ability to do accounting work or God’s calling feeling insufficient at worst, or cruel at best, but rather my definition and lack thereof of vocation. As it turns out, during my last seminary semester I took a course where I learned the concept of vocation and it has enlightened my life and my calling ever since. I give thanks and glory to God for Nancy Duff as she led us through our vocational callings. We all as Christians have the same vocation — to confront and correspond and answer God’s divine calling on each of our lives to be co-workers with God in God’s work of liberation, reconciliation and transformation. But within this general calling, we all have specific callings, specific “spheres of operation” as Karl Barth put it, within which we live out our individual vocations/callings in the corporal vocation as Christians. It was then that I realized that my gifts, joy and love of accounting wasn’t just by chance; it was my unique calling. I realized that if I had this definition and terminology before I applied to seminary, I would have never applied, never attended seminary, never got ordained as a teaching elder and wouldn’t be serving a church as its pastor. I would have viewed my passion for accounting as my unique calling and would have found ways to serve God through it.
Yet, here I was, in my final semester in seminary and it was just then that I saw this clarity. I was being called to do both, called in accounting/finance but also called to be a teacher in ministry. Seven years later, I’m still discerning the uniqueness of this calling.
I share this story because the nature of the church – and in particular the Presbyterian Church – is changing. There are less and less full-time ministry positions available and recent seminary graduates are being led into “tent-making” ministries where they serve a congregation or ministry part-time and also work in the “secular” world part-time, too often ending up at a retail establishment. In my opinion, the process in these cases started too late. I believe that when students apply to seminary, they should be asked the same question I was posed – not as a threatening proposition to potentially give up on seminary, but rather as a guiding light to determine what else brings this student joy and what else are they passionate about. Our seminaries need to find ways to create hybrid degree programs with other local institutions, such as a joint M.Div. and M.S.W. program. Or, how about a joint M.Div. and M.B.A. program?
We as a church body need to inspire our seminarians and tent-making pastors to utilize all their passions as part of their unique vocational callings. But, let’s first stop using the term “bivocational.” I think it’s important to distinguish that tentmakers can be “bi” or “multi” vocational, depending on their unique calling by God. Using the term “bivocational” to describe the new reality of pastors and the work that we do takes a secular connotation (our vocations/jobs) and makes it fit into the world’s standards and vocabulary. In society we may be “bivocational” in the sense that we have two or more paying “jobs,” but so do many people, not just us pastors. The term “tent-making,” for me, affirms our theological calling to all that we do, both in our service to the church locally, and to the church universally.
SHAWN HYSKA has been the pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Kensington in Philadelphia since December 2012. In addition to serving the church, he is a financial consultant to nonprofit organizations. His passion lies in seeing how and where God is moving and acting in our everyday lives. A typical Sunday does not pass by without a movie, music or a Philadelphia Phillies reference. Follow him @shawnhyska.
