If the Southern Baptist North American Mission Board’s Send North America evangelistic church planting initiative is to succeed, it must include thousands of bivocational pastors who are willing to plant churches.

“We must leverage the laity to plant churches,” said Aaron Coe, NAMB’s vice president of mobilization, “and we need to do it through a bivocational church movement.

“There are thousands of men sitting in church pews listening to their pastors each week who more than meet the qualifications for being pastors and church planters. We need to mobilize them to be involved in church planting if we’re serious about the Great Commission,” Coe said.

NAMB church planting leaders and members of the SBC-wide Bivocational and Small Church Leadership Network (BSCLN) have begun to explore ways for bivocational pastors to become involved.

Ray Gilder, the BSCLN’s national coordinator from McMinnville, Tenn., and a retired bivocational pastor himself, describes a bivocational as a pastor who has another source of income over and above his church. Gilder says an SBC church running a weekly attendance of 100 or less probably has a bivocational pastor — and 75 percent of SBC churches run 75 or less. Most of them are in rural areas.

“Until Send North America, bivocational pastors have not had church planting on their radar,” Gilder said regarding the NAMB/BSCLN meeting this fall.

[Editor’s Note: Blue Ridge Presbytery, PCA, has formulated plans to use Licensed Ruling Elder Supply Pastors and several men are considering completing the study and exams required.]

[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The source for this document was originally published on bpnews.net—however, the original URL is no longer available.]