EDITOR'S NOTE: This story was originally published in the November issue of GCU Magazine, available in the purple bins on campus or digitally.
Photos by Ralph Freso
Brett Bergstrom has two jobs. He gets up daily at 3:30 a.m. His time off consists of a Sunday afternoon ritual – eat a quesadilla, take a short nap.
“I don’t need a day off,” said the senior pastor and university development manager at Grand Canyon University. “God provides everything I need. I wish I had been a pastor way earlier. There is no greater calling.”
Bergstrom loves his life more than days off or even quesadillas, which was clear when he shared his story during a panel discussion on bivocational ministry at GCU earlier this fall. The panel initiated a university drive to encourage students to consider church roles in addition to their careers as teachers, engineers, marketers or social workers to help fill shortages.
Bergstrom is a perfect bivocational example. He did it twice.
He spent his life working in various businesses before opening his own in 2000, selling hot tubs and barbecues in Surprise, Arizona. Business exploded, until it didn’t after the 2008 recession, and he had to close the doors. He had been involved in his local church, leading men’s Bible study, so took his troubles to the pastor.
“If you could do anything,” his pastor asked, “what would you want to do?”
“I sell hot tubs,” Bergstrom responded.
“What would you say about being a pastor?”
“I don’t know anything about it. I graduated with a marketing degree.”
“I want you to pray about it.”
Driving home, his phone rang. It was a friend from his church who was at the hospital with his 5-year-old son. The boy had just been diagnosed with cancer.
“Can you come down here?” the friend asked.
“Absolutely,” Bergstrom replied. “But after I hung up, I was like, ‘Why is he calling me? Why didn’t he call the pastor?’
“That was my confirmation.”
He accepted the role of assistant pastor, but after hearing the pay, went stone-faced. He needed another job to support his wife, three children and mortgage. He sold spa chemicals out of his garage and serviced hot tubs between his new church duties.
He was bivocational.
Ten years later, he moved to Houston to plant a church, same thing.
“We had three families when we got there doing Bible study. So I needed to get a job,” Bergstrom said.
He got another confirmation. A university needed a counselor to help online students navigate through their college path. That university was Grand Canyon, whose president, Brian Mueller, was his basketball coach 40 years earlier in Colorado.
So Bergstrom found himself in a job talking to students who often didn’t come to him with problems with a class. They came to him with life issues. And because he works at a Christian college, he would ask if he could pray with them.
Bergstrom was also growing his church, which recently moved from meeting in a day care on the weekends to its own facility. “We wouldn’t be able to do that if I was drawing a full-time salary,” he said.
Churches face shortages when starting up or revitalizing in urban areas and don’t have the resources yet to staff up, and in more rural areas there is “a graying of the clergy in the U.S.” with few replacements, said GCU College of Theology Dean Dr. Jason Hiles.
GCU graduates can not only help in the pastor ranks through the College of Theology and its graduate school, Grand Canyon Theological Seminary, but the new initiative is touting the many other roles that bivocational students can play in churches, from music or women’s ministries to communication and marketing.
Numerous academic offerings, such as a new business college course on church revitalization and plants, or minors in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences in counseling or Spanish, can help in pastoral counseling or child and family ministries.
“They can pick up any of six or seven minors in the college – Christian studies, biblical studies – and take coursework to understand the Bible better and serve others better on the weekend in the church,” Hiles said. “Have you ever considered being a part of ministry? You don’t have to quit your day job.”
Mueller is praising the effort, telling a Chapel audience this fall that his mother was bivocational, working full time in the home while doing her ministry by visiting lonely senior citizens in nursing homes. He told the audience at a panel discussion that to “do the work that Jesus expects us to do,” will take more than seminary students. Most churches have fewer than 100 members, he said, and to fill the roles needed, will take counselors and teachers, marketers and music professionals.
He can point to his own staff. John Kaites is not only dean of the Colangelo College of Business and owner of numerous businesses, he is a senior pastor at Horizon Church in the Ahwatukee area of Phoenix.
“I feel like the future of the church is going to come from business students who lean into the ministry,” Kaites said. “The core business of the church uses the same business principles that make a church run and the restaurant down the street run.”
Many career skills cross into church work, and vice versa.
Junior Reece Woods, majoring in applied human resource management, spends most of her free time as a youth pastor at Twentynine: Eleven Church in Tempe.
“I feel very called to HR, helping people get over their issues in the workplace,” said Woods, who is also minoring in theology. “But youth is my whole heart. I’m in church multiple days a week. I love the kids.
“Both are about the interpersonal skills, the ability to talk to someone, to mediate.”
It’s two vocations and one vision, as Kaites described, “loving God and loving others. That is my job … In your law practice, in your sociology space, in your nursing space and teaching space, it will become obvious to you. You will just be naturally bivocational because of that."
