Holding down a full-time job while also pastoring a church is not for the faint of heart. Lee Wright, who is a bivocational pastor leading three churches, says God makes it possible.
Wright, a full-time safety officer for the Georgia Forestry Commission, also pastors Benevolence Baptist Church in Benevolence, Brooksville Baptist Church in Brooksville and Coleman Baptist Church in Coleman.
“In my past, it was always ‘I’m Superman, I can do anything I set my mind to do’,” Wright said. “It’s humbling to know that there’s no way I could do any of that without God giving it to me and Him allowing me to do it.”
When not on the road, Wright preaches the second and fourth Sunday of every month at Benevolence at 11 a.m., every first and third Sunday at 11 a.m. at Brooksville, and every second and fourth Sunday at 9:30 a.m. at Coleman. These are his first church pastorates.
There are a total of 50 attendees in all three churches. He co-pastors Coleman with Jeff Hines, who is a full-time pastor at Fort Gaines Baptist Church. He often fills in on fifth Sundays at Bluffton Baptist Church in Bluffton.
Juggling act
Wright also holds a weekly Wednesday night Bible study and worship service at his home. He facilitates church activities such as Christmas events, revivals, fellowship meals, and community backpack giveaways with fellow Georgia Baptists. He’s been the pastor of all three churches for 11 years.
“The hardest part is when you have five funerals in one week, and you’ve got things going on at work, and you’ve got to juggle all that. It’s not falling victim to the, ‘Oh my, what am I gonna do?’ mentality,” Wright said.
Wright preaches the same expository text at Coleman and Benevolence, but they can turn out different sermons. “Sometimes it’s the whole chapter, sometimes it’s not. It just depends. All I do is prepare my heart, and then God does the work,” he said.
Wright says pastoring three churches hasn’t been a problem. His officer job, which he started in 2025, allows him to check on people by phone while driving. Visiting church members and checking on them isn’t a hard thing either, because he lives in a small community and everybody knows how everybody’s doing.
Support from home
Balancing secular and ministerial work can be tiresome. “Sunday is that day to just not move,” he said. The support of his wife, Katie, is imperative, he said. “That kind of forces me to rest sometimes.”
He grew up in Benevolence, which is about 60 miles southeast of Columbus, and is the fourth generation to live on his family farm. Everybody who lives to the right of his house attends Brooksville church, and everybody who lives on the left side of his house attends Benevolence Church. Coleman is 20 miles southwest of Benevolence.
He was teaching Sunday school at Benevolence and attending another church in 2015 before being asked to fill in after the former Benevolence pastor stepped down.
Feeling the need for a message to be delivered, he prepared one with no experience. “I had no clue how to do it,” he said. He accepted the position a few months later.
Except for a short time, Benevolence and Brooksville had the same pastor. He became the Brooksville pastor and Coleman co-pastor around the same time.
Wright says bi-vocational ministry is very important to the Kingdom of God. While the financial ability to support a full-time pastor often isn’t there for small churches, they need a tent maker, too. “You need somebody that’s willing to support them and willing to fill the need as long as the need is there. To me, that’s important,” he said.
Wright says he is honored to serve his churches.
“There’s a lot of encouragement, a lot of love and a lot of support. There are also times when I don’t feel like I’m getting where I need to get,” he said. “I have to remember in these times God’s called me to scatter the seed, to teach the word as it’s written and that he sprouts the seed in his time.”
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EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Jason Queen and originally published by the Christian Index.
