More than once I’ve been told there is no such thing as a part-time pastor. Usually, the people saying it are acknowledging the fact that the United Methodist Church has thousands of “bi-vocational” and part-time pastors but has very little of its institutional apparatus set up to support or sometimes even acknowledge their unique status.
Reading John Wesley’s “A Father Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion,” gives me pause to think that Wesley did not really believe in part-time pastors either.
In it, he takes to task pastors who do not expend all their energy in watching over the souls of their flock. He chides the pastor as seeing his office as preaching once or twice a week and then being done with it. Preaching is an awesome and great responsibility, he says, but then goes on:
But great, inexpressibly great, as this is, it is perhaps the least part of our work. To ‘seek and save that which is lost;’ to bring souls from Satan to God; to instruct the ignorant; to reclaim the wicked; to convince the gainsayer; to direct their feet into the way of peace, and then keep them therein; to follow them step by step, lest they turn out of the way, and advise them in their doubts and temptations; to lift them up that fall; to refresh them that are faint; and to comfort the weak-hearted; to administer various helps, as the variety of occasions require, according to their several necessities: These are the parts of our office; all this we have undertaken at the peril of our own soul.
Wesley asks, “Who can do this, unless his whole heart be in the work; unless he desire nothing but to ‘spend and be spent for them; and count not his life dear unto himself, so he may present them blameless in the day of the Lord Jesus?’”
Sounds like a bit more work than Sunday sermons and working in pastoral visits and church meetings when I can. I think Wesley would say my soul is in peril for all the work I’ve left undone.
I am a part-time local pastor serving 
The doctrine of original sin is surely more humbling to man than the opposite: And I know not what honour we can pay to God, if we think man came out of His hands in the condition wherein he is now.
