Pastor and Administrative Assistant, Parkside Church and Southern Wesleyan University

My name is Deborah Rhodes, and my full-time job is administrative assistant for Student Life at Southern Wesleyan University. But I'm also kind of bi-vocational, my husband and I co-lead a church plant in Greenville, South Carolina. So my husband and I co-lead. And so we have shared responsibilities for a lot of things, but my favorite piece of my responsibilities at the church is getting to create our content for our teaching series and that kind of thing and then also getting to preach as well and then overseeing some of the discipleship pieces of the church. So one of the biggest things that I work on every year, and it usually happens in the fall around October, is planning our teaching series for the next calendar year. And so we just look at where do we wanna focus and how long do we wanna do this series for and what are some of the things that we wanna preach about throughout the year? And so that is really helpful to get to kind of plan out the whole year. But also, it can be a difficult task when you're thinking about an entire year right in one space of time and just really leaning into the Holy Spirit for direction on that and saying, "Okay, where do you want us to go, and what should this look like?" And so it really is a lot of fun, but it is a lot of work because it requires things like figuring out what we wanna teach and the content for that and just getting all of that together so that we can kind of follow through on that and conveying that to our teaching team and helping them understand where we're headed as well. My hours are weird because I work full-time that is not for the church, and so I have to be intentional with some of those time slots, and so it really is. And we've been doing this for a couple of years now. And so honestly, I'm still learning the rhythm of those hours. But for me, I try to, if I'm preaching that week, take time throughout the week, set aside to spend time on whatever it is I'm preaching about that week and making sure that I'm able to focus. And so it's usually evening or weekend hours when I try to do that. And so being bi-vocational makes it a little bit different than a traditional pastoral role would. And so it really is just looking at my schedule and making sure that whatever my schedule looks like for that week, that I'm intentional with some pockets of time here and there to be able to take care of the things that I need to do.