A Man for All Seasons

Reverend/Senator/General Wayne Burkes, Jackson, MS 

A bi-vo pastor? What's that?

Big deal, I thought when I first heard the term. It's just a man who holds a regular job and also pastors a church. I was very familiar with the concept, although I had not heard the term, because my father did it all his life. But bi-vocational is the term Southern Baptists use for such people, and that's okay with me, because it resulted in a nice assignment.

In 1988, the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board (since reorganized under another name), decided to run an article in their magazine, Missiions USA, featuring a representative group of men selected from the many bi-vocational pastors in the denomination.

Long-time close friend and distinguished graphic designer Michael Largent, was design editor at Missions USA at the time, and he gave me an assignment to photograph several of the men.

Each of these pastors was an impressive person with an interesting story. Some worked a second job because their congregations were too small or poor to support them. Others because they enjoyed the challenge of burning the candle at both ends. But the most impressive man was not a bi-vocational pastor; he was TRI-vocational. And what vocations! Each of them would have been as much as most men would want to handle, but Wayne Burkes was not only the pastor of one of Jackson, Mississippi's largest Baptist churches; he was also a Mississippi state senator and a general in the Mississippi Air National Guard, where he flew massive C-130 cargo planes.

I photographed Rev./Senator/General Burkes in the cockpit of his C-130, but the shot that I (and Michael) preferred was made in the rotunda of the state capital at Jackson. Posing him by the balustrade on the second level of the building, I placed one light with an umbrella reflector at a 45-degree angle to his right front and a second, similar but weaker light to his left rear. Then, going down one level, I directed one more light upward to fill some of the shadows. With a slight wide-angle lens, probably a 35mm on my Olympus OM camera, I shot upward to include as much of the dome of the rotunda as possible. The film was Fujichrome 100.

"That's a good one," said Michael, as he reviewed my coverage. "Put it in your portfolio." And so I did.

Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone