Monday morning. Time to review the appointments for the week. They jumped at me from the pages of my desk calendar: stewardship committee, premarital counseling, confirmation class, baptismal counseling, prospective member visit, newsletter article to write, bulletin to prepare, wedding rehearsal, wedding, church council.
All of a sudden, visions of low-voltage switchgears popped into my head.
To this day I am not sure what a "low-voltage switchgear" does. I know it has something to do with electricity. I spent one summer during seminary working nights in a factory that manufactured them. I was one of four men on the paint line.
Jim stood at the beginning of the line, hanging unpainted parts on hooks extended from an overhead belt. The parts would be washed and dried automatically and then move past Gary and Vern, the two actual painters, who would assault them with spray guns. The belt then moved up close to the ceiling, and the freshly painted parts traveled a leisurely course through the factory to allow time for drying. Then they dropped down to me. It was my job to remove the painted parts from their hooks and stack them neatly to be moved to assembly.
My first impression was that the line moved with amazing speed. I couldn't believe how busy I was. The first few nights I felt like Charlie Chaplin (or Lucy Ricardo) putting cakes in boxes. But I got the routine down, and soon I was bored. One part seemed pretty much like the other, each night pretty much like the one before it, and after a while all I was getting out of the job was a decent paycheck at the end of the week. I was glad when summer ended.
The Paint Line and the Parish
When I was a freshly minted pastor, I couldn't imagine ever being bored in the ministry. Everything was fresh and exciting and challenging. I couldn't believe how busy I was.
But as I looked at my appointment book that Monday morning, the week ahead seemed a lot like the paint line. I had a lot to do, but much of it was strictly routine, the sort of thing I've been doing for more than twenty years now.
I love being a pastor. My sense of being called is as strong now as it ever was, and I have never given serious thought to any other profession. But some of the time I am bored, because there is a fair amount of repetition in the work I do. I stand at my "spot" in ministry and watch the "parts" come toward me: weddings and hospital calls, stewardship campaigns and committee meetings, confirmation classes and new-member orientation sessions. It seems I've dealt with them all before, and I deal with them quickly and efficiently, but not very enthusiastically. A voice begins in the back of my head in a whisper and then turns to a shout: Boring. Boring! BORING!
Now, boredom should not be confused with burnout. To me, burnout is a lingering feeling, a heavy weight that stays for days or weeks unless action is taken. Boredom is lower on the intensity scale: not a terminal disease, but annoying and unpleasant, like a dull headache.
Boredom is not a feeling I enjoy, nor is it an asset to doing ministry. When I get bored, I probably am becoming a bore to other people, and if there is one thing worse than a bored pastor, it is a boring pastor. The awareness I am bored, therefore, creates a feeling that I'm not doing my job. Now I'm not just feeling bored, I'm also feeling guilty about feeling bored.
Fight or Flight
When I am feeling both bored and guilty, I begin to think the answer might be a new call. Perhaps in some different congregation I would never be bored.
But experience indicates that is not likely. I've served four congregations in three states, and tasks that were repetitious and boring in one were just as repetitious and boring in another. Weddings, stewardship drives, and church bulletins are pretty much the same all over. When you move, you have the short-term stimulation of being in a new place, but after a while it becomes clear (at least it always has to me) that the new place is not all that different from the old place. More people, maybe. A bigger building. A larger staff to shove some of the more odious tasks onto. But substantially the same work.
With boredom, flight will not work. Therefore, the only way to deal with my boredom is to fight it. After all, the problem of boredom is my problem. Its causes and its roots are in me, not in the situation around me. The problem is not that the parish ministry is boring. The problem is that I am bored.
So at those times when the congregation seems like the paint line, I wage war against my boredom. Four strategies have helped me.
1. Admitting my dispensability
The program year got off to a flying start right after Labor Day. All of our regular programs began again, along with a few new ones. There were tons of prospective members to visit, dozens of families to prepare for baptisms. We had the rite of confirmation and a church council retreat and as many weddings as a Las Vegas wedding chapel. The fall stewardship appeal was coming together, and a record-breaking number of new members was joining the church. But by the middle of October, I could feel boredom creeping into my bones.
On the outside there was no reason to be bored. Lots was happening, and most of it good. I should have felt stimulated and excited. But, for some reason, I felt bored and depressed. Once I bothered to think about it, it wasn't hard to see why.
I had been caught up in the myth of the "indispensable pastor." I was so committed to everything that I didn't bother to take a day off. As a matter of fact, I went seven weeks without taking a day off. I hadn't watched a football game or played golf or gone to a concert or slept late or read a novel or gone out to dinner with my wife. As a result, I was tired and cranky-the job seemed only a burden. A bore.
Once I recognized my own stupidity, I took off three whole days, and when I came back to church after that break, the boredom was gone, and the church had survived my absence.
I've learned I'm less likely to get bored when I'm taking a day off each week. I'm less likely to get bored when I'm getting regular exercise. I'm less likely to get bored when I'm sleeping enough. I'm less likely to get bored when I'm eating sensibly.
Taking care of my physical condition is a way of taking care of my mental condition.
2. Find new ways of doing old things
Each year we baptize approximately fifty infants and children in our congregation. Prior to a baptism, my assistant or I will call upon the family of the child to discuss the baptismal service and the commitments they are making.
I was making a call like that on the Perkinses not long ago. We sat in the kitchen: Mark was sipping coffee; Sally held up little Zachary for me to see. I agreed that you seldom see a baby with so much red hair at such an early age. Rex, the family collie, was amiably rubbing himself against my leg, generously bestowing white hairs on my black pants. Minerva, Zachary's big sister, brought out her favorite doll, a talking bear. Push a button in its stomach, and it gives a little speech. Minerva persistently pushed the button, giving me the chance to get well acquainted with her bear's speech.
Eventually Minerva and her bear were consigned to the bedroom, and I began talking with Mark and Sally about Zachary's baptism. They seemed to pay attention to what I had to say. But the more I talked, the more I felt like Minerva's bear. Push the right button, and I give my little speech on baptism. Were the Perkinses as bored as I was?
So the next month I tried something new. We invited all the families planning baptisms in that month to a meeting at church. We told them to bring their children and provided child care for the older ones. The families had a wonderful time comparing babies, and when we started to talk about baptism, they drew courage from each other to ask some good questions, to answer each other's questions, and to talk about the joys and the challenges of Christian parenting. The more experienced parents offered reassurance and friendly counsel to the novices. I got to hold all the babies.
A baptismal counseling session used to be just one more thing to do, a repetitious task. Our monthly baptism class, on the other hand, is fun, challenging, and unpredictable. It pays to find new ways to do old things.
3. Remember the big picture
A third strategy in my war against boredom is not to lose sight of the big picture.
I never saw the big picture on the paint line. I didn't even know what a low-voltage switchgear was. All I could see were freshly painted parts waiting to be taken off their hooks. Perhaps if I had known how the switchgear would be used, I could have been more enthusiastic about my work.
Not long ago, the stewardship committee was working on the "parts" of the annual pledge campaign. Which promotional materials should we use? What would be the best dates for the campaign? Who would recruit and train the visitors? Who would assign the calls? Who would receive the reports from the callers? Who would post the pledges? Who would get the pledge cards printed? I've been through these questions every year. It is hard for me to get enthusiastic about them.
But stewardship is much more than picky details. Stewardship is turning on people to the joys of giving. Stewardship is helping individuals find ways to use their God-given talents in the mission of the church. Stewardship makes it possible for us to help people in need, to enrich our evangelism program, to expand our youth ministry. It might even make it possible for us to get a decent organ. That's the big picture, and keeping that in mind makes all the little details much more bearable.
The picky little details are the individual brush strokes in our stewardship painting. By themselves, they may not be particularly interesting, but put together, their cumulative effect is great! So when the committee debates the all-important issue of black ink versus blue ink on the pledge cards, I take a little mental vacation and picture the potential good for the congregation of this stewardship campaign.
I apply a similar principle to premarital counseling. I've given my little sermonettes about the importance of communication in marriage and the necessity for careful financial planning and commitment and compromise so often that it's easy for me to get bored with my own speeches. Not that I don't believe what I am saying. It is simply that I get tired of hearing myself say it.
Then I look at the young faces staring back at me, and I realize they are not bored. While I may have given the speech hundreds of times, they never have heard it. They never have been married before (at least not to each other!). The big picture is that of a young couple starting out on the sometimes-bumpy course of Christian marriage. Starting that journey is certainly not boring. Holding on to that big picture makes wedding planning far more interesting.
4. Spend time with energizing people
In our city not long ago, a blind woman fell into a freshly dug hole that the utility company had, for some reason, left unguarded. She was not able to get herself out. But when the neighborhood mailman came along, he jumped into the hole and boosted her out. Sometimes I need somebody to help me out of the pit of boredom.
Nothing lifts me out of the pit faster than spending time with people who have a gift for infusing me with energy.
So maybe I'll take my wife out to lunch. My wife is a person of keen insight and great enthusiasm, even about some things I'm likely to find boring. Being around her enthusiasm often gets me going.
Or I will drive over to visit Hannah. Hannah is the senior member of our congregation, the daughter of missionaries and later a farm wife and a teacher. Her health isn't what it used to be, but her mind is still razor sharp and her sense of humor unfailing. She pours me strong black coffee and feeds me dainty little cookies and teases me about my inability to speak Norwegian. We talk about the church and my family and her childhood on Madagascar and life on the farm, and from this wizened lady, I get the clear message that while life is not always easy, life is good. I always leave Hannah's house feeling better.
Or I will call one of my pastor buddies, and we will complain to each other about all the rotten things we have to do, the coldness of the Minnesota winter, the pigheadedness of parishioners, the ineptitude of church executives, the failure of the Minnesota Twins to improve their pitching staff, the folly of the federal government, and the difficulty one has these days in finding a decent black suit. By the end of the conversation, we are both laughing-laughing at the foolishness of it all, laughing at our own foolishness, laughing at the relief of finding a kindred spirit.
Or I will take a treasured book off the shelf and commune mentally with one of my favorite authors. Lyle Schaller has a way of getting me excited about parish ministry. Frederick Buechner and Robert Farrar Capon, Charles Swindoll and Martin Marty, Saint Paul and Martin Luther-they all stimulate me and get my juices flowing again.
Don't Get the Wrong Idea
It would be easy to get the impression from this article that I'm an unhappy man. That is not the case. I love what I am doing. But honesty forces me to say that as much as I love being a pastor, there are times when it seems like a treadmill. The times do not come often, and when they do, they don't stay long.
To me, serving in a professional way means doing the best, most conscientious job you can do, whether you feel like it or not. Being a professional requires dedication and discipline. My moments of boredom are challenges to my dedication, discipline, and professionalism. I welcome those challenges.
Finally, I'm not convinced boredom is completely bad for pastors. Many of our parishioners do work that is sometimes quite boring. In my congregation are men from the paint line, women from the secretarial pool, and all sorts of people whose work is repetitious and lonely and seemingly pointless. My occasional bout of boredom gives me empathy and respect for those people who faithfully keep at their work, even when they are bored.
Fortunately my bouts with boredom are not frequent. As long as I can't be manager of the Boston Red Sox, I can't imagine anything I'd rather do than be a parish pastor. And it sure beats working on the paint line.
Steven L. McKinley is pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in Anoka, Minnesota.
