I felt spent and discouraged. On my desk was the usual pile. There were a half-dozen phone messages, one from a disgruntled parent whom I would need to soothe. Beside that stack lay a heap of receipts from Saturday’s event that needed to be organized, categorized, and justified. And off to the side waited the reference books and notes for this week’s youth message.
The pile was no larger than any other week, but somehow that day it seemed impossible to face. I felt as if I’d been running this race forever, and running it in hip-deep mud. Then I realized I had not had a real day off in more than two months.
I know I need rest for the sake of my family and my health, but so many things fight against it. There are so many hurting people, so many expectations, so much to be done.
I found out that I was not the only pastor who struggled with this.
At a conference on marriage and ministry, the leader separated pastors from their spouses. Each group was asked to name ten barriers to intimacy. Both groups ranked the lack of consistent time off from the ministry as one of their top three problems.
Another time I brought up the subject in an e-mail forum for youth pastors and sparked a lively discussion. One colleague from Scotland wrote, “It is hard to take a day off, and you feel guilty when you do. With me, it’s a case of so much to do and so little time to do it.”
Pick a day, any day
I was convinced that I needed to take one day off every week. The precedent is biblical. Saturday seemed like the logical choice. The kids were out of school and there wasn’t anything regularly scheduled on the church calendar. So I tried that for a while. But I began to notice that, even with my renewed resolve, I was still missing many days off. Special events kept popping up. In one accounting, I found that weddings, youth activities, and one-time-only meetings ate up 60 percent of my Saturdays. I needed to change my day off.
But there were no other days open. Monday was the senior pastor’s day off, and the elders had asked that he and I not take the same day. The weekly staff meeting was on Tuesday. On Wednesday we had our mid-week clubs, and I ran the youth sessions. Our lay leadership team met every Thursday and the elders on Friday.
I saw it would take some work to get a consistent day off. Not only would I have to rearrange my own schedule, but the staff and lay leaders would have to reorganize theirs as well.
It might seem that with more staff, it would be easier for each pastor to get a day off.
Not true.
The first associate arrives to find a church calendar that has grown up around the senior pastor’s schedule. And church members think that by adding another pastor, they will plug any holes that the senior pastor’s schedule might have left. Many associates are told they are not to take the same day off as the senior pastor. This way, the church will have a pastor on duty every day of the week.
In my case, since our senior pastor spends the mornings in sermon preparation I was also asked to use the afternoons for my study time. That way I would be available to the congregation during the time when the senior pastor was not taking calls. I did not realize it at the time, but I was hog-tied. The best I could hope for, for any meeting that required both the senior pastor and me, was that it would be scheduled during my study time. In the worst case, it would interrupt my day off.
Ours is a growing church with a busy schedule. There are many times that the senior pastor and I are required at the same meetings and events. As we have added pastors, the situation has become more complex because no pastor is an island. Our ministries are interrelated. We work together on projects. We meet with the same boards and task forces.
Our situation may be more complicated because we follow a team model of ministry. We value working together. So, as we have added the third, fourth, and fifth pastors, we have had to re-examine some of the assumptions and expectations that we had when we were a smaller staff team.
Is Tuesday good for you?
At the pastor level, we agreed to schedule our meetings—especially those requiring more than one pastor—on the same day. That would free up some of the other weekdays for staff to take their days off.
We chose Tuesday.
The first step was to get the lay leadership team to move their monthly meeting to Tuesday. Once we explained the situation, they were glad to make the change. From that point on, we pastors made a concerted effort to schedule our meetings on Tuesdays.
Sometimes it is hard to find a place meet on Tuesday evening. And there have been some scheduling conflicts for those on more than one board or committee. But that isn’t all bad! Some of our members have been forced to reduce their church commitments and to focus on the areas where they are most valuable. By no means have we completed this process, but things were consolidated enough so that all the pastors felt like they could schedule a regular day off.
Then the elders took over
Fortunately, our elder board was very supportive. They did not want the pastors to burn out. A regular day off was recognized as important for us to stay fresh and strong. The elders wanted us to have time for our own families, too. But even in that atmosphere, meetings proliferated and the needs of the congregation made it almost impossible for any of the pastors to get a whole day away.
All it took in our situation was making the elders aware of the problem. They supported our staff decision to move most of the meetings to one night. In addition they reduced the number of meetings that pastors were required to attend.
For instance, our governing board has a long meeting once a month on a Monday evening. Traditionally, all of the pastors had attended. The elders gave us permission to skip that monthly meeting and only attend when they discussed something directly connected with our individual ministries.
More important, the elders pleaded our case with the congregation. They spoke from the pulpit and sent a letter to the congregation asking that each pastor’s day off be respected.
Six days shall you labor
Many pastors I have talked with believe they simply have too much work to fit it into a 40- or 50-hour work week. One response is to work more hours.
One associate, whose senior pastor insists that he take off one day a week, told me that he appreciates the time to be with his family. But he added, “I have to work longer hours the other six days. I am not working any fewer hours than I would be if I was going seven days a week.”
I have concluded that there is always more work to be done. That is the nature of ministry. If I work 100 hours a week there will still be things left undone! For me, it has been healthy to recognize that I can’t do it all. And it is okay that not everything gets done. After all, I’m not the one in control, God is. My willingness to take a day off is evidence of my faith that the God who orders my rest day will direct my work days, too.
Rob Devens is associate pastor for students and families at First Evangelical Free Church, 2121 Pine Street, La Crosse, WI 54601. He can be reached at robdevens@aol.com.
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