I started this blog-newsletter-thing at the very end of October 2022 because I was having a difficult time. Here’s a portion of what I wrote in the very first post:
A few weeks ago, early on a Sunday morning, I got a call from one of the local funeral homes. I had been expecting this death and I was ready for it. But it kicked off a few overloaded weeks: a funeral, a wedding, two burials, five wider church meetings, a leadership retreat, and some interpersonal crises in the congregation. And, of course, all of the not-quite-normal stuff that comes with being the pastor in the not-really-post-pandemic era.
Stacks on stacks of crises. And I realized that I was not okay.
And it might be because I’m on vacation next week, and then back for a couple of seeks, and then on a three month sabbatical—which is also a way of saying that my posting schedule is about to get weird—but I’m really feeling pretty okay now.
Not perfect, of course. There are still a lot of challenges. There are still a lot of things—church things and personal things—that I need to work on. But, overall, I am in a much better place than I was when I started this project.
So I thought I’d share the three things that have made the biggest difference.
The first thing that has made a big difference is abandoning manuscript preaching. I now spend my week thinking about a sermon instead of writing one. And on Sunday morning, I preach from the center of the chancel and without notes, instead of from the pulpit and reading a manuscript.
On a pastoral level, I’m being more spontaneous and connecting with the congregation better. But, on a personal level, and more importantly for my purposes here, it has freed up so much time. Here’s what I wrote about that in a post a few weeks ago:
[T]he ‘writing’—developing the stories, crafting the segments of the sermon, putting them in order, choosing the touchstone phrases, and so on—can happen while I do other things. I now write my sermons while I walk the dog, cook dinner, clean the bathroom, or whenever. And I write them, especially, on my commute: a half-an-hour each direction several times a week opens up a lot of time to think through them.
On the one hand, that means that there’s more overlap between my working and not-working lives, and that has a cost. On the other hand, though, it means that I have more time for non-working things (making dinner, mowing the lawn, etc.) because that overlaps with work; and, similarly, I have more time for the working things that cannot be done while also doing non-working things.
In a weird way, even though I still spend a fair amount of time on sermons, being able to work on those sermons while commuting or whatever has given me more time. And that has been tremendously freeing.
The second thing that has made a big difference is abandoning office hours.
I used to keep regular times when I was definitely at the office just in case anyone wanted to stop by. That meant that I was at the office during those times even if there was nothing that I needed to be in the office to do: even if I could have been somewhere else in the community, or visiting someone at their home, or spending time with my family.
Now, I probably spend about the same amount of time at the office in some form or another. The difference is that I spend my time at the office doing the things that I need to be in the office to do, when I need to do them. And that means that, again, I have more time to do those other things that need to be done: no sitting in the office when I could be at a community event, or at the assisted living facility, or just at home.
And, again, that is tremendously freeing.
The third thing that has made a big difference is taking time off, whether that’s taking my official day off, making sure that I make room for a slack day, or taking the time to be sick when I am sick.
At the height of the pandemic, it was my normal practice to work six days a week. If there was a funeral or another emergency, I worked seven days that week. And that meant that there were times when I went two or three weeks with no days off. And there were many more times when that day off was barely enough time to decompress before I had to leap back into the day-to-day.
I’m still learning to take time off—and I’m probably still too quick to give time up when there is an opportunity to help the church (like putting an alternative worship service on my slack day)—but, overall, I am doing a much better job of actually taking time off: no work after dinner, no work on Fridays unless there’s a real emergency, minimal work on Saturdays.
And that means that I am doing more than taking one day off a week to barely decompress while running errands. I am taking actual time to hang out with my family, and see friends, and engage in hobbies, without worrying about the work that I should be doing during that time.
And, again, that is tremendously freeing.
You might notice a theme to these three things: time.
A long time ago, I saw a schedule that some pastor has written down as a model for new pastors to use as they started congregational work. It was from the 1920s, and it suggested a much more pastoral life in every sense of the word: no heavy thinking after 9pm, time set aside for studying Greek and Hebrew, time to spend with family and in nature, and so on.
I don’t know if it was ever a schedule that pastors actually followed. I do know that it was a schedule that no pastor could follow today. And that’s for three reasons.
First, the work has expanded. We are no longer simply ministers of word and sacrament. We are also executive directors and fundraising professionals and public relations managers and a thousand other things. The list of things that the pastor does has become extensive (and even the list that I wrote out is not complete).
Second, every part of the work takes more. A worship service that lasts for an hour includes multiple hours of media creation and management, fundraising that used to be an autumn pledge drive is now a year-round slog to find the money to fund ministry, and so on. Every task is bigger. And every bigger task takes more time to accomplish.
Third, working more has become a badge of honor among clergy. We’ve started taking pride in working long days and late nights. We’ve written it into our contracts that we should work a minimum of forty hours, and that we shouldn’t worry about time until, “an excess of 55 hours per week becomes a habit for you or for us.”
We have embodied the idea that we should work as much as possible before we collapse in the pulpit.To be fair, we are not the only ones who are experiencing these things. Far too many of our congregation members—far too many people in our society—have embraced or been forced to embrace the idea that every hour of the day and every day of the week is for some version of work: the official job, the side hustle, or whatever.
And that’s not healthy. We know that’s not healthy. We know we are disconnected from each other. We know we are exhausted. We know we are becoming a little less human every day.
I don’t have a solution to that. But, for myself, I have been reclaiming time for myself. Time to be myself. Time, even, to simply be.
And I feel so much better than I did when there wasn’t enough time for those things.
That’s the actual language in my call agreement and the language suggested by the denomination!
I’m way behind in reading posts but find much value in this as I read tonight. I’m too forgetful to preach without notes, but I admire this.... and everything you wrote. Thank you.