I have conversations with colleagues about whether being a pastor is an identity or a job.
There are a lot of people who see being a pastor as an identity: a pastor is a pastor all the time, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, even when they are doing non-pastoral things. And there are some people who see it as being a job: a pastor is a pastor when they are on the clock and fulfilling their pastoral duties, and not the rest of the time.
I have strong congregationalist roots, and I have always thought of pastoral ministry as a job. Every Christian is a Christian all the time, and every Christian is a minister, so every Christian is a minister all the time. But pastoral ministry is a subset of Christian ministry, and a pastor it only a pastor when they are engaged in pastoral ministry.
Christian all the time. Minister all the time. Pastor some of the time.
But the reality is that it is incredibly easy for pastoral ministry to become an all-the-time thing: a job that becomes—that even consumes—your identity. And one of my biggest challenges is that I have let my job consume so much of my identity.
There are reasons for that, of course.
First, there’s the matter of availability.
For a long time, the pastor has been the person who is supposed to be there for the congregation and the community. That has meant actively engaging with people during normal hours: worship services and meetings, church and community events, visits to homes and hospitals, and all the rest. That has also meant being available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to respond to emergencies ranging from personal crises to hospitalizations to deaths.
And that may have been fine when the only way to reach the pastor was to find the pastor, or to reach them on the phone at home, or to leave a message at the office. But I have a device in my pocket that lets people reach me by phone, text, email, or any number of social media networks at any time of day. And there is an expectation that of course the pastor will, one way or another, be in.
Second, there’s the matter of responsibility.
I am part of a congregationalist tradition where the people are, ostensibly, in charge. The pastor is not an employee of the congregation, but a leader among leaders and a representative of the gospel tradition and the wider church. That means that the work of the church is the work of the people, and that the pastor should have a role that is both limited and well-defined. In other words, the pastor is not the one who does the work of the church, but is the one who makes sure that the work of the church gets done by everyone.
And, again, that may have been fine when the world was smaller and the church was bigger. That may have been fine when there were more people in the pews and the life of the church was a higher priority for more of those people. But as the world has grown and the church has shrunk and members have disengaged, pastors have become more than pastors. We are also executive directors, heads of staff, music directors, fundraisers, social media managers, videographers, and more.
Third, and finally, there’s the matter of personality.
There was a time during the wilderness years between college and seminary when I worked in a kitchen. Every job in a kitchen is important—one does not piss off the dishwashers—but some are more prestigious than others. Mine was not prestigious. I washed dishes, I prepared ingredients, I made salads and appetizers, and I finished desserts. And sometimes, when the lunch crowd was small, I got a turn on the sauté station.
But the point is that even though my job was near the bottom of the kitchen hierarchy, I went to bed and woke up with prep lists running through my head. I am good at letting work take over my life. That was true in those wilderness years, that was true when I was a fundraiser, and that is true now that I am a pastor. And I suspect that a lot of clergy are the same way. It’s easy to think about that sermon, or that intracongregational conflict, or whatever when we’re having dinner with our spouse, or when we’re walking the dog, or when it’s our day off, or when we’re on vacation.
So there are cultural reasons, and responsibility reasons, and personal reasons that our jobs can consume our identities. And all of them became that much more powerful during the pandemic.
The long and the short of it is that I went from having one all-but-guaranteed day off every week plus one slack day every week to having one slack day every week. And that meant that I didn’t have any days off when there was a wedding or a funeral or a poorly timed crisis or, really, anything that I could even think about during my free time.1 And that is not sustainable.
So one of the things that I am now learning—or, possibly, re-learning—to do is take time off. I am learning to take two days off every week, knowing that one of those days might get taken by the crisis of the week, but that it doesn’t have to. I am learning to push thoughts about work out of my head on those days, as well as before I ‘clock in’ and after I ‘clock out’ for the day.
I am learning to not work. And to let those parts of my identity that are not my job have some time to themselves.
Of course, I am still available for emergencies twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But I am learning that things that are not emergencies—real actual life-or-death emergencies—can wait, and that I am a better and more effective pastor when I am not treating everything as a crisis that needs to be dealt with right now.
Thanks for reading!
Slack time is the time that I build into my schedule on the theory that something will come up that I didn’t plan for. If nothing comes up, I can just have that time off. But if something does come up, I don’t have to juggle crowded schedule, cancel a meeting, or give other work less time than it deserves. Instead, I can simply use the time that is sitting there specifically for the things that will inevitably come up from time to time.