It has been over two years since I wrote something on this blog. That is for two reasons. One is that I was working on finishing my Th.M. thesis and hoping to turn my M.A. thesis into some sort of book. The other is that I have been burning the candle at both ends and half-failed at the first reason. So here I am in Indiana, listening to the breeze sweep across the tree tops on my in-laws farm, enjoying a short sabbatical, and I would like to share why.
This post is written with my church, Salem Presbyterian, in mind as audience. For clarity’s sake, I will note these are just my personal, biased, not-peer-reviewed thoughts. It has been a pretty crazy season for our church with Ben needing to take some time away for physical healing and our congregation moving to a temporary summer home. I did not really announce to people I would be taking most of July off, but I am in fact away as you may have noticed. I wrote a letter to the elders about a month ago asking for time away to refresh and with great kindness they agreed.
Since beginning at Salem, I have been running at a break-neck pace because I absolutely adore our church. I love pouring blood, sweat, and tears into the lives of our community and especially into making that community function as a place of mission and hospitality. But there are problems with this pace of life, as many of you know. One of the really hard things to deal with as a pastor is the constant state of being “on.” It is almost impossible to know when I am not working and in a lot of ways I do not mind because I love my job so much. I have always resented pastors who draw thick lines between work and life. The parish is too much of a family to be so unimaginative. But in my youthful arrogance, I did not offset a blending of work and community with sabbath and reflection.
I am reading two books right now (well I’m juggling a few more very poorly, but…) as part of my sabbatical I have assigned myself Resilient Ministry by Bob Burns, et al., and The Pastor As Minor Poet by Craig Barnes. In The Pastor As Minor Poet, Barnes notes the story of Henri Nouwen, a Catholic priest and writer I have always adored. Nouwen checked himself 
into a monastery for seven months after he realized he was writing, lecturing, but failing to simply spend time in prayer. Barnes describes Nouwen’s situation as, “complaining about all the demands on his schedule, [yet] he paradoxically found himself afraid to be alone.”¹
This is where I am.
It has been awesome to watch God work over these few years at Salem Pres. We have almost doubled as a congregation and seen so many new members come through our doors even as we commission many to go out into the wider world. I love tinkering with so many of the gears and pistons that make our community possible as we embrace and send, embrace and send. But a number of unhealthy habits and narratives have snuck into my mind.
I have described Barnes’ book as both a salve and a compass. His humor and empathy help me cope with the challenges of pastoral ministry. I have also resented pastors who claim that ministry is unlike any other career. I find that to be such a self-appreciating claim. On the flip side, it is a strange vocation and through these readings I am learning to embrace that it is a sometimes lonely and murky way to spend a life.
Resilient Ministry is more a diagnostic manual, identifying streams of habit and thought and prescribing alternatives to the destructive ones. I am learning about a few of my bad habits. When I wrote to our elders describing my exhaustion, I noted that I do not think my job description is too much work. It fits my gifts and I believe I can accomplish it reasonably. However, three things have led to dysfunction in my work-life.
- Self-consciousness about my work life
- Misunderstanding my calling
- An idolatry of control and people-pleasing
I will save the latter two for later reflection. For a moment, I would love to address my self-consciousness about my work life. Resilient Ministry recommends finding ways to share with one’s congregation what it is we do for both the pastor’s and the congregation’s benefit. This combats a few of the habits and narratives I have allowed into my daily life. They note that pastor/writer Eugene Peterson was accustomed to writing a quarterly update on what it is he does week to week as a way of cluing-in his people. I hope to make a habit of the same…starting now.
I was so relieved to learn a study by the Anglican church found a pastor works an average of fifteen hours more a week than lay leaders realized. I feel this in a heavy way. I try to find work, because I feel I need to justify my vocation with other busy professionals in our church. Like I said before, I know my job could be accomplished in reasonable ways, but I feel like I need to “work.” I feel guilt about reading, I feel guilty about praying, and I feel guilty about NOT “working” during “business hours.”
Each morning I get to my desk intending to read scripture, pray, and journal. But immediately I think of the people out there doing “real work” like digging, bandaging, calculating, and serving. So I open my laptop and I begin to answer emails, make phone calls to small group leaders, create forms for the retreat, edit the bulletin, send out the weekly email, check our finances, or audit our member rolls and assure the unbaptized are scheduled for a baptism. Before you know it, it is lunch and I am meeting someone, then I meet with Ben in the afternoon, perhaps spend an hour again chipping away at emails, and by then it is dinner time. I eat dinner and head out of the house for a session meeting, to visit a small group, or to lead an evening prayer meeting. By the end I have busied myself, I have been with people, I have justified my existence and perhaps even competed with the most busy professionals in our congregation. But my soul is worse-off.
There are breaks in those times and some days I do not have any meetings. I could spend those days reading or even simply working on our house or yard, but I am afraid of being “caught” not working. I feel like I have to prove my job is a real job (which is absurd because when I look at other pastors I think “that is a nearly impossible vocation to survive.”) For myself however, I hear voices that people think I only sip coffee, flip through my study Bible, listen to podcasts, and go on walks.
I told a group of Duke Divinity School students earlier this year that the thing that surprised me most about being a pastor is that almost always someone is mad at you. My own pride drives me to tinkering with administrative work (which is necessary and valuable) because it is measurable and it makes me feel like I can rebut people’s expectations with my busywork. But this ignores the loftier task of being a priestly poet, one who discerns God’s word and then hopefully inserts it artfully in the lives of those around me–even if they are mad at me.
This task can only happen with self-care. Add “self-care” to the list of things I hate that pastors say. For those keeping score, I hate (1) firm lines between pastors and congregants (2) claiming ministry is unlike ANYTHING else, and (3) self-care. I fear these lines of thinking contradict Jesus’ call for followers to die to themselves, to take up their cross, to incur the cost of discipleship. Thankfully, Resilient Ministry has identified my equally arrogant cynicism,
The idea of self-care involves the pursuit of physical, mental, and emotional health. While just as important as spiritual formation, self-care may initially sound selfish. After all, didn’t Jesus say that those who follow him must give up all rights to themselves (Mark 8:34)? How does our Lord’s call to self-denial square with the idea of self-care?
In truth, responsible self-care is actually a way to deny oneself…The old life may have included slothful or obsessive activities such as inconsistent sleep habits, crazy work hours, poor or neurotic exercise, and an unhealthy diet. Self-denying self-care, on the other hand, may include getting to bed on time, saying no to work by setting aside periods for sabbath and sabbatical, getting responsible exercise, and eating a balanced diet.
Someone recently asked me what my hobbies are and while I have hobbies, all I could think of was work…I work.
I hope I can be at Salem Pres for a long time. For my part, I need to take better care so I can pour myself out better to the congregation. Barnes says, “Anybody with a few skills can run an effective meeting, so why waste a pastor on that assignment?…What if, instead of working so hard at omnicompetence, pastors were free to work hard simply at being better poets?”³ The only thing stopping me from following this advice is my own misunderstanding of my call and my own need for control.
¹ Craig Barnes, The Pastor As Minor Poet, 55.
² Bob Burns, et al., Resilient Ministry, 21.
³ Barnes, 44, 28.
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