Toolbox For Faith

When my oldest son first started to play in a baseball league, the idea was just to have fun. Everyone got a chance to bat. They didn’t really keep track of outs and they didn’t keep score - officially. Even through there was no official score, my son and all of his friends knew exactly what the score of the game was and they were quick to declare a “winner” when the game was over.

My son and his team were not unique. As a nation, I am convinced that we keep score of just about everything, because we are a little obsessed with knowing who is winning and, just as importantly, who is losing. The numbers, as some people like to say, don’t lie and so we keep score. This week, however, I began to wonder why we feel compelled to keep score in church. You don’t see Jesus asking Peter to get a count of the crowd gathered to listen to the Sermon on the Mount, but each Sunday ushers, interested parishioners and pastors, invest time in counting how many people are in church. We record the numbers. We track them and analyze them, but why?. Why do we count how many people are in worship on Sunday mornings or how many members are on the rolls or how many persons we serve in mission?

I like to believe that we track these numbers so we can measure the progress and impact of our ministry, but sometimes I wonder how often we count simply so we can keep score, so we can create a leaderboard that shows statistics like: who is the largest and who is the smallest or who is growing the fastest and who is falling apart the quickest. Once the leaderboard is established then we can find our place and compare ourselves to others.

What would happen, do you think, if we stopped counting for a month or two? Would we find another place to direct that energy? Would we start to look for new ways to measure progress? Would our priorities and the ways we invest our time begin to change? I’d like to think all of these things would occur, but I have a feeling that in most cases we would secretly keep score, just like my son and his team did, so that when the experiment was over we could announce a winner.

As I drove by a church on my way to drop my son off at camp, I looked over at their sign and saw, “The Summer heat is nothing compared to what you could experience for eternity. Prepare for the Rapture today!” Intellectually, I understand that there are groups of Christians who believe strongly that the rapture is real, but I guess, deep down, I hoped that the failed rapture prediction from last May would open a few eyes and turn people away from that interpretation of scripture. Since, however, rapture teaching probably isn’t going away anytime soon, I’d recommend “The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation” by Barbara R. Rossing. It is an excellent book and she does a wonderful job of giving both the background on how rapture teaching emerged and a hope filled interpretation of the book of Revelation. You can find the book on Amazon here.

How many hours a week to you typically work - 40, 50, 60 or more? I am writing this on the 4th of July from my office, so I have to admit upfront that I typically work more than 40 hours per week, but an article I saw on Huffington Post this week got me thinking about why? Historically, I think most people would have said that pastors work long hours because the church is understaffed or because there are always emergencies happening or because the pastor wanted to be involved in everything. According to “Top-Level Professionals View 40-Hour Work Week As Part-Time” (accessed July 4, 2011), 40 hour plus work weeks for pastors may simply be a reflection of the world around us. The article discusses a report by The Center for American Progress which found that “many top-level professionals, lawyers and doctors view the traditional 40 hour work week as a “part-time” job . . . . Many feel, with some justification, that a 40-hour week would be career suicide. This schedule is seen as ‘part time’ in many professional-managerial jobs, and tends to spell a less-prestigious and less upwardly-mobile career path.” (quotation from the Huffington Post article).

Since I believe that most pastors reflect the culture around them, it makes sense that 50 or 60 hour weeks are become the acceptable norm, not an unhealthy habit that we were warned about in seminary. Let’s face it, if key leaders in your congregation are professionals who work long hours, then that’s what they will expect of their pastor. When I interned outside New York City, I wore a dress shirt and tie to the office Monday to Friday, but when I took my first call in Lowcountry South Carolina, the ties went in the closet and now only come out occasionally. Pastors often talk of “being in the world, but not of the world”, however I’m afraid we have become fully “of the world” when it comes to the number of hours pastors need to work or believe that they need to work per week to be faithful.

Since I don’t see that expectation changing anytime soon, the question becomes one of balance. How do you create a balance between work and home? For me, balance comes through flexibility. My internship supervisor, Pastor Roger Spencer, once told me that “some weeks you go home and the church owes you money, but some weeks you go home and you owe the church money. Hopefully over the course of the year, it all works out. The key to finding balance,” he said, “was to recognize the weeks when you could get back an hour or two and go home.” These days, seeking balance often revolves around time when I am in the office. I typically go into the office when I drop my kids off for school around 7:30 AM, but I also typically pick them up when school is over around 2:30 PM. Some days I am back in the office (and so are they) after I pick them up and some days, I am able to head home. Day to day, week to week it changes, but my kids and my congregation have learned my patterns and understand that this is one way that I balance family and church. I’m sure I’ll have to re-balance things as my kids get older, but for now it seems to work for us.