Toolbox For Faith

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.