Episode 057: The Pastoral Workweek
In this episode we sit down to talk about the central tasks of pastoral ministry and how to delegate and manage your time accordingly.
I have to do three things: lead the team, teach and preach, and be a shepherd to the congregation that’s in front of me… it’s hard to put a percentage to those things… the demands of people cannot be scheduled or predicted…
I tend to spend a lot of my time leading… 5-8 hours I spend studying for content for sermons… the rest of my time is available to pastor the congregation, to be present with them…
I try to keep track of ratios… generally I’m spending twice as much time on staff as I am on congregants… on an average week I might have four or so congregant meetings, and twelve or so staff-related meetings…
Most pastors that I coach have a hard time saying no, which means that the tyranny of the urgent tends to rob them…
What’s different about our job is how much content we have to create… most CEOs and leaders of small businesses might have to speak 4-6 times a year… we do that in a WEEK…
The pastoral vocation requires us to come up with so much creative content while also giving out so much emotional energy, which makes our job different from any other job on the planet, and most pastors don’t know how to manage that space and their energy…
For me, I have to think bigger than “sermon prep”… there’s something deeper than just preparing “the talk”… we have to cultivate a life from which messages emerge… we have to enrich the soil from which future messages will spring…
An older pastor once said to me, “Brady, don’t drown under the weight of people’s love… if you’re not able to say no to good things, you will drown under the weight of their love for you…”
The greatest gauge for me on whether I’m managing my schedule right is whether there is joy… I want to end my week with a certain sense of joy… if I can’t be joyful at home because of what work costs me, then something has to shift…
