UNSTACKING WORK OVERLOAD - Christianity Today

When I first encountered input saturation, I didn’t recognize it. It was my first year of ministry, and our district superintendent had invited me and his other charges to the stark and therapeutic wilderness of Camp Fred Looke in Wisconsin for rest and encouragement.

Our retreat speaker was enthusiastically outlining new approaches for outreach Bible studies, or premarital counseling, or whatever was the current hot topic-I fail to remember now. I was scribbling notes as fast as I could, grateful for the practical help-good, solid answers to my general incapability.

Then I saw it: the man next to me, twenty years my senior, wasn’t writing at all. I looked around and realized no one who had been in ministry more than five years had paper or pen! Many stared vacantly into space. The inspiration and instruction wasn’t going to travel home with most of them. They had come to our annual gathering for relief from the grind, merely tolerating the superintendent’s lectures. I prayed with naive arrogance, “Lord, help me never be apathetic about the work of the ministry (and I thank you that I am not like other men).”

My eagerness had me trapped by my third annual trip to Fred Looke. By then I had attended so many seminars and had read so many books about ministry, I was working wildly to do everything a conscientious pastor is supposed to do. There were many voices telling me, “If the Sunday school is going to be strong, the pastor will be actively involved in it,” or “Invest your life in your young people,” or a dozen other things-you-must-do.

This time, I escaped from the superintendent’s seminar and went for a long walk in the frozen woods. I couldn’t listen for another minute to somebody listing what else I needed to do. Sitting on a snow-covered log, I began to write everything I had come to expect of myself, and beside each task, how much time I would have to invest per week. The total came to 139 hours. Then I knew something had to change.

Aggravating the problem

My first response to the dilemma kept me going for years. I set out to become capable in all areas of pastoral responsibility, to master the skills of ministry, though they seemed so widely varied. I decided to learn to do it all with great proficiency and efficiency, and thus do it all in less time.

W. A. Criswell preached with dramatic effect at our annual council in Atlanta: “I can do all things through Christ.” With renewed faith I left the assembly believing I could do everything, which wasn’t precisely Criswell’s point.

But I tried. I found great satisfaction in better technique. In becoming a student of the practice of ministry, I began to see my skills mature. I was feeling good about my personal development.

Then one summer, toward the end of an advanced study program and ten years of diligent work, when I should have been feeling some relief from work overload, I found myself blurting to my professor, “Now that you’ve taught me to do so many things well, I’m cursed with being capable of doing much more than I have time to do!”

I was back where I’d started. I may have become more capable, but the root tension remained the same. The technical help being offered in continuing education and journals was still asking for more and more of my time. There was nobody to tell me what to leave undone. I knew what to list as my priorities. It was the “posteriorities” I didn’t know how to list.

Solving the problem

As I move toward a solution to all this (there has to be something better than not listening at getaways), some principles have begun to help ease the load:

Form a precise philosophy of ministry. The great Victorian preachers prepared sermons in the mornings and visited the sick in the afternoons. People expected nothing else. Now we have added counseling and summer camp and seminars and active outreach and fellowship groups and small groups and Sunday schools and kids’ clubs and youth work and adult education and missions work and stewardship campaigns and building programs and hospital chaplaincy and police chaplaincy and on and on. Of course we still expect to be as profound as Victorian preachers and to visit all the sick (and everyone else).

A concept from John Calvin (undoubtedly given me at a pastors’ seminar) has helped me choose my activities. Calvin said the roles of the pastor are like those of Christ: the prophet (preaching that bears a message), priest (intercession and pastoral care), and king (managing the business of the kingdom).

Of course, even that mandate can expand to impossible dimensions, but with careful thought about my calling, I found I could more confidently tell Mrs. Morrison, “I really do regret that the ladies’ washroom needs redecorating. Have you talked to the chairman of the building maintenance committee?”

Center on your strengths. With the centrifugal force of so many expectations, staying in the hub of your strengths takes conscious effort. After three years, Jesus could pray, “Father, I have finished the work that you gave me to do.” It troubles me that I rarely go to bed at night able to pray that prayer because of concern for the tasks I didn’t get to that day or the people I should have seen. So I’ve not yet narrowed enough my expectations for myself.

God expects me to be a good steward of my gifts, his investment in me. Although we all get involved in things that “somebody has to do,” I’ve made it important to “consider myself with sober judgment” (Rom. 12:3), to know my strengths, and to seek to make my maximum impact for God by protecting the time it takes to use them well.

It’s tempting to assume what we do best can be done with little preparation or special attention, while we shore up areas of weakness. When we do that, we find ourselves putting our best energy and time into tasks we don’t do well.

I’ve found it critically important to generate with my elders a written job description for my work. My church may still want all the active programs we have learned to expect, but it becomes clear to thoughtful people that the pastor can’t be involved in every one. Neither can my lay people, for that matter. My job description’s greatest value is the limits it sets.

My personnel committee is careful to rebuke me when I take on more than I should, like when they recently urged me to let other staff members lead worship more often. We have learned together that my preaching preparation and prayer, as well as pastoral curing of souls, suffer under too large a load of activities. But with an agreed-upon job description, I’m protected. With the support of church leaders, I can more easily leave ordering the Sunday school curriculum to our capable Christian education people.

Gather around you others whose gifts complement yours. Without careful thought, we may invite people just like us to be close to us. We experience fewer interpersonal bumps that way, but I’m learning to value people who are different from me. I need their observations, though I may not like what I hear sometimes. I need them to do what is not my forte, though they may do it differently.

The first axiom in choosing coworkers is: Begin with your own role definition, concentrate on what you do best, and cover the rest with others. My strength is my pulpit. And I’m privileged to have marvelous people with me, both on staff and in lay positions, who do most other things very well.

I am deeply concerned about our financial balance (especially when the treasurer keeps asking for red pens), and I’m neurotic about tidy bookkeeping. But now that our financial processes are in the hands of competent people, it’s time for me to step back from that department. They have to shoo me out of the way sometimes because I am reluctant to let anything happen without me in it. But I’m able to concentrate more effectively when my colleagues are strong where I’m weak.

Value God’s anointing more than God’s equipping. My skills and gifts are part of the equipment God has given me. So is my upbringing and education. He has shaped me with the experience-centered training program he designed for just me.

With all that, however, my counseling may be skillful, but it won’t heal without God’s power in it. My preaching may be sterling, but it won’t provide an encounter with God without the unction of the Spirit. My prayers may be faithful, but they won’t be vital without the Spirit’s assistance. My leadership may be a masterful application of the latest thought on the subject, but without the hand of the Lord upon me, nobody will follow.

Our technological orientation has produced better techniques for everything we do, and that’s good and helpful. But with each day’s urgencies, it’s easy to compromise that time with God in which our spirits are renewed and our whole beings filled and shaped by his Spirit. I regret that it has taken me so long to learn to value that unction or anointing more than I value the development of skills.

The hardest challenge of our ministry roles is not that we must somehow do more but that we must somehow do less. Dazzling fads may beguile us into good activities we really should leave for others, so I’m praying for specific guidance not on how to get everything done but on how to leave some things undone.

-Ronald B. Gifford

Peace Portal Alliance Church

White Rock, British Columbia

A LIFE OF INTERRUPTIONS

The first thing I do at my office in the morning is pray. The second thing I do is consult my DTT (Do This Today!) list. On my DTT list are the things that simply cannot wait another day.

There was both good news and bad news when I consulted my DTT list one morning last month. The good news: the tasks for that day, the 18th, were few and not all that demanding. The bad news: that day wasn’t the 18th. It was the 25th.

Things that could not wait another day had already waited seven. I was a week behind, and I shuddered to think how long it would be before I got to all the tasks noted on my next six DTT lists. Now you know why I pray first thing in the morning.

How do I get so far behind? Interruptions.

I arrive at my office in the morning with great expectations about the work I’m going to get done that day: plan the new members’ class, plot the agenda for the next consistory meeting, compose a prayer of confession for the Sunday bulletin, write my editorial for the church newsletter, finish my sermon, and visit two shut-ins on the way home. But always there are interruptions.

I figure that by the time I leave my office in the afternoon, I will have spent two, maybe three, hours doing things that, that morning, I had no plans of doing. The doorbell will ring. The phone will ring. People will drop in to talk. Interruptions.

Someone-I think it was C. S. Lewis-wrote something I have found helpful: “What we must do is to stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life, the real life that God sends us day by day. What we call our real life is but a phantom of our imagination.”

What splendid insight! When our children interrupt us, or when the phone rings at an untimely moment, I try to remember that my attention is being directed, not distracted. Interruptions do not remove us from real life; they lead us into real life. Come to think of it, what was the ministry of Jesus if not a succession of interruptions, of unexpected intrusions into his life by other people?

I’m still uneasy about being a week behind on my DTT list, but more important than my DTT list is my DTN (Do This Now) list. My DTT list, I prepare. My DTN list, God prepares, not to yank me out of the business of a minister but to plunge me into it.

Now that I think about it, those two or three hours of interruptions are often the most significant hours of my day.

I want to say a few more things about interruptions, but they’ll have to wait. I’m wanted on the phone.

-Louis Lotz

Morningside Reformed Church

Sioux City, Iowa