What practical fact of daily life most differentiates the person in the pew from the one in the pulpit? Is it wisdom? Education? Creativity? Compassion? Or faith? Hardly.
I think the factor that most distinguishes my life as a pastor and the people I serve is just time. No one has more time than a pastor.
This, of course, seems beyond outrageous to say. After all, the one thing I and every other pastor knows is this: we have no time!
So what am I saying?
Think about it this way. One of the primary human resources a congregation gives its pastor is the gift of time. By being paid to serve full-time, a congregation says, “We want you to have the time to exercise your gifts in leading us.” Who else in our congregation is handed every week the overt gift of time to seek and serve God?
So why do we as pastors feel we have no time? Because we still never have enough! And, in fact, that’s true. We don’t.
That’s why, before consulting the One-Minute Manager, we pastors need to learn more from the Lord of all eternity. The minutes matter because eternity matters. We try to solve the problem of time in a grassroots way, from the bottom up. In the end, that is precisely why there is never enough time: we are incapable of making more of it.
By contrast, what can help us is to receive the gift of time in a grateful way, from the top down.
Time is always and only a gift from God. A pastor is given time to help the congregation remember eternity. The clock causes us to forget that.
We are not called to use time as manic managers, but to steward it as watchful, temporary servants.
Time is not primarily for the sake of doing more. Time is God’s gift for being and doing what matters. For this reason, our goal should not necessarily be to manage our time in order to do more, but perhaps to gratefully honor God’s gift by doing less.
God is never seen to be in a hurry. Jesus refused to be hustled. If that’s so, all the more should we find liberty in affirming we are made to be finite.
Of course, that’s the rub: we all hate our finitude. The PDA is only the latest human invention to try and avert that fact. We simply don’t want to admit the fundamental limits of our time.
If even God rested, why are pastors such suckers for the cultural idol of 24/7 productivity? We are not everlasting. Nor ever-ready. Nor should we be. The One who alone is eternal numbers our days, and must be trusted to give us enough of them.
Meanwhile, this means when a congregation hands us the gift of time, they are being stewards, as we must be, of what belongs first to God. Then, in light of eternity (not just in light of next Sunday!), we are to invest that gift in love, in hope, and in freedom.
We live in the active acknowledgement of the God who holds all things, which means the Lord holds whole lives, not just individual moments. We do not hold eternity, but eternity holds us, and those we are called to serve.
On frantic days, this helps me breathe. It helps me daily to drink in the simple assurance that God has created a world in time, and that today, as every day, there will be enough of it for what matters. Not enough for all I could imagine doing. Or for all that is needed. Or for all that will be asked of me. I am made to be finite, so I am free to live in a finite way. Only my insanity about time says otherwise.
Breathing deeply like this reminds me that ministry has almost no emergencies. There are some! But in light of eternity, panic and high drama in the life of the church is almost always an overreaction. Time does not actually shrink, even when it seems to do so in the face of email, phone calls, loud voices, and unrealistic expectations.
What matters is that the God of all time breathes eternity into our moments.
The Master Gardener uses us as seasonal workers. We serve a people for a time, in the name of the One who is with them always. When, by grace, I feel eternity allows me to “waste” time in the way Jesus did, I feel much less desperate or driven or depressed about time. It’s an act of abandonment brought on by faith. In the end—and there will be an end—no one has more time than a pastor, and all of us have enough.
Mark Labberton is pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, California.
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