How to make your pastor look shifty

You are a nice kind person, I’m sure, so you won’t want to do this. But if you aren’t, let me tell you an almost sure way to make your pastor or vicar look shifty and feel guilty.

Ask him a question. Not ‘How much of your last four sermons did you get from the internet?’ or even ‘How many non-Christian friends do you have?’ or ‘What is your Five Year Strategy for the church?’ (though those might achieve the desired effect). Try this: ‘How often do you work on your day off?’

Eight days a week

Ministers’ wives sometimes say that they find it difficult when their friends talk to them about their husband’s work and say things like this: ‘So he just works one day a week then?! What does he do for the rest of the time?’ What makes that such an irksome question is that the wives know their husbands would probably work eight days a week if they could. Church ministry is a drug. Addictive, adrenalin inducing, compulsive. The work is never done. Doctors talk about on-call rotas of one in four or one in three. Pastors may get called out much less often. But they are generally on call one in one.

Sunday off?

For most people, Sunday is a day off work, and probably Saturday too. Either can be taken up with church responsibilities. But that is a different kind of work and provides a rest from normal work. We need those kinds of break. People who work seven days a week at the same thing without a regular break end up exhausted and irritable: they risk staleness, burn-out and breakdown.

But many, many vicars and ministers regularly work on all seven days of the week and would jump at the chance of an eighth. One curate told me he was shattered after working seven days a week for his first few months in the job. ‘Can’t you talk to your boss about it’, I asked. ‘I did’, he replied, ‘but he just shrugged his shoulders and said, “I work on my day off…..” .’

So if you ask your vicar or minister if he works Monday to Sunday there is a good chance that he will avoid eye contact and mutter something about how much work there is to be done and perhaps even seem as though they expect you to be grateful.

Plan of action

What should you do? I’d like to suggest that you tell him you want him to have a day a week completely free of church work, that you think he will be much better ‘value’ to the church if he does, that it is important he has time to rest, recharge his batteries, walk his dog, enjoy a hobby, take his wife out for a coffee, mow the lawn, have a lie-in, play golf or squash or chess, help with the kids’ homework, watch Spooks or Twenty-Four or Strictly Come Dancing or Top Gear, write to his parents or children, or to do absolutely nothing and feel no guilt whatsoever about it!

Why he needs to rest

But what if he talks about how many people there are to see, how many meetings there are to plan, how hard it is to find time to prepare sermons and services? Tell him that you need him to be rested if he is going to give the kinds of sermons you want to hear. Tell him you find it hard not to overdo things and having a minister with an overflowing diary is leading you astray (!). Tell him that if his wife looks neglected it de-stroys all the positive effects of the sermons he is preaching.

Final warning!

But what if he still looks determined to carry on? You could say: ‘God worked six days, then had a rest’. And then perhaps have a word with the churchwardens / PCC / lay elders / deacons. And pray for him to follow God’s pattern for life, not the world’s.

Julian Hardyman,
senior pastor of Eden Baptist Church, Cambridge