Your Pastor Needs A Sabbatical
Most of us don’t fully realize the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual demands required to serve as a pastor. We are aware of the investments those in ministry have made in our own lives. What we don’t often calculate, however, is the cumulative stress those investments require when they are multiplied by the entire membership of our congregation.
We depend on pastors as our own personal counselors, mentors, leaders, friends, and spiritual advisors. We call on them to bless, baptize, and bury. When our families are in crisis, we expect them to referee, revive, repair, and reclaim. We are also quick to take offense when they don’t recognize or acknowledge us at the grocery store or remember the names of our children and grandchildren.
According to a 2010 editorial in the New York Times, "Members of the clergy suffer from obesity, hypertension, and depression at rates higher than most Americans. In the last decade, their use of antidepressants has risen, while their life expectancy has fallen. Many pastors say they would change jobs if they could." Phillip Yancey wrote, I wonder how much more effective our churches would be if we made the pastors spiritual health, not their efficiency our number one priority?
A Lifeway Research Survey indicated that more than 1 in 5 pastors say their family resents the demands of pastoral ministry. Half of those surveyed are often concerned about the financial security of their family. More than half indicated their job is often overwhelming. One-third feel isolated. One-fourth frequently get irritated with church members. One-third noted that the needs of others often takes them away from spending time with their family. Paul David Tripp wrote, “Does it seem right and healthy that in many churches the functional reality is that no one gets less of the ministry of the body of Christ than the pastor does?”[1]
So, how can we not expect the stress of those responsibilities to eventually take its toll? How can our pastors lead us to where they no longer have the emotional, physical, and spiritual resolve to go themselves?
Offering ministry sabbaticals is a way congregations can invest in the lives and future ministry of their pastors and their church. Pastors need the gift of time beyond a couple of weeks of vacation. These sustained periods away every few years allows them to step away from their daily responsibilities, to renew their bodies, refresh their souls, and to reaffirm their calling to God and their congregation.
In and article on sabbaticals for pastors, Martin Sanders and Warren Bird indicated that 35% of protestant congregations say they provide their pastors with opportunities for sabbatical leaves. These congregations sense the need and affirm the value of a carefully planned period of time in which a pastor is granted space apart from normal ministerial responsibilities in order to spend an extended period of time in recovery, rest, study, and reflection.[2]
In 2008, the Louisville Institute commissioned a research survey of 250 pastors who had taken a sabbatical. Among the findings: 87% of pastors reported that the sabbatical significantly renewed their commitment to ministry. 94% of church members claimed that their pastor seemed refreshed and re-energized after the sabbatical. 75% percent of congregations reported that a pastoral sabbatical tangibly benefited the life of the church (and not just the life of the pastor). And 80% of pastors who took a sabbatical considered the gift of time the single most important feature of their sabbatical.
Investing in ministerial sabbaticals gives your pastors permission to rest, heal, learn, and recharge for future ministry. And it gives your congregation an opportunity to practice faithful stewardship of those ministers with whom they have been entrusted. The gain for a congregation that invests in the health of their pastor through sabbaticals is much greater than any minimal loss of them not being in the office or the pulpit for a few weeks.
If your congregation won’t make the sacrifices and spiritual investment in the lives and future ministry of your pastors…who will? And if your church is not willing to give your pastors that time away to renew, refresh, and recommit, then maybe it’s time for them to move to another church that is.
[1] Paul David Tripp, Dangerous Calling: Confronting the Unique Challenges of Pastoral Ministry (Wheaton: Crossway, 2012), 11-12.
[2] Warren Bird and Martin Sanders, What Pastors Should Know Before Their Sabbatical, from the website http://www.churchleaders.com.