My
parents will tell you, my sister will tell you, my fiancée will tell you: I
don’t march well to the beat of another drummer (actually, my high school band
director, Mr. Adams, could probably tell you that too. But I digress). I also don’t really march well to my own
beat. I’m big, clumsy, and occasionally
oblivious. If I have a drummer I march
to, it is probably a demented, sleep-deprived infant who is banging things at
random with its tiny little infant fists.
All
of that is to say this: I sometimes struggle with the expectations other people
put upon me. Not because I can’t live up
to them—although sometimes that’s true—but because I won’t, because those
expectations are, to be honest, soul-deadening.
Expectations
like the belief that I must marry and have kids before becoming anyone’s senior
pastor (yes, I’ve had that told to me).
Expectations like the advice that I take voice lessons to help my
self-taught singing voice because “churches expect their pastors to be able to
sing’ (yes, I’ve had that told to me, too).
And it’s something that certainly isn’t limited to me, it’s something
that affects a lot of pastors.
I’m
talking about the expectation of us always being in our office (you know, in
addition to being out in the community performing outreach, out in the
hospitals and nursing homes doing visitations, and out in the homes of our
congregants). If we aren’t in our
office, we must not be doing real, actual, bona fide work. So when my advertised office hours add up to
only 16 hours per week (all day Mondays and most Thursdays, in case you’re
wondering), and people ask me, in true Office Space fashion, “what it is you do
here,” part of me just wants to run from this conversation screaming.
Here’s
the thing you may not know about your pastor…and I’m not saying this is true
for all pastors, but if for no other reason than gut feeling, I’m willing to
bet it’s the case for a lot of us: we don’t actually like sitting in our
offices. Yes, it is important for us to
be accessible to you, our congregants.
Yes, it is important for us to be doing the business of the parish. But in an age of smartphones and wifi
everywhere, the traditional office is rapidly going the way of the dodo.
And
if I’m honest, good riddance. I have
never been good at holding a 9-to-5 schedule.
The few times I have done so in ministry (like for my chaplaincy
internship in San Francisco), I was miserable.
I was commuting 40 minutes a day on a train—and then in a van
shuttle—surrounded by wan, sallow cubicle monkeys who went about their commutes
in the most robotic possible way. And
I’d go to my internship, where I would have to log every single minute of my
workday, and I would continue to be miserable, and I would commute back across
the bay with the same wan, sallow, miserable cubicle monkeys/Office Space
extras.
It
sucked.
I
have always been at my best at two different times of the day: early in the
morning, right after I have had my coffee, and early in the evening, when I
usually get a second wind around five o’clock after having a snack or a brisk
walk around the block. The middle of the
afternoon? I am worse than useless. I’m the tired, motley jackass in those
5-hour-energy commercials who is shuffling back to the coffeepot every hour. I’m the person for whom siestas exist in the
Spanish-influenced parts of the world.
But,
because the mirage of the office must be maintained, I, and many other pastors,
set up shop even when we aren’t at our best.
We therefore aren’t especially productive, and our work then bleeds over
into the evening hours…which for me is when I am, actually, more productive,
but it is still an inefficient way to go about my ministry. It certainly does neither me or my
congregation any favors, and I can’t imagine it thrills God either, for one additional
reason:
It
doesn’t get me outside of the Disciples orbit all THAT often.
If
we—and I’m including myself here—are called to be the light of the world, salt
of the earth, city on a hill, and so on, then it doesn’t do me or anyone else a
whole lot of good to only interact with the exact same people week after
week. If I’m to grow as a Christian—and if,
God willing, I am to help others grow as well—getting outside of my usual
circles every now and again is important (for a far more eloquent take on this
exact issue, I highly recommend Dan Kimball’s book “They Like Jesus, But Not
the Church,” which I did a sermon series on a year ago).
So,
really, I’d like to see us in the Church (big ‘c,’ universal church) move away
from another paradigm that perhaps is a tad outmoded, and certainly is not
always geared for efficiency…the paradigm of office work. It is a lie that a pastor must have an
office. Yes, it is NICE that I have one—it
does make a significant portion of my work much, much easier.
But
my calling is no more tied to my office than Christianity is tied to any one
church’s sanctuary. It’s all global by
now.
And
that’s the way it needs to be if Christianity is to flourish.
Yours in Christ,
Eric
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