For this week's newspapers, I answered a reader's questions about what pastors do during the week:
Q: What does my pastor do for the
remainder of the week after the Sunday service is over?
We’ve all heard the joke about
pastors working only one hour a week, but hopefully it’s just a joke to the
people who say it, because it is certainly not a reflection of reality. In fact, due to their many commitments in the
congregation and the unusual hours in which they must fulfill them—ranging from
evening meetings with congregational boards to giving counsel to couples or
individuals during most people’s “after work” hours, to the frequent emergency
calls to the hospital or the bedside of a dying member—many pastors actually
find it a challenge to devote adequate time to their families.
One of the primary tasks of the
pastor’s work week is preparing the sermon and service for the upcoming
Sunday. If a pastor followed the
commonly-accepted formula that college speech professors dictate for preparing
a public speech, the pastor would spend one hour of preparation for each minute
of the sermon. In the real world,
pastors often rely on their education and experience to prepare more
efficiently and most report spending 10-20 hours in sermon preparation (or
20-50% of their working hours).
Unless a congregation has a
professional musician on staff or an administrative professional devoted to the
task, he is probably also responsible for planning all of the other elements of
the service, scheduling those who will perform them, and distributing the
materials necessary for them to do so.
Because the pastor is often the
primary staff member to occupy the building in smaller congregations, he may
also spend many of his office hours answering phones, responding to
correspondence, researching information requested from the congregation’s
records, sorting mail, and other administrative and office tasks—or in passing
on messages to part-time staff who perform them—beyond sermon preparation and
service planning.
If he teaches weekday or Sunday Bible
classes or instructs youth, he will spend about 2-5 hours of preparation per
hour of teaching if he is writing his own material, and an hour of preparation
per hour of teaching if he is using curriculum purchased from a Christian
publisher.
In rural areas like ours, there is
also the element of travel. When
frequently-visited hospitals are an hour away and the drive to the hospitals
where congregation members receive more specialized care may be up to 4 hours,
pastors spend a significant amount of time traveling. A visit to a member in Rochester or Iowa City
will easily occupy a full day for the pastor.
Pastors will frequently have
responsibilities to the denomination to which their church belongs or to the
district and regional bodies of that denomination, which equates to additional
meetings and travel. Additionally, much
like other teachers, doctors, and other professionals, a pastor who takes his
work seriously will devote time to keeping his skills current and expanding his
knowledge. This could take the form of
single-day classes that are nearby, but often involves week-long conferences in
another part of the country.
The descriptions above all assume a
traditional full-time clergy devoting the vocation’s statistical average 50-52
hours to congregational work, but it is becoming more common, especially in
rural congregations, for pastors to serve multiple congregations, or serve the
congregation only part-time, while working in another vocation as a supplement
for the portion of compensation the congregation cannot provide. This requires adjustments and choices to be
made, both by the pastor and the congregation, to adapt for the reduced
flexibility and shorter hours of this arrangement while maintaining the best
possible degree of pastoral care in light of the circumstances.
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