How Much Does a Pastor Work?: Wrestling with the Ambiguities of a Pastor’s Timesheet
Having a conversation about how much a pastor works is like having a conversation about what a snowflake looks like: we can all draw a generic thumbnail sketch easily enough, but drawing the particulars comes with more difficulty.
I have no idea how much a pastor works even though I’ve been one for a decade. I’m sure a few pastors don’t work enough, while many others work too much. But who decides what constitutes too much and too little? Who is the Goldilocks pastor who does just the right amount of work?
I did some reading recently about why pastors leave the ministry, and the authors cited an interesting study. In the 1950s the average pastor worked 69 hours a week, while in the 1990s the average pastor worked between 48–55 hours (Dean R. Hoge and Jacqueline E. Wenger, Pastors in Transition, 226). That’s a significant drop, and a healthy one if you ask me. So, I made an Excel chart and plotted the trendline. If we extrapolate out, the average pastor in 2020 should have worked less than 40 hours per week, the global pandemic notwithstanding. Continuing the trend, we could suppose, then, by the time Jesus comes back pastors will only be working that one hour a week congregations always tease us about. And in heaven, they say, pastors will be out of jobs. But until then . . .
What Counts as Work?
Deciding what counts as work and what doesn’t count is not as obvious as you might think. Much of my job involves the kinds of activities you expect, the kinds of activities easier to track. Pastoring includes preparing and preaching sermons, counseling, administration, overseeing staff health, hospital visits, officiating weddings and funerals, leading and attending meetings, and so on.
But pastoral ministry sometimes involves less expected activities, like hosting a four-square tournament or “Youth Group Olympics” in your backyard; arranging the stage before and after a wedding and then vacuuming up all the glitter stuck in the carpet that fell from the bride’s dress; washing church table cloths after a Wednesday memorial service luncheon; working on graphic design for the church welcome booklet, coffee mugs, and sermon posters; helping the guy who knocked on the front door of the church and just needs gas money to get home; talking for thirty minutes to a church member at a swimming pool on my off day when I was there to play with my kids; and occasionally shoveling icy-slush from the church walkway, plunging a clogged church toilet, and painting the church foyer; and so on. This is no campaign for sainthood; I’ve never touched a leper in Calcutta. But everything I listed comes from time-on-task in our church, the stuff of normal pastoring.
“Pastoring is more of a lifestyle job that goes with you everywhere you go, rather than one left at the office when you punch the clock.”
Some of these tasks fit in the typical nine-to-five, but many don’t. And this is what makes it difficult to figure out how much, and how hard, we pastors work. Pastoring is more of a lifestyle job that goes with you everywhere you go, rather than one left at the office when you punch the clock. Thankfully, as our church has grown, the pastors at our church have a job description that looks less sporadic than my above list implies.
Recording Hours Worked
Rewind the clock with me about six years. At that time, I had been at my current church for just over a year. Perhaps in the hopes of doing a good job and perhaps because of my sinful inclinations to be a people-pleaser, I said “yes” to everything church members asked me to do. That’s what it felt like, anyway. As you might expect, my schedule got out of control. Over one particular month, I remember working in the evenings five or six nights a week. You can’t work both first and second shift for long stretches without developing problems. I was having problems.
I talked about this with one of our volunteer pastor-elders, and he encouraged me to prioritize my responsibilities. Also, per his encouragement, I began tracking every hour worked, though I wasn’t happy about doing so. Up until that point in ministry, I had resisted tracking hours because in my former career as an engineer, I was required to track every half hour of work and submit a convoluted timesheet to HR at the end of each week. When I traded the calculator for a Bible, I never wanted to record my hours again.
But I had also resisted tracking the hours I worked in ministry because, as I said above, the nature of pastoral ministry makes tracking hours difficult. It can be hard to know if the time required to prepare your home to host a dinner for twenty people counts as “work,” or if that extra time to clean your bathroom, mow your yard, and scrub your floor is part of owning a house. Sometimes it’s not clear whether a dinner meeting was even a “work meeting” or whether it might be better described as just hanging out with friends. And after those twenty people leave your home, do the forty-five minutes it takes to clean up your house count as “work”? And if I bought the food for the meal with my church credit card, does my family get to eat the leftovers tomorrow?
(If you’re a church member, please don’t take these comments the wrong way, and don’t think meanly of your pastor for asking these sorts of questions. If he is asking these sorts of questions, he’s probably just trying to be faithful to the calling you’ve commissioned him to pursue.)
The best advice I have ever received about tracking pastoral hours came during a Q&A at a conference I attended years ago while in seminary. I don’t even remember the name of the speaker, but I remember what he said when someone asked him how many hours a pastor should work and what constitutes work: count it all and shoot for fifty hours. “The volunteer pastors at your church probably have a salary job that requires them to work the standard forty hours a week, but in reality they probably work at least forty-five,” he explained. “And then the church expects our volunteer pastors to give, on average, five hours a week to the local church, if not more. So, count it all and shoot for fifty. But be ready to do more on an occasionally busy week, just as your elder board is ready for more at work and church.”
Perhaps this approach is too simple and arbitrary, but it’s proved a handy guideline all these years later. I count the time to clean up my house after I host a dinner, and I count the time to attend a small group Bible study. I don’t count my time to commute to work each day, but I do if I visit someone after hours at the hospital.
As much as I didn’t want to track my hours for all the reasons listed above, I felt it was more important to know how much I was working, especially how many evenings a week I was away from home. So, per the suggestion of my friend, for the next two years I logged every half hour of work and found I averaged 46 hours a week and spent around 2–4 evenings a week away from home. That’s a little light, according to the conference speaker’s advice.
But was it light? We haven’t counted it all yet.
What about “Writing Time”?
This is where my specific calling in ministry further complicates the calculation of total work hours. Although it certainly does not make me a snowflake with a unique crystalline lattice, I am a pastor who also feels called by God to write. So, for most of the last seven years, the time before I took the role of managing editor for Gospel-Centered Discipleship, I treated my calling to write as a part-time but unpaid job. I don’t often tell people I view it this way, but that is how I look at it. I do most of my writing early in the mornings between 5:30–7 a.m., and sometimes also on Friday afternoons from 2–4 p.m. Most weeks this adds up to about ten hours of writing on top of my day job.
Let me explain more of what I mean by calling my writing “unpaid.” Writing has not been lucrative for me. Most years, when you add up all the expenses of hosting and maintaining my blog, writing articles for other websites, buying books for research, and paying for professional editing, any money I make from book royalties or the occasional article, does not make up for the money I lose. In accounting terms, my profits and losses are in the red.
I don’t worry about this, though. I consider my writing ministry done unto the Lord. And I also look at it as an investment; maybe some year in the future, “losing a few thousand” will become “making a few thousand.” But in the meantime, it feels obedient to keep working at my craft and growing in my ability to write words that help people find joy in God. Besides, I enjoy writing.
But here’s the question: where do these extra 10 hours-per-week fit in relation to my 46 hours-per-week? Should I consider writing more of a hobby, in which case the hours don’t count at all toward ministry hours? Or is this writing work so closely related to ministry that these hours do “count” as work? In math class, 10 plus 46 would equal 56, and since the case could be argued that with each blog post I write, the better I become at communicating Christian truth, which feels closely connected to the actual work of pastoring a church, and therefore these writing hours should be counted as regular work hours.
For years, I wrestled on my own with these questions. I won’t bore you with all the internal iterations of how I parsed the details, but the angst proved lonely and, in the end, the wrong way to handle the ambiguity. The team of pastor-elders at our church have since helped me clarify how we, together, answer questions around what constitutes “company time” and what constitutes “hobby time,” as well as the tricky financial aspects of writing. As formal and cumbersome as it might sound, we now have a signed writing agreement that, we think, benefits us both.
Why Am I Sharing This?
“Putting the ambiguities in the spotlight, I hope, will help other pastors who wrestle with the same questions. Surely, I’m not the only one. ”
I do not share these reflections because my confidence is high that I do everything the way a pastor should. I don’t know what Enneagram number this makes me, but I’m the sort of pastor—the sort of person really—who often feels like I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing even when I know I am, if that makes sense. So, I do the best I can to answer questions about work hours faithfully. And as I wrestle with how much to work and what to work on, I try to listen to my wife, the council of the pastors I work with, and friends and mentors who pastor different churches, as well as having an open, prayerful dialogue with the Lord about it all.
The reason I’m sharing all this now, is the hope that putting some of the ambiguities in the spotlight will help other pastors who wrestle with the same questions. Surely, I’m not the only one.
Also, I share these questions and the fact that I work about 46 hours a week to keep me accountable. It wouldn’t be healthy or honoring to God for me to have worked 32 hours a week or to have worked 82 hours. Working 46 hours of “work-work” and 10 hours of “writing-work” seems to be the right amount for most weeks. The only time this balance doesn’t seem to work is when I officiate a wedding. In wedding weeks I can’t seem to figure out how to do less than 55 hours of work. And as much as I love officiating a beautiful wedding and preaching the gospel, I won’t complain that when Jesus comes back, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage.
Despite what it might seem, this work and writing schedule has me with my family for almost every dinner, almost every breakfast, and almost every sporting event for my children, at least on the nights my wife and I don’t have to “divide and conquer” because two or more of our children have sporting events in different places. I wish I made time to go on more dates with my wife, but I can’t blame work for the infrequency. That’s more a function of lack of effort on my part than it is too many evenings away for work.
The difficult part of pastoring on my family, it seems to me, is not the number of hours I work or the pay. The most difficult part for them is that too often I can’t stop my mind from working even when I’m not working. I keep thinking about a certain marriage that is imploding, the sermon I’ve yet to write, and the parishioner who is mad at me—and vice-versa. At home I keep thinking about how to keep all the plates spinning at work. You can lead a pastor to Sabbath, but you can’t make him rest.
To be sure, carrying the stress of work to one’s home is not only a struggle for pastors, but we pastors should have less of an excuse; the theology we preach is the same theology we should live. Rest, at its core, is about faith. When we rest from our labor, when we forsake worry, when we take a nap, and when we play with Duplo Legos on the floor with our children, we declare that God is God, and he is the one who builds his church. Looked at this way, the atlas of anxiety a pastor too often carries is less a badge of honor representing his love for the church but more a demerit representing his lack of trust in God.
If you feel inclined to pray for me or to pray for your pastor, please do pray this: that pastors would work hard unto the Lord and not man, but when we are not working, we would not unduly trudge the work of the church home in our heads and hearts.
If there’s a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to figure out how to stop working when work is over, let me know. I could use it.