Cultivating Rhythms of Rest in Ministry

If you’re a church leader, you’ve probably been in a social gathering of other church leaders a time or two. In nearly two decades of ministry, I’ve spent many hours in pastors’ luncheons, conferences, roundtables, and other get togethers––all that have the typical pleasantries and small talk that going along with interacting with people you don’t know all that well. Typically, among pastors, that involves surface level talk about the current season of ministry, new programs or initiatives, and other things that simply generally communicate that everything is going well and church life is firing on all cylinders.

But if you’re able to sustain that conversation just a little longer and peel back another layer, you often get to the enduring truths that 1) ministry is more than just a highlight reel––we all wrestle with highs and lows and 2) in both highs and lows, ministry is exhausting. I’ve had my fair share of conversations with pastor friends who, whether things were going well or going poorly, were coasting on fumes from their already depleted reservoir of energy.

So how do we create healthy rhythms for rest and refreshing in ministry? I want to offer several principles to consider as you prayerfully look to establish or recalibrate the rhythms of rest for you and those who lead alongside you in your church.

First, there’s a difference between balance and rhythm. In popular level conversation we often talk about finding “balance” in life. But balance is the white whale of life––it is both elusive and sets us out on a futile quest to attain it. I can honestly say that in nearly two decades of ministry I’ve never achieved anything that remotely resembles balance.

By contrast to balance, seeking healthy rhythms in life helps us to understand that life is unpredictable, messy, and sometimes a bit chaotic. Building good rhythms in our lives help us chart the course through life’s unpredictable waters. Rhythms help give us some stability where disorder would otherwise exist.

Second, we need healthy rhythms of Sabbath. Much has been written over the last thirty years among evangelicals and other Protestants to attempt to recover principles of Sabbath keeping. Eugene Peterson addresses this topic as it specifically relates to pastors in Working the Angles, Brady Boyd touches on it in Addicted to Busy, Ken Shigematsu devotes considerable time in God in My Everything, Rich Villodas treats Sabbath at length in The Deeply Formed Life, and the list goes on. These are all resources that have had tremendous impact on my theology of Sabbath.

The overarching point in all of these, and other books, is that we need a regular weekly rhythm of rest which reminds us of our reliance upon the Lord. Of the Jewish inauguration of Sabbath on Friday evening, Peterson specifically notes that it calls to mind that as we are slumbering in our beds, God is already at work. So, when we rise, the work has already been started by him who neither slumbers nor sleeps (Ps. 121:4).

To these excellent works on Sabbath, I would add one simple principle that has been helpful in my own Sabbath rhythm: make Sabbath a, unmoving fixed day that isn’t Sunday. Personally, our family simply observes the Sabbath day as described to us in Scripture––from sundown (or close to it) on Friday to sundown on Saturday. That’s what works for us, but whatever you choose, make your Sabbath unmovable by default.

By unmovable, I don’t intend to imply that you shouldn’t be flexible with Sabbath based on the needs that arise, as Jesus himself models in the gospels. What I mean is that if Sabbath is a sort of spiritual “flex day” that you squeeze in, when possible, you’ll find it rarely makes the calendar. Prioritize your Sabbath rhythm.

Third, Sabbath is for rest, vacation is for recreation. Because many of us have poorly-formed Sabbath rhythms, we depend upon vacation to rest. But inevitably, vacations involve travel, activities, sight-seeing, and fun experiences––as they should! But if you’re anything like me, I often return from vacation more tired than when I left! I need a day or two to vacation from my vacation to feel recuperated.

Healthy Sabbath rhythms allow us to rest so that when we take extended holidays we can focus on recreation and fun. We need both, but when we go into vacation expecting rest, we often find ourselves disappointed.

Fourth, we need to rest when our soul tells us to. I once had a mentor tell me that after years of ignoring his bodily rhythms, he finally got to a place in ministry where he recognized that he functioned best when he took an extra day off ever 4-6 weeks. It served his soul like Leap Day serves the calendar––an intercalary day inserted into normal rhythms to ensure harmony. It’s important here to remember that the typical 5-day, 40-hour work week was established during the industrial revolution and is largely unhelpful as it pertains to our expectations of work in an information economy. Be free and listen to the rhythms of your body and your soul.

Fifth, we need periods of “structure” and “anti-structure.” Borrowing from Dan Shaw, Paul Hiebert, and Tite Tiénou’s exceptional work Understanding Folk Religion, we need periods of “structure” and “anti-structure” to give harmony to our lives. As illustrated in the graphic below, we need “formal times”…think times of recalibration, discipline, fasting, etc., to bring order to chaos. In the Christian liturgical calendar, the seasons of Advent and Lent have typically served as ritualized formal times. But if life is all discipline and fasting––if we never get to let our hair down…what kind of life is that? The ancients understood this much better than we do today, which is why formal times were offset by “anti-formal times”––seasons of feasting, celebration, dancing, etc. In the calendar, these were the twelve days of Christmas and the fifty days of Eastertide that offset the seasons of fasting that preceded them.

But this principle isn’t just about liturgical holidays. You, your family, your staff, and your congregation all need a rhythm of both structure and anti-structure to feel a sense of equilibrium to life.

Sixth, we need to recognize that we’re not the only ones who can get tired. A lot has, rightfully, been said about the exhaustion pastors are feeling in this cultural moment. But we would be remiss if we did not recognize that those who faithfully serve in our churches often give from depleted energy tanks as well. What’s more, our inability to rest well in our own lives can have a corrosive effect on the life of our church as well. We should therefore be sensitive to what others are walking through as well and try to, after the pattern of Jesus, put as light of a yoke upon people as possible.

There is also an increasing number of mature Christians who are not finding homes in local churches, often due to a lack of felt safety that they can simply come and be for a while, not pressured to enter the grinds of volunteer ministry that burned them out in their previous church family. Sometimes the best way to minister is not to think through how to pipeline people on an assimilation track, but to simply be a faithful, non-anxious presence that builds trust with proven consistency. This group of people is a growing demographic, sure to grow even more in the future.