Sabbath for Ministry Leaders

"Sunday is a work day." I have a distinct memory when I worked on staff at a church of the senior pastor saying this to us in a staff meeting. It was a big, downtown church. A lot of stuff happened on Sunday—multiple worship services of various styles, Sunday school classes for all age groups, volunteer coordinating, evening youth activities. And we were the people paid to make it all happen each and every week. If you find yourself around a table such as that, just what do you do with the practice of Sabbath?

What do healthy rhythms of work and rest look like when you work for a church? How do you practice Sabbath when your work involves curating the worship experience of others on Sunday? Is it like a slick brochure for a vacation house in Fiji? Sure, it sounds amazing, but I'll never go there. J.M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan once wrote, "Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else." And I'll be honest: There was many a Sunday in that season of church work that I wished so hard to be doing something else.

A regular practice of Sabbath is a critical piece in both our personal and corporate participation in God's shalom-making in the world. God puts the world together again, not through frantic busyness on Sunday morning, but through non-anxious goodness each and every day.

The presence of Sin and Death in the world fracture so many things about us and the world—our relationship to God, to one another, within ourselves, with creation, and with time. A regular practice of Sabbath rightly aligns us, like regular visits to a chiropractor, with God's intent for us and the world. This is especially critical for those tasked with creating culture within congregations for redemption and healing. Where there is no Sabbath, there is no ministry.

Sabbath for connecting with God

First and foremost, Sabbath is about God. We don't practice Sabbath because it's convenient, nor do we choose it from an array of flavor-of-the-month spiritual disciplines. We practice Sabbath because God says so. Among the Ten Commandments, it gets more words than any other. It's the only one of the Ten that we're told to do because God does it. It's foundational to the creation story. Sabbath is fundamental to God's good order of the world. We can align ourselves with that order or refuse it.

For those who receive a paycheck from a church and find themselves working on Sunday, there are two options. First, one can choose another day of the week to practice Sabbath. This is what I did when I worked at the church. For me, it was a slow road of learning to do the best with what I had.

A second, and I admit a more challenging approach, is to reframe how you think about what happens at church on Sunday and to shape the expectations of your congregation about what happens Sunday morning. What if what you do on Sunday was not your task or job description, but rather, how you bring your gift to your community?

You may need to discern in prayer, with your family, and with your spiritual director which of these two you want to do. But whichever you choose, do it from a sense of responding to God's invitation. Sabbath re-centers you around God and God's rhythms for the world each and every week.

Sabbath for connecting with others

Sabbath is not about escape or disengagement. On the contrary, it is about engagement with God's world in the very best ways God intended. Those of us in the Western world live in a hyper-individualized culture. If we're not careful, we might give in to the temptation that Sabbath is "me and God" time. As if Sabbath is for Instagrammable Bible and coffee time.

Nowhere do the writers of the Bible condone one group of people work so that another group can "worship." In fact, the language we find in the fourth commandment is just the opposite. Not only are individuals instructed not to work, but we're also instructed not to do anything that causes someone else to work. And the implications of this stretch far and wide.

Our practice of Sabbath connects us with others in healing ways. When we incorporate the Sunday worship service with our Sabbath, we participate in bringing the unique gifts God has given us—communicating God's Word, leading music, expressing hospitality, coordinating volunteers. We see our activity truly as generous service to one another instead of as tasks for which we receive a paycheck. Sabbath is for reconciling our relationships with one another. As Walter Brueggemann writes, "The odd insistence of the God of Sinai is to counter anxious productivity with committed neighborliness."

Sabbath for connecting with yourself

It's not cool to be busy in ministry. Somewhere along the line, I picked it up that it was. I remember in seminary that the standard greeting went: "Hey, how are you doing?" "Oh, I'm so busy!" And then followed a competing litany of activities as if it was a contest like there was a badge or award for doing the most things.

Pastor John Ortberg once asked Dallas Willard about what could be the one thing to bring new energy to his tired spiritual life. "Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life," Willard replied, "for hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life in our world today."

People who work in ministry, and I have been one, are infatuated with busyness. We fall trap to the lie that a full schedule and comprehensive to-do list validates our existence. A church member, who was also a successful business person, once asked me, "What do you do all week?" They weren't trying to be cruel, but what I heard was that I didn't have a "real job" and needed to work harder to justify my paycheck.

The regular practice of Sabbath puts us in our place as it relates to work and success and hustle and busyness. When we practice Sabbath we remember our personal thriving is dependent on God's activity and not our own.

Sabbath for connecting with God's creation

Burnout is a very real consequence of working in ministry without healthy rhythms of work and rest. The creation story illustrates the intent of God's world. Everything has its right place. On Sabbath, we can acknowledge our right place within God's creation.

The writers of the Bible never use the language of "my Sabbath." Yet, I frequently something along these lines: "This is when I do my Sabbath." Sabbath isn't ours. It's God's. And because it's God's, it involves others. So Sabbath isn't a "mental health" day to escape the world, our responsibilities, and people. No doubt, we need those, but we shouldn't call them "Sabbath."

Paul writes in Romans, "For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay." Can you imagine what it looks like to participate in harmony with God's creation?

Are there baby steps you can take in the way you eat or in the way you get from place to place that—for just one day every seven—you participate in God's shalom-making with God's world? Our Sabbath practice guides us and those we lead into this harmonies relationship with this world in which God has made us.

Sabbath for connecting with God's time

Sabbath isn't a what. It's a when. Sabbath is time. Think about the language you use about time. Save time. Waste time. Manage time. Our fallen nature doesn't know what to do with time. Sabbath is a rhythm of six days and one. This is not about putting in 20 days in the office in a row and then crashing to recuperate. My friend Chad has a fantastic message about how Sabbath is not crashing.

Time is sacred. It is a valuable character in God's creation. Time is not a beast of burden to be domesticated. Nor is it a commodity we can acquire more of. How we interact with time, how we steward time, matters. Sabbath is for aligning our schedule with God's. It's a weekly reminder that the world spins because God wills it, not because we spent ourselves over a never-ending to-do list.

Look for little rituals you might use as a beginning and end to your Sabbath day. Find a prayer or write your own that marks an on-ramp and an exit-ramp. As part of the Passover seder tradition, the youngest child at the table asks, "What makes this night different from all others?" You might incorporate something similar that anchors your whole week as a family and reminds you why everything you do the other six days exists. Sabbath begins to heal our dysfunctional relationship with God's beloved, holy creation of time.

Waldemar Janzen writes, "The Sabbath is, above all, a call for humans to let God be God and to desist from all human attempts to manage the world through work and achievement, including religious work and achievements." Work matters. Work is important. It's important to be productive in ministry with the time we have. But work is not an ultimate thing. God is the ultimate thing, and a practice of Sabbath weekly reminds us of this.

If there's anything that congregations desperately need today it is spiritual cultures of God's deep non-anxious goodness. As a spiritual leader, you have a responsibility to model Sabbath to those you've been entrusted to lead. You set the pace. You create the culture for what this can look like in your community.

If you want to go deeper in this, I highly recommend The Sense of the Call: A Sabbath Way of Life for Those Who Serve God, the Church, and the World by Marva Dawn, as well as The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction by Eugene Peterson and The Emotionally Healthy Leader by Pete Scazzero.