How the Senior Pastor Benefits
However, the church isn’t the only one that has benefited. I have too, perhaps even more so. To begin with, it’s given me a chance to regularly recharge my creative batteries.
We each have a reservoir of creativity. For some of us, it runs deeper than for others. But for each of us, there’s a bottom. Unless we’re able to periodically replenish it, sooner or later it runs dry. When that happens, the joy goes out of preaching, for us as well as for our listeners.
I once served in a ministry where I was responsible to teach five or six different Bible studies every week. For a while, it was exhilarating. But after three or four years, I began to fade. It’s not that I ran out of passages or topics to teach. I ran out of creative and thoughtful ways to present them. The result was a marked increase in truisms, clichés—and a little plagiarism!—and boredom all around.
Now I use my breaks from the pulpit to rekindle my creativity, to catch up on non-preparatory reading, to reflect, and to dream new dreams. Breaks recharge my creative juices in a way that another week of sermon preparation cannot.
I also use my nonpreaching weeks to regroup emotionally. Preaching is hard work, and it takes its emotional toll. It’s no small matter to stand up and presume to speak for God. No wonder we’re known to take Sunday afternoon naps and Mondays off. Yet for me, the actual preaching and preparing of a sermon isn’t the hard part. I love it. The hard part is always knowing I’ve got another one due in a couple of days. That keeps me on edge and always pushing.
During my first four years at the church, I preached every Sunday except for my vacations. That meant that, no matter where I went or what I did, next week’s sermon was always percolating in the back of my mind. I’d wake up in the middle of the night to scratch out an outline. I’d take notepads on vacation. At conferences and seminars, I’d disappear for a few hours to hammer out that final point or closing illustration.
The result was a slow but steady drain on my emotional reserves. As much as I love study and preaching, it was too much of a good thing. Too often, by the time my vacation rolled around, preaching had become a chore instead of a privilege; I was reading the Bible for sermon material, not personal growth. Furthermore, most of my ministry was on automatic pilot.
That hardly ever happens anymore. I find that my regular breaks from the pulpit get me off the sermon prep treadmill before I’ve reached a point of emotional exhaustion. Though I often end up working just as hard and even harder during my nonpreaching weeks, it’s the change in routine that makes the difference. Preaching can hardly become monotonous when it’s periodically taken away. In fact, I always miss it, and I invariably return with heightened enthusiasm for proclaiming God’s Word.
Sharing the pulpit has also helped me follow through better on my responsibilities as the church’s leader. Like most pastors, I have a love/hate relationship with administration: I love what it accomplishes. I hate doing it. I didn’t enter the ministry so I could juggle budgets, supervise a staff, crank out policy statements, or return phone calls. But that’s part of the package, and if I want to do a good job, I have to do those things well and in a timely manner.
Still, they aren’t a lot of fun. If I can find half an excuse, I’ll put them off until next week. And preparing Sunday’s sermon has always been a great excuse. That’s where my weeks out of the pulpit come in. When I’m not scheduled to preach, I no longer have an excuse to let things go. Those important-but-not-urgent administrative matters that have been pushed to the side have a chance to rise to the top of my to-do list. And miracle of miracles, they usually get done.
I’ve often been told that one of the secrets to our congregation’s health and growth has been my excellent administration. But little do people know that what they’re so impressed with would never get done if I had my way—or if I had a sermon to prepare every week.
