Nearing the end of vacation
28/06/14 07:05
Occasionally I will have conversations with my colleagues about how best to take a vacation. It is typical for clergy to have four weeks of vacation each year. The rationale is that because we work every weekend, there is a need for a bit more vacation than is the case in other occupations. It has also been argued that the nature of the pastoral ministry requires faithful dedication to the spiritual practice of restoration. You don’t maintain spiritual maturity with a diet of work only. Whatever the reasons, it is important for those of us who work in the ministry to occasionally remind ourselves that this tradition is a big blessing and one of the ways that congregations support pastors in a very generous way. There are plenty of people who go through their entire working lives with only a couple of weeks of vacation each year.
With this generous amount of vacation, the question of how to best manage the time is always a bit of a quandary. When we began our pastoral ministry, our predecessor always took the month of August as vacation. The congregation simply shut down during that time. They didn’t hold regular worship services, pastoral emergencies were handled by special arrangement with other clergy in the community, and most of the members of the congregation also took a vacation from church during that time. It was an agricultural community, harvest was usually in full swing, and the system worked for them.
I couldn’t understand how a church could maintain its health by simply taking a month off each year. The spiritual needs of the congregation didn’t go away during that month. The commandment about the Sabbath and the discipline of rest isn’t for only part of the year. So we made plans in that congregation to have guests come to lead worship when we were on vacation and coverage during our absence. Church leaders had some doubts about the associated costs, but it turned out that attendance went up and the costs were easily handled by increased income.
The dilemma, however, was how best to take our vacation. Arranging for pulpit supply was a challenge in a rural and isolated North Dakota community. There weren’t a lot of extra pastors around to provide coverage. It seemed to work best if we didn’t take all of our vacation in one bock. When our children were preschoolers, we often took a bit of vacation right after Christmas. The church was in a slow phase and working out coverage wasn’t too difficult. Then we would take more vacation in the summer, often right after the Conference Annual meeting or summer camp or some event for which we were already traveling.
Some colleagues advised against splitting vacation. They maintained that it takes a good week to release the stress of the job. You can’t just turn off the worries and concerns that you carry every day. Then it takes another week to re-enter the work mode and if you take less than four weeks of vacation, you don’t really get the vacation. We did experiment with taking our vacation in a single block. The vacations were wonderful. But the time between them was long and we often didn’t work at peak efficiency. It is true, however, that I find myself doing bits of work as I begin and end a vacation. The distinction between work and vacation isn’t quite the same as it is with some other kinds of work. I suspect that this problem exists for all professionals and others whose jobs don’t end by the clock.
As our children grew, we went through a variety of different ways of taking vacation, adjusting to their schedules and the activities and events of their lives. Some years we even took our vacation in small pieces, only a week at a time. That didn’t work well for really getting the rest and recreation that we need to maintain a high level of presentness and availability when we are on the job.
For us in this life phase, taking our vacation in two-week blocks seems to work well. The congregation is busy and there is always work to be done and there are parts of our jobs that can’t be done by someone else. A couple of weeks of break enables us to get away and to return refreshed.
The truth is that for the most part we have to do our jobs whether or not we are taking vacation. Outside of worship and the handling of being on call and pastoral emergencies, we pretty much have to do the rest of our jobs before and after our vacation. The work doesn’t go away simply because we are out of town.
And there never isn’t a Sunday when I am not thinking about the congregation and how worship is going. I know that we have excellent leadership when I am gone, but I want things to go well and I want visitors to have a positive experience and I want our members to receive the restoration of worship each week.
So my emotional energy is starting to turn back towards Rapid City even though we have a few days remaining here in Olympia. I am really enjoying being with our family and playing with our grandchildren and treasure every moment that we have, but I know that I still have roots and work to do in Rapid City. I don’t think that my personality allows me to ever completely disengage from my work.
There is another blog and more that could be written about sabbatical. I probably have written too much about that topic already, since I started blogging during a sabbatical and have continued with it through a second one now. The 2011 sabbatical, divided into three different months, didn’t work very well as a sabbatical. I wouldn’t recommend that to someone else. We ended up doing a lot of regular work, including leading worship on two of our sabbatical weeks. The year was an unusual one for us to begin with. I had lost a brother to a sudden heart attack the year before, then we lost my mother and Susan’s father in a short period of time. We also had major life events with the birth of our first grandchild and the marriage of our daughter. Whew! we would have been exhausted if we hadn’t taken a sabbatical.
There is a reason why the commandment is to be aware of the need of rest and recreation every week, not just when one is on vacation. And there is a reason why the concept of jubilee is different from Sabbath in the bible. Both are important.
For us, this vacation has been wonderful. And the fact that I’ve been thinking about returning to work is probably a good sign.
With this generous amount of vacation, the question of how to best manage the time is always a bit of a quandary. When we began our pastoral ministry, our predecessor always took the month of August as vacation. The congregation simply shut down during that time. They didn’t hold regular worship services, pastoral emergencies were handled by special arrangement with other clergy in the community, and most of the members of the congregation also took a vacation from church during that time. It was an agricultural community, harvest was usually in full swing, and the system worked for them.
I couldn’t understand how a church could maintain its health by simply taking a month off each year. The spiritual needs of the congregation didn’t go away during that month. The commandment about the Sabbath and the discipline of rest isn’t for only part of the year. So we made plans in that congregation to have guests come to lead worship when we were on vacation and coverage during our absence. Church leaders had some doubts about the associated costs, but it turned out that attendance went up and the costs were easily handled by increased income.
The dilemma, however, was how best to take our vacation. Arranging for pulpit supply was a challenge in a rural and isolated North Dakota community. There weren’t a lot of extra pastors around to provide coverage. It seemed to work best if we didn’t take all of our vacation in one bock. When our children were preschoolers, we often took a bit of vacation right after Christmas. The church was in a slow phase and working out coverage wasn’t too difficult. Then we would take more vacation in the summer, often right after the Conference Annual meeting or summer camp or some event for which we were already traveling.
Some colleagues advised against splitting vacation. They maintained that it takes a good week to release the stress of the job. You can’t just turn off the worries and concerns that you carry every day. Then it takes another week to re-enter the work mode and if you take less than four weeks of vacation, you don’t really get the vacation. We did experiment with taking our vacation in a single block. The vacations were wonderful. But the time between them was long and we often didn’t work at peak efficiency. It is true, however, that I find myself doing bits of work as I begin and end a vacation. The distinction between work and vacation isn’t quite the same as it is with some other kinds of work. I suspect that this problem exists for all professionals and others whose jobs don’t end by the clock.
As our children grew, we went through a variety of different ways of taking vacation, adjusting to their schedules and the activities and events of their lives. Some years we even took our vacation in small pieces, only a week at a time. That didn’t work well for really getting the rest and recreation that we need to maintain a high level of presentness and availability when we are on the job.
For us in this life phase, taking our vacation in two-week blocks seems to work well. The congregation is busy and there is always work to be done and there are parts of our jobs that can’t be done by someone else. A couple of weeks of break enables us to get away and to return refreshed.
The truth is that for the most part we have to do our jobs whether or not we are taking vacation. Outside of worship and the handling of being on call and pastoral emergencies, we pretty much have to do the rest of our jobs before and after our vacation. The work doesn’t go away simply because we are out of town.
And there never isn’t a Sunday when I am not thinking about the congregation and how worship is going. I know that we have excellent leadership when I am gone, but I want things to go well and I want visitors to have a positive experience and I want our members to receive the restoration of worship each week.
So my emotional energy is starting to turn back towards Rapid City even though we have a few days remaining here in Olympia. I am really enjoying being with our family and playing with our grandchildren and treasure every moment that we have, but I know that I still have roots and work to do in Rapid City. I don’t think that my personality allows me to ever completely disengage from my work.
There is another blog and more that could be written about sabbatical. I probably have written too much about that topic already, since I started blogging during a sabbatical and have continued with it through a second one now. The 2011 sabbatical, divided into three different months, didn’t work very well as a sabbatical. I wouldn’t recommend that to someone else. We ended up doing a lot of regular work, including leading worship on two of our sabbatical weeks. The year was an unusual one for us to begin with. I had lost a brother to a sudden heart attack the year before, then we lost my mother and Susan’s father in a short period of time. We also had major life events with the birth of our first grandchild and the marriage of our daughter. Whew! we would have been exhausted if we hadn’t taken a sabbatical.
There is a reason why the commandment is to be aware of the need of rest and recreation every week, not just when one is on vacation. And there is a reason why the concept of jubilee is different from Sabbath in the bible. Both are important.
For us, this vacation has been wonderful. And the fact that I’ve been thinking about returning to work is probably a good sign.