Our first job after completing graduate school was serving two small congregations in southwestern North Dakota. Part of the compensation package for the work was the use of a parsonage. We moved from a one bedroom efficiency apartment to a three bedroom home with a finished basement including a bathroom upstairs and another in the basement. Neither of the church buildings that housed the congregations we served had offices. They consisted of a sanctuary, a fellowship hall, a kitchen and restrooms. One of the church buildings had two small classrooms at the end of the fellowship hall. We were a couple with no children when we began our work. It was easy for us to turn one of the bedrooms in the parsonage into a study where we did our reading and writing. The church did not own any office equipment. We owned a manual typewriter and a small desk. I put bookshelves on the walls. We didn’t own much furniture when we moved in, so the rooms were pretty empty. We had a desk phone, wired to the wall in the study; a princess phone, also wired, in the bedroom; and a wall phone in the kitchen. Almost as soon as we moved in we added two features that enhanced communication. We had a 25 foot cord for the wall phone so that the handset could be carried around the house while we were speaking. We had the ringer removed from the princess phone in the bedroom so that we could use it without having it ring right next to where we were sleeping. It was easy to hear the other phones ringing from the bedroom.

That was 1978. There was no national debate about working from home. Most of our colleagues had offices or studies in their homes. Only a few, who worked in larger congregations, had offices in their churches. I had been an intern in a large church where we had offices at the church, but I had commuted 25 miles to that suburban church while living in the city. I needed a place to serve as a base for my work there.

Over the course of the next seven years, two children came into our lives. We turned the home study into a child’s bedroom and moved some of its functions to a room in the basement. We also turned one of the small classrooms in the church building next door into a church office. The church acquired an electric typewriter which we used for preparing bulletins, committee minutes, reports, and other church business.

In our next call, there was a church office. In that church building there was a clerical office with a part-time secretary on the main level of the church. and a pastor’s study in the basement below. The church had a typewriter and a photocopy machine. After a decade of serving that church, we had turned the parlor into a church office with temporary dividers delineating the space for the secretary, two desks for pastors, and another for the education director. There was also a general work space with a table for collating and folding bulletins and reports. We obtained a personal computer at our home, and the church obtained its first computer and printer during the time we serve it.

The job of a pastor, at least the way we did the job, wasn’t primarily about being in an office, however. We visited members in hospitals, care centers, and their homes. We held church meetings in the sanctuary, in the fellowship hall, and in the church parlor.

For the first seventeen years of our professional careers we shared a single job between us, so the distinction between home life and work was a flexible barrier. We worked from home if the job was preparing sermons or studying scripture and theology. We worked from the church if the business was teaching, meetings, or administration. We worked from wherever we were if the task was pastoral care and counseling.

For the next twenty-five years, we lived ten miles from the church building and we both had very comfortable offices at the church. We also had more secretarial support in that position. The church had a couple of personal computers when we began and by the time we left it had a network with a shared server and printer, high speed wi-fi throughout the building, and I had a laptop computer provided by the church for most of the time in that position. We still maintained a home office and both of us did some of our work from home.

In the terms of today’s employment patterns, we were hybrid workers throughout our active careers. We worked from home part of the time and from an office part of the time.

All of that was before the pandemic. We retired during the first summer of the pandemic as businesses around the world were switching from workers in office buildings to employees working from home. Meetings, including church meetings, moved from in-person to computer video conferencing. People began to purchase homes that were in different locations than the companies that employed them. There are remote workers who don’t live in the same state or even the same nation as the companies for which they work.

Some large corporations have announced an end to remote and hybrid working. Amazon is ordering its staff back into the office five days a week. Goldman Sachs also requires bankers to be in the office five days per week. Tesla and Space-X have also required workers to return to the office. Space-X is reported to have lost 15% of senior-level employees over its decision to prohibit remote working.

Studies on worker efficiency are mixed. There have been some that have shown increased productivity among remote and home workers. Other studies have not replicated the results. Some have shown greater collaboration and creativity among workers who report to the office each day. Some have shown that remote meetings result in shorter meetings and more efficiency. There are companies experimenting with four day work weeks and other structures for work/life balance. Some countries have limited the amount of electronic messages and meetings employers can demand of workers when they are not in the office.

I suspect that like the work we did during our careers, there is no one size fits all solution to the question of where an employee works and how the barrier between working and time off is maintained.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of jobs that cannot be done from home. Surgeons need to work in hospitals. Fire fighters need to go to the fires they fight. Law enforcement officers need to be available throughout a community. Many service providers need to work in the place of service.

And I have retired. The front room of our home, that might have been a dining room or living room for previous occupants has a desk with my computer and shelves for our books. I no longer draw a salary, but I still do work that is meaningful. And I no longer have an office to go to. Some times it feels like returning to the way it was when I began, just with high speed internet and wireless phones.