Who would be for it?
This might see like the easiest thing to argue in the world: exhaustion is bad.
Of course there is a kind of tiredness which is good: a body worn out from hard work in the field (he types from behind his laptop) or a mind worn out from hard graft in the study can be a good thing. By exhaustion I mean that you’re still tired the next morning, and you’re still tired every morning.
More pertinently, since I want to talk about church and ministry, by exhaustion I mean this growing epidemic of burned out and worn down pastors and other ministry leaders and workers, and I mean the people who would love to serve in their churches but do not have the energy or emotional fortitude—even if they could find the literal time—because the demands of work and home are so sapping of the ability to get up and go again.
The church must be against this. Exhaustion is not the Way of Jesus. Jesus came to bring rest, nuakh for our souls. Since we don’t have bodies, we’re just embodied people, rest for souls encompasses rest for bodies, minds, and emotions too.
Rest for Pastors and Church Workers
This means that churches must set themselves deliberately in structures and attitudes to look after those that they financially support. We should not be stingy in how we pay and expense them. We should not be stingy in how we give them rest. Generosity towards those we set apart from work to serve the church must be our approach. This doesn’t mean parity with what other people get in the workplace: they’re exhausted. It means a taste of the new creation as much as we can manage.
It’s good to work hard. It’s good to be tired from hard work. It’s good to relax at times and to rest well. Churches need cultures that encourage this. I’ve veered away from suggesting more than principles partly because now I’m employed by a church but mostly because this is a key thing for trustees, boards, or whatever you call those who set employment conditions for your workers to consider. You won’t all decide the same things.
Different things will be right in different circumstances. That’s good and right, we shouldn’t assume there is ‘best practice’ that’s going to work everywhere. Much like 10% giving is a good baseline but the New Testament frees us to go further, sometimes you’ll need to go further in your policies and conditions. If you’re concerned about being taken for a ride, you’ve employed the wrong people. Let’s be honest, that’s a very rare situation, for all it does happen. Safeguards are vital too. I think there are two key questions for Trustees to consider: are we generous, not just financially? Do we encourage rest, not just in what we say but what we do and expect?
We need volunteer cultures that encourage rest too. This is particularly challenging at the moment. There’s not a church out there post-Covid that has enough volunteers. Combine the cultural shift away from service after the last five years with the cutting demands of the cost of living meaning single income families are perishingly rare, and the volunteer base of almost every church has diminished over the last fifty years and dropped off sharply more recently.
This makes it hard for those who are serving, they have to do more until they get to the point where they just have to stop. But what can we do?
Less. Honestly that will often be the answer. Overworking our volunteers doing ‘good things’ that help people but run us into the ground is not the way of the kingdom.
We can acknowledge the challenge. Naming the problem in clear terms will help more often than you might think as people start to recognise it.
We can teach service. This will help, but there are also hard limits about what people can manage. They’re struggling already.
We can pray. Who knows what the Lord might do. Just don’t kill your church members while you’re waiting for a miracle.
Rest in the World
That’s in the church, what about the wider world? Many of these problems are caused by the requirements for dual-income families and way work has expanded to fill the margins of our lives. They’re exacerbated by the digital revolution and the ‘always on’ nature of life.
We’re in a new world, and the church has the opportunity to demonstrate what rest is.
We can (and should!) teach and encourage people into healthier relationships with digital technologies. Sometimes that means throwing your phone in the river. The Pastors and other leaders will need to model boundaries and limits. This will look different for different people depending on their life circumstances.
We can say out loud that the current economy has shafted the family and robs us of rest. Maybe that won’t change anything, but it might help people realise it’s not meant to be like this.
We can make sure that church models what we say, ensuring that those we ‘employ’ and those who serve aren’t burned out. Of course, we won’t manage to go as far as we might, we’re in the same broken economic systems as everyone else and it’s hard for a church to fix the fact that in expensive parts of the country many Pastors will struggle to buy a house.
We can try and influence our localities to reflect kingdom employment practices, deliberately being better than the world. This is a good reason to start a business as a Christian, though not the only one, aim to employ people better than everyone else does even if you do make less money. It’s one of the best ways to transform a community: start businesses that act like Christians.
Exhaustion is not the Way of Jesus. It shouldn’t be our way either.
Photo by Kinga Howard on Unsplash
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nuakh 