Every year about this time – which for many congregations is budget time – someone asks for timesheets: how much time each day a minister spends in administration, meetings, pastoral care, worship prep, etc. I assume it’s to justify their salary but sometimes it’s about thinking their minister takes too much time off or doesn’t focus on the things they want a focus on.
Just… stop.
And here’s why:
Ministry in a congregation – whether contract, transitional, or settled – is a salaried position, with the expectation that the person in the role (who has a terminal degree – that’s what a Master of Divinity is, by the way) knows to accomplish the many many many many tasks needed to tend to a congregation’s health and well-being.
With few exceptions, those many many many many tasks include pastoral care and visitations, governance, outreach, staff supervision, prophetic witness, teaching, crafting worship, and preaching. It may also include guiding capital campaigns, resolving grievances, covenant work, community interfaith work, IT support, plumbing, and occasionally putting out fires. And did I mention the email? Yeah. Ministers cheer if they get their inboxes under 200 unread.
That’s a lot of stuff that can suck up a day, which leaves very little time for the actual work needed to create good worship that offers spiritual deepening and opportunities for inspiration. Thus, your minister often works too many hours, often squeezing sermon writing into late Saturday night because it’s the only time everyone’s sleeping and their phone/text/email is quiet.
So when they take a week of study leave, or one of their several weeks of vacation, most of that time is spent simply resting, because they are exhausted. Sometimes they travel, because getting out of town is the only way they can avoid seeing or engaging with congregational business.
And still, some people will say “but what does our minister do? We should have a minute by minute report.”
No.
Just no.
First, if you expect a minister to write down everything they do, they would spend all their time doing that and little of it doing the ministry they hired you for. (I also wonder how any employee in any field manages that.) How do you isolate reading and responding to the emails about the leak in the ceiling from the email about the accompanist needing to take Sunday off from the person in the doorway seeking a pastoral meeting from the other person interrupting because the copier jammed, all of which is interrupting a search for the right reading for Sunday morning while eating a late lunch at their desk?
Second, if your minister actually billed you for every minute they worked for your congregation, you’d have to sell your building to afford it.
Third, no matter what they report, someone isn’t going to be satisfied. I have a colleague who, with no sense of irony, was told that they needed to be in the office all the time and they needed to be out visiting everyone in their midsized congregation. And while “master of divinity” may sound like a super hero, no one yet has figured out how to be in two places at once. (By the way - when that colleague acquiesced on the being in the office all the time thing, the only people they ever saw were staff and the UPS guy.)
Ministry isn’t a law practice, with a slate of clients who get billed by the hour. (It’s also not factory work or retail.) Ministry is a calling to be responsive to the needs of a congregation and also guide a congregation as a leader of our faith. They can’t do this if they’re answering demands about exactly how they spend their time.
For most ministers, success in a week looks largely like this: a worship service happened, no one quit, and the building is still standing.
That’s a good week of congregational ministry.
Let them do it.
I want to add one more thing that didn’t quite fit the flow of the post above: it is well known throughout the business world that it takes one hour of prep for every minute of public speaking. So – a five minute speech takes about five hours of prep. Which means a 20 minute sermon takes about 20 hours of prep. And that prep may look like reading, watching something, meditating, taking a walk, listening to music, and yes, eventually writing. That time doesn’t look like anything to people seeking quantitative evidence of productivity, and yet it’s crucial. (I’ll link again to my post about inspiration, in case you missed the link up above.)
Ministry has always been a learned profession – although we now understand it to be a learning profession; and we need time to learn, from all of our sources of wisdom and understanding.
If you let ministers do their jobs, and not demand to know how they spend their time, you’ll see the fruits of that learning and care and prophetic witness in the ways you are inspired, moved, changed, connected.
In other words: Let ministers be ministers.