One thing I find myself doing on a regular basis is stopping in for coffee before I get to work. I usually get to the coffee shop around 7:15 each morning. My particular coffee shop has gone through a staffing change recently. I love the chit-chat between myself and the person behind the counter, “On your way to work?”
“Yes,” I reply.
“Where do you work?”
“Oh, I work at Saguaro Christian Church. Just down the road.”
“Really!? What do you do there?”
“I am one of the ministers”
“Really? Hmmmmm. It’s Monday though. Is this, like, I a fulltime thing? I didn’t realize that ministers worked on days other than Sunday.”
The conversation always varies after this point. Sometimes they want to know about being a female minister, sometimes they tell me I don’t look like a minister (please someone let me know what a minister “looks like”), sometimes they just want to know what it is us minister people do; but it never fails that each and every time my coffee shop hires someone new, I have this conversation.
I got to thinking though. I have this conversation often enough and in a variety of places that I think people really don’t know what an average day or week might look like for a minister. So what is it that us minister folk do when we aren’t all dressed up in robes on a Sunday morning?
Let’s see…I usually get to the office between 7:30 and 8:00 which is just in time to have to struggle to find a parking spot between all the Jazzercise cars in the parking lot. I try really hard to make it into the locked office without spilling my coffee which works about 75% of the time! The very first thing I do every single morning is plop down in my chair and listen to my messages. I never have very many, in fact most mornings I don’t have any at all.
On Monday morning I spend the hour after that writing notes to people in the congregation. Throughout the pervious week I try to get to know people I don’t know as well or see the places where people are using their spiritual gifts. This has become a great spiritual discipline for me. A Tuesday morning is filled with meetings until noon, and Wednesday afternoons are filled with meetings until 4:00pm. I try to take a day off here or there, and in a good week I can take either a Thursday or Friday off. Saturdays vary with lots of meetings or work days or whatever special event is going on in the church.
So this leaves a couple afternoons for hospital visitation and other congregational visits. Oh, and the evening meetings, usually only 2-3 nights a week! I think any preacher will tell you that it takes about 15- 20 hours to prepare a sermon for the week. I try to squeeze at least 8 hours of prayer and other spiritual disciplines in during the week, and also drop in about 4 hours of reading for continuing education. Sometimes you can find me doing those things in the office and sometimes you will find me at the park outside or at San Xavier Mission doing those things.
So much happens in the office, but so much happens outside the office like visitations, errands for the trash bags or office supplies that didn’t get ordered. All the pastor meetings and youth meetings and women’s ministry meetings that happen in Casa Grande keep us clergy people out of the office. In the event that no one dies, calls with a crisis, or comes in off the street looking for something, this may be an ideal week or day in a clergy person’s life. Barring that nothing crazy goes on or takes us away from the things we try to do regularly and not to mention all those usual office tasks that have to get done each and every week, we might be able to do all these things! We just don’t have enough room on the page to get into everything. All the while trying to balance a family and not neglecting them or trying to start a family or trying really hard to work only 60 hours a week not 80 hours.
And so all this brings us to Sunday. The day in which we get to connect to the most people. The day that leads us to that inevitable question, “Ministers work more than just Sunday morning?”