In response to the suggestion that a denomination should encourage its churches and pastors to define hours ‘worked’ by pastors… I replied:

There are many questions here.

1. If a pastor has mainly a teaching gift rather than a pastoral one (in the sense of interpersonal pastoral conversations for example) that pastor will rate what he/she does between Sunday ‘services’ very differently. For example, is the time I spend reading newspapers or Garrison Keillor or trawling through the World Wide Web for *ideas* (as distinct from mindless serenditipous meanderings) ‘pastoral work’? Yes. But about 99% of the pastors I talk to feel a bit guilty reading a novel on other than their days off.

2. Who defines what is ‘work’? I’ve just come back from conferences in Malaysia. About 99% (there’s that stat again 🙂 of Baptist ‘lay leaders’ there regard their pastor as CEO of the church, and so should have regular office hours like they do. Such business-people have no idea about their pastor’s calling to do what all the biblical leaders did – spend a disproportionate amount of their time reflecting in deserts… Read Eugene Peterson for the best expression of a causic critique of that…

3. And what of the frequent stories we hear of church folks complaining that too much of the pastors’ time is spent ministering to ‘outsiders’ (rather than chaplaining them)? They too will have difficulty defining what is true/authentic pastoral work…

There’s a lot more of course, but that’ll do for now…

Shalom! Rowland Croucher