A Mini-Sabbatical Month

Making sabbatical time feasible in a small church

I’ve been looking forward to October for a while. Today marks the beginning of a month of no church work. Notice I said church work, because I am still doing my other jobs at least part of this month. But! It’s four Sunday of no preaching, four weeks of not going into my church office, and four weeks of a vacation responder on my church email.

These particular weeks come from a configuration I worked out with my church to honor the sabbatical time that was part of my original call agreement. As is standard in my tradition, my original call agreement with my church was that every seven years I would be offered a three month sabbatical. The only requirements listed for this time was that I use the time to reflect on our mutual ministry.

This is a lovely and routine and practical habit in churches. But truthfully? I was looking at what it would mean to plan three months away and it was looking daunting.

I pastor a small congregation. For me to take three months, in part to help fortify against my own burnout, I would be at very real risk at just exhausting my church folks. I’ve got a helpful congregation but our bench is only so deep. Would this be me working extra hard for a few months to just land in those three months extra exhausted?

For my own life, I also knew that three months away from church really wouldn’t mean three months of no work. I’d still be working my other jobs. Maybe that wouldn’t matter, but it just didn’t seem quite the same to me. Even with three church months off I couldn’t go on long pilgrimages or extensive travels.

I came to my church with an alternate idea. What if we could disperse this sabbatical time across seven years? This would mean an extra two weeks each year. With my already allotted vacation time, I could consistently plan for one month away from church work each year. To me, this sounded like a habit I could get behind.

Preaching subs for three months? Tricky. One month? Doable.

This month is the trial case for all of this. I’m excited for a few reasons. First, it wasn’t too bad to plan for this time away. I could be a little more hands on with the preparation and I hope my lay leaders are excited and prepared for the month ahead. Second, because it’s a mix of sabbatical and vacation time, I don’t feel a ton of pressure to have any great revelations in this time. I get to rest. Third, it’s an experiment! So there’s no great failure.

More than anything I’m grateful for a congregation who is willing to try it. I want to model healthy patterns of rest and work to them. This means being thoughtful about what actually creates a space for rest for me and the configurations of my particular work. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

What I’m playing

This week I did a quick play through of the video game A Short Hike and loved it. It’s a tiny little puzzle explorer game where you hop about and try to climb a mountain so you can get cell service to call your mom. I loved how many side quests were packed into such a small game. This trailer is for playing it on the Nintendo Switch, but it’s available on most platforms. Not for nothing, it’s so cute, too.

What life looks like

Geese deciding if they wanted to come to church