Pastoral Care for Pastors Jeremy Hoover

Last week, I taught you about building block one in my time management system, scheduling your week so you know what is happening. If you’ve been doing the exercises, you should have a time map of how you spent your work time before you began reading this series. You should have run through a week where you scheduled your time. If you’ve done those things, you are hopefully already finding some growth in your time management.
If you haven’t done those exercises, I really want you to spend some time thinking about why. It could be that you are already skilled in time management and this isn’t anything new. If that’s the case, I appreciate you reading this series and kindly request that you share it with one or two other colleagues who might struggle with time management.
But if this is a problem area for you at all, and I am providing you with free teaching that could be helpful to you, what do you have to lose by giving it a chance?
Growth is difficult. But as pastors, we are constantly challenging others to grow in their faith. And growth means change. I implore you to do the hard work that goes beyond just reading these articles. Block out some time and do the exercises. You owe it to yourself and your church to continue your own growth. Then, after you’ve done the exercises, come back and continue reading. 
Building Block #2: Plan your week with margin so you have time for interruptions
If the first key to time management is knowing what you're going to be doing, the second key to time management is acknowledging and planning for the fact that you're going to be interrupted in your work. This is where I got caught many times as a young pastor. Each week, I had two or three lessons to prepare for, hospital and general pastoral visits to make, and administrative work to complete. I would schedule these things in my calendar, but I made a crucial mistake: I didn’t plan time for interruptions. 
This meant that if a church member stopped by my office for a visit, which I really enjoyed, I found myself behind in my work after they left. If I was needed at the hospital, again, I was leaving my tightly-scheduled week to go and serve. Occasionally, a Bible class teacher would call in sick and I had to quickly prepare a lesson to fill in for them, and that was time taken away from my constructed schedule. 
When this happens, many people think that having a schedule means your time constraints are too tight and you need to be more flexible. The problem with this is, that more flexibility often means less scheduling, and less scheduling can lead to filling your time with the low-productivity and non-essential tasks that end up taking up too much time. 
My solution for this is to schedule your day and week as tightly as you can, but to schedule some margin into your week so that when the inevitable interruptions arise, you are free to serve without jettisoning your schedule. If you plan on being in the office all day, schedule about six hours of work instead of eight. This may seem counterintuitive to you. I'm not saying to shortchange the church. But, if you plan for six hours of work and you are diligently working during that time, you will find things to do to fill that remaining time. There is always more time for sermon prep. There are always congregants who are available to have a quick coffee with.  There are always people to be called or people to be visited and there is always administration that can be better attended to. These important things often go by the wayside because we find ourselves running short on time.
And, if an interruption or emergency comes up, you will be able to serve without worrying about getting the rest of your work done. Time management is about building discipline into your life. We can give more attention to both our scheduled tasks and other impromptu things if we build margin into our weeks. Don't account for every hour that you intend on being out of your home and in the offi

In last week's article I wrote about the importance of time management. Later that week, I had a conversation with another colleague who was having trouble getting his lessons done. This colleague deserved some grace because he was responsible for most of the weekly lessons for his church. He was teaching a Sunday morning Bible class, preaching a Sunday morning sermon and a Sunday evening sermon, and then teaching again at a midweek Bible study. He had a lot going on. 
But because I had been writing these articles, and it was fresh on my mind, I said to him, “Let's break down what your week looks like. What do you do each day? How do you spend that time?”
We found that although he was relatively disciplined and was spending time working on his lessons each day, there was a lot of time that he spent browsing the internet, chasing rabbit trails, checking email unnecessarily, and doing things that filled his time but were low productivity or even non-essential tasks. 
So I shared with him the three things that I'm going to share with you in this series, and asked him how his week would look if he did these. I'm going to share that outline with you at the end of this series because I don't want to get ahead of you doing the necessary work to discover for yourself how you spend your time and where you need to grow and change.
Before we get to the three “building blocks” I’m going to share with you, I want to strongly encourage you to complete the exercise from last week. If you didn't create the time map I recommended, go back to that article and do the exercise. Push yourself and be accountable to growing in time management.
Time management is something I would dare to say that most of us think we have a better handle on than we actually do. If we're totally honest about how we spend our time, the results can be jarring. This is why I recommend that you complete that time map exercise before you continue this article. If you have completed the exercise, pull it out so it's available for you to refer to while you go through this series.  
Building Block #1: Plan your week ahead of time so you know what you're doing
Building block number one is the key to everything else. You must plan out your week so you know what it is that you're doing and need to accomplish. This does not mean that I expected you to block everything out in your calendar. I don't mean that, when you look at your calendar for the week, that you should have every hour blocked out. But you do need to know what you're going to be doing on a particular day.
I've learned a lot of this over time, and I’ve settled on using Google Calendar for my schedule and tasks. I set “all day” notifications for tasks that need to be completed on certain days but are not time-sensitive. I use the “all day” feature not because I’m going to work on these tasks all day, but because I have the calendar set to send me a list at 9:00am of my daily tasks. This becomes my to-do list for the day that I work off all day. I can also look at my calendar and see at a glance what the week looks like. I can see appointments that have been scheduled for the week, what days I’m doing sermon prep on, and what tasks I have scheduled for each day. 
For most pastors, content creation is a big chunk of your week. This is true whether you are a preaching pastor, a youth pastor, or even a music director or worship pastor. If you follow this building block, you will chunk down your content creation into its smaller parts and schedule those parts on different days of the week, either as a task for the day or, if it is more helpful for you, as a scheduled appointment in your calendar.
I break down my sermon preparation into four parts: outlining the text and journaling, key word study, commentary reading, and writing. I put each of these on my calendar on a different day: on Monday, I outline the text and journal; on Tuesday, I study key words; on Wednesday, I read commentaries

“It seems like I’m always working on my sermon on Friday and Saturday when what I really want to do is be with my family. I don’t know how the week gets away from me.”
This young pastor was sad. As I talked with him, it became clear that he hadn’t been equipped in seminary for the practicalities of ministry. Seminary is very helpful for learning about biblical studies, theology, and even theoretical ministry, but seminary does not teach the important but intangible things of ministry such as interpersonal skills, leadership development, and time management. 
The pastor I was talking with needed some guidance on how to structure his week. He was a good preacher, but he was struggling to contain the overflow of his week and manage the different “buckets” of his week better. He knew it was affecting both his performance and his family. He was disappointed that many Saturdays were spent writing and preparing his lessons instead of spending time with his kids. 
I remember struggling with some of these same things in my early years as a pastor. The work of a minister is very often solitary, and the solitude in an office setting can create many distractions. I would do helpful things, like prayer-walking through the church building, photocopying lesson sheets for children’s Bible classes, and reading books about ministry. But these “good things” were keeping me from focusing on what really mattered, and I still found myself going home on Friday with half a sermon to finish on Saturday.
When I became frustrated with not getting my work done during my regular workweek, I began to read and learn about time management. Over the years, I’ve refined my understanding of time management from a tactical, process-oriented approach to more of a values-driven approach. Time management can be anything from blocking out time in your calendar to accomplish certain tasks to making a list of the top three things you need to accomplish that day, doing them, and repeating that process. 
One misconception about time management is that there is a “one size fits all” approach. But I encourage you to think about what works best for you. Are you highly structured and maintaining a tightly-held calendar would be ideal? Do you feel too constrained by keeping a calendar? Perhaps a “prioritization” approach would be helpful for you.
In the second part of this article, I will share with you three “building blocks” that, if implemented, will help you begin to manage your time better.  
But before I get into the building blocks, I want you to take a few minutes and complete an exercise for self-awareness. Make an honest assessment of how well you already do with managing your time. Write down, for each of your last five workdays, as best you can, how you spent each hour. Write down everything you did during the hour. And then, track your next five workdays in real-time, keeping a running log of your activities. This will give you a dead honest look into how you spend your time. 
For example, your previous Monday might look like this:
* 9-10am -- arrive at 8:55, check email, read sports website, read Bible and pray, journal
* 10-11am -- finish journaling, check weather for the week, check email, wander into sanctuary to see if it is picked up or not, get mail
* 11am-12pm -- tidy up office, check email, read blogs, make a list of people to follow up with this week
* 12-1pm -- begin prep for lessons, interrupted by phone call, check email, browse Bibles and books online
* 1-2pm -- put on Christian music to help focus, check email, read a theology book
* 2-3pm -- online video call with other ministry colleagues
* 3-4pm -- finish video call, check email, make a to-do list for tomorrow, try to pray
* 4-5pm -- watch sports highlight videos, tidy up desk, check email, leave at 4:35pm
Does this outline look anything like your day? If it does, I am not writing this to cast judgment or to shame you. In all honesty, I have had many d

It may sound too familiar to say that we connect with God through prayer. That statement may be something we know but not something we experience. We give mental assent to it as a true statement even while yearning and longing for a deeper experience of relationship with God.
My journey of prayer has seen many peaks and valleys. Like in this image, I often find myself descending into a valley while looking ahead to the next peak.
In this article, I want to share four phases I've gone through in my journey of learning how to connect with God in prayer. My hope is that you will find value in my experience for growing in your own practice of prayer.

First Phase: God as the Cosmic Santa Claus
I grew up "going to church." I imagine you could say I was "born and raised" in the church. Yet my concept of prayer was very anemic. Sure, we prayed at church, but it was the "opening" and "closing" types of prayer, along with a blessing offered before we shared the Lord's Supper together. And we prayed at home, though it was mainly a blessing before we ate or my father praying with my brother and me before we went to bed.
I knew that I ought to pray. And I knew that I ought to include praise and thanksgiving. But other than thanking God for the day and for anything good that had happened to me that day, I did not have a robust way of praising and worshiping God in prayer.
This was shaped by my view of God at the time -- a very weak, limited view that saw God as the Cosmic Santa Claus. He saw everything, he knew if I was awake, and he definitely knew if I was bad or good. As an adolescent, and then a teenager, I was fully aware that there was enough "bad" to warrant the Cosmic Santa Claus to not send "gifts."
So my prayers were mainly of the "Forgive me for X, forgive me for Y" variety. I would do this in bed at night before I went to sleep. Many nights I would fall asleep scanning my mind for any unconfessed sin because I was fearful of missing some sin that I had overlooked. What would God think? After all, he was already aware of any sin that had been committed; how could I not be?
In summary, I found this phase of prayer fearful, even while it cultivated an awareness of God.
Second Phase: Finding Other Prayer Exercises
I must have known that there was more to prayer than what I was experiencing because I kept with it and I kept exploring it, especially in my junior and senior years of high school.
At my local Christian bookstore, I'd hunt for books about prayer. I found expositional teachings about prayer, prayer devotionals, and Charismatic books about prayer that I had no capacity to understand at the time. But most importantly, I found tools I could use to help me pray.
I ran across the A.C.T.S. acronym (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication). This was helpful because it gave me a framework. I realized that I could break up my prayer time into different areas. I still struggled with adoration but found my groove in confession. Thanksgiving could be tough, and I began to learn that this "toughness" came out of a skewed sense of prayer -- my belief that prayer was about asking God for things.
During this phase of prayer, I began to learn that prayer was not only about asking God for things, but also thanking God for things. But prayer was still transactional -- it was about making the exchange of thanksgiving and confession, the credits and debits, between God and myself.

Third Phase: Liturgical Prayer and Psalms
In college, I was exposed to a wide experience of Christian traditions. This was more helpful to me than I recognized at the time, and I learned without knowing it from many others.
I was particularly intrigued with the vibrancy that many of my new friends prayed with. It was a vibrancy I was lacking. I knew something was missing in my relationship with God but I didn't know what.
I took an upper division-level class on Christian ministry with a professor who became very influential for me. He introduced us to

I became impatient last year. My new church was progressing much more slowly than I wanted it to. As a “type A,” I planned for, and expected, results. Of course, the Covid-19 crisis in Ontario, which came with three lockdowns and multiple levels of restrictions, had complicated things. But we had been able to have a really good and successful summer and I expected to capitalize on that summer work and build into something greater.
Imagine my frustration as I saw summer slipping into fall and then into early winter with less and less to show. 
I had time on my hands because there wasn’t really anything else to do as the calendar turned to December. It was too cold to meet outside, restaurants were closed to the public for dining in, and it was obvious we were heading towards another lockdown.
So I did what I should have done from the beginning--I turned to God. I doubled down on reflective Bible reading and listening prayer. And those exercises reminded me to trust God. Rather, God showed me the value and simplicity of listening to him and waiting upon him for direction and answers.
It reminded me of the experience of the Israelites as they wandered the wilderness. (The secular culture of Canada can feel like quite a wilderness!) They became hungry and thirsty and complained to God. They became impatient. But the lesson for me was this--God always provided for them.
Stop Grumbling and Complaining About What You Don’t Have
In Exodus 16, there is a story about hunger. The people were hungry. They complained to God. They didn’t trust that he would provide as they needed. But God did provide. Through Moses, he gathered the people and instructed them that he would provide for them--daily, even! 
These daily provisions, however, came with a caveat--they were to gather enough manna for each day, and for each day only. If they gathered too much (i.e., to hoard, perhaps because they didn’t trust that God would provide daily), the manna spoiled overnight. And it didn’t matter how much they gathered, because each one ended up gathering all that they needed (16:18).
What a wonderful thing--God providing sustenance in the wilderness where it didn’t naturally occur. 
One challenge many pastors face in ministry is the temptation to grumble about what they do not have. Grumbling occurs when we become too focused on scarcity--not enough funds, not enough people, not enough goodwill. In this way, grumbling causes us to neglect God and to look around at our own ability to provide for ourselves, where we come up woefully short of what we really need. When we find ourselves grumbling, it is time to refocus on grace.
God Provides What You Need
I began to see what happened in Exodus 16 as a word for me. If I would trust God, and seek him each day, he would provide everything I needed for that day (i.e., my daily bread; Matthew 6:11). But if I raced ahead of God, creating plans and gathering ideas without seeking him, those plans would “spoil” and become useless. 
And then I noticed that God provided one additional measure for the Israelites. Although they were only to gather manna one day at a time, God made a provision for them so they could worship him. They could gather twice as much as they needed ahead of the Sabbath so that they would not have to gather on the Sabbath and could leave the day for God. If they gathered too much on any other day, it spoiled, but if they gathered twice as much before the Sabbath, it kept, so they could keep the day for God.
When pastors talk to me about being stressed out, ungrateful, and prone to grumbling, I ask them about their spiritual lives: how much time have they spent recently with God? This time with God can take many forms--a long walk, a dedicated time of listening to God in prayer, growth in spiritual disciplines. But what is revealed, usually, is that the grumbling pastor has slipped in these areas. The way to find God’s grace is to create space and time for him to provide

“What do you want to talk about today?” I asked “Charles” at the beginning of our coaching session. I normally begin sessions with a question like this that helps the coachee begin to think about what is on their mind and would be most helpful for them to discuss.
“I don’t really have a topic,” Charles said. He paused, then continued. “Well, maybe we can talk about our church’s new leadership transition plan.” Charles proceeded to talk freely about this new plan, without interruption, for the next twenty-five minutes. He shared his concerns, his frustrations, his hopes, the relational tension that was creeping into the leadership team, and his overall dissatisfaction with where his five-year pastorate is with this church.
It was clear that Charles was stressed out and that this stress was beginning to overtake him.
We talked for the next twenty minutes or so, letting Charles breathe and reflect. It wasn’t the time to coach him toward some hard goals and action steps. Instead, I simply recommended that he take time for himself each day. I encouraged him to block out the first 45 minutes after lunch and to take a walk through the neighbourhood where his church was. 
I checked in with him after a week. Although he was still frustrated and stressed, he felt immensely better about things and believed he was turning a corner, mentally, that was going to help him adjust and be in a better place to handle the leadership transition.
Practicing self-care is always the right move for a pastor. Making sure to practice self-care before it becomes too late is the difficult move.
I wrote about how to know when you need to make a change last week.
This week, I want to share with you four self-care practices that will help you create space to reflect and recharge, whether you see a storm coming or are in the middle of one. 
These are habits that I have learned to practice throughout my career in ministry. They have been immensely practical and helpful to me, as well as to others I have shared them with.
* Take a long walk
The first practice is simple: Take a long walk. This may seem odd to you, but I suggest that this is the absolute best thing you can do for yourself. Pastors end up sitting a lot. We sit at a desk to study for and write lessons; we sit at a table to visit with congregants; we sit in the car as we drive to and from appointments. We even sit in a chair when we pray or read our Bibles. 
Pastors need to move more. I believe that so much sitting takes away from our creativity. And though it seems counterintuitive, I also believe that when pastors decide they are in a rut and need to pray or read their Bibles more, that very rut will work against their desire to spend more time in prayer and the Word. 
Getting out of the office and going for a walk will invigorate you. Moving will help your body release tension that has settled from all your sitting. Walking, without looking at a book or listening to a podcast, will help you think. Being away from the office while you think will bring creativity into your thoughts and will create space for you to listen more closely to God. 
* Take steps to lead yourself well
A second recommendation is to be proactive with your self-care. Burnout happens when pastors allow events around them to create a downward spiral. The path to burnout begins when pastors are not grounded or anchored because they have let themselves become overwhelmed by external things: the demands of others, artificially imposed deadlines, the stress of the job.
Pastors must be deliberate in establishing self-care habits. These habits are spiritual disciplines. In these habits, pastors create space for God, where God may speak and the pastor can listen. 
Something as seemingly small as giving the first fifteen minutes in your office to a prayer practice will pay tremendous dividends for helping to ground you. Reading a prayer before you leave at the end of the day will create room for God to re