Who Gets a Slice of Our Time?

Most Pastors are our own gatekeepers in terms of our time. Most of us don’t have an executive assistant who fields our calls and manages our schedules.

As a Pastor in a mid-council context (I work with 92 congregations) there are over 27,000 parishioners in the Presbytery I serve. Here’s a question I’m pondering these days: who gets a slice of our time?

Ostensibly any member of any of our congregations can contact me or other members of our staff for any reason. My cell phone number is in the Presbytery Directory. And among the phone messages I’ve received over the years:

• I’m not happy about the new fence on our church property, and the pastors and elders won’t listen to me.
• Our organist lost his temper last Sunday.
• I’m new to the area and want to join a Presbyterian Church but nobody speaks to me when I attend their worship services.
• Our confirmation class is using a curriculum that offends me.
• I would like to schedule a time we can meet to talk about supporting Ukraine.
• My husband’s grave needs to be weeded. Can you help me?
• I have an idea for our congregation. Can we meet for coffee?

Who gets a slice of my time? Who gets a slice of your time? There are certain things we can do to create healthy boundaries in terms of our schedules:

• I remind people on my email signatures and voice mail messages that Friday is my Sabbath and I don’t do Church work on Fridays.
• I try to head off unnecessary conversations by inserting, “Let me stop you right there. Thanks for calling but this is an issue for your congregational leaders . . .”
• When someone from a different Presbytery contacts me for help finding a pastor, I direct them to their own Presbytery leaders.
• I’m starting to use Calendly which has a handy spot for people to include a reason they want to chat. (“Can we get together to talk?” is not enough information.)

Church Sage Bruce Reyes-Chow is working on a new curriculum for boundary training for leaders and I encourage you to check it out. Boundary training is certainly about preventing sexual and financial misconduct, and it’s also about allowing at least 48 hours to respond to an email before re-sending or refraining from sending 500 word text messages.

So here are my questions:

• Is this a bigger issue for women? In talking with other professional women, it’s common for our clients/patients/parishioners to see us as girlfriends which subsequently means we are available for all kinds of important and not-so-important conversations.
• Is this a generational issue? Are younger Pastors more likely to be contacted with grievances/needs because they are making necessary but uncomfortable shifts in how we do church? Are older church members still expecting their Pastors to have designated “office hours” when they can drop by without an appointment?
• Is this basically a trust issue? Let’s say a congregation is experiencing conflict and measures are being taken to mediate that conflict. The leaders of that congregation and the leaders of the Presbytery are working on the issues, but the average parishioner (who doesn’t have a leadership role) doesn’t trust that anything is happening. Or parishioners simply don’t believe their Pastors are working hard enough because they don’t see what they do all week.

Who gets a slice of our time? So many of our Pastors are exhausted. So many of our Parishioners are exhausted. We spend much of our precious time dealing with issues that distract us from the real work of the Church because it’s easier to argue about paint colors than develop spiritual maturity.

Did Jesus die for this? If the answer is “yes” then that’s where I will focus my time. What about you?