What Do Pastors Do With All Their Time?

“Your dad only works one day a week. What does he do with the rest of his time?” This was asked of one of my daughters by another girl at church. We all chuckled and sighed.

It’s rather understandable, though. The ministry seems mysterious from the outside. It can appear as if a pastor’s job is delivering about an hour or two of public speaking a week, and the rest must be free time, right?

I once helped a new members’ class think through this by writing various weekly ministry tasks on a board, and I then asked the class to assign a reasonable amount of hours to each task. The list included prayer, sermon preparation, reading for further study, preparing other Bible studies or presentations, counselling, training leaders, following up with the missing or sick or discouraged, organising services, visiting members, contacting missionaries, evangelising, and broader church administration. By the time they’d finished apportioning hours to each task, we ended up with an 80-hour work week, not counting the actual corporate meetings of the church, which added another 8 or so hours. They saw the problem: this would kill most men in their first year.

I then asked if the pastor should make time for his family, for fitness and health, for maintenance of his own home and possessions, and possibly for recreation or leisure. They heartily agreed, but couldn’t see where it would fit into this 90-hour work week.

The solution is found in Ephesians 4:11-16. The pastor is to equip members to do the work of the ministry. Much of those 80 hours is supposed to be carried out by the members of the Body, not all by the pastor himself. He trains others to counsel, evangelise, organise, administrate, teach, and indeed, train others.

But since the demands of even a small church far exceed what one man can do, he must treat his time like a precious, scarce resource that must be stewarded efficiently. Consequently, he deploys his time in ways that will result in the most equipping work for the most people.

That means his priority is preaching. If he preaches to 200 people for one hour a week, that’s 200 hours of ministry in one go. A sensible pastor will then pour significant time into the preparation of his sermons and of the worship services. He will supplement this sermon preparation with other reading and studying to keep himself fresh, creative and growing.

His second priority will be raising up faithful men who can teach others also (2 Tim 2:2). Instead of devoting his time to the lukewarm, undecided and half-committed, he will prioritise the faithful, growing and eager ones, teaching them and counselling them into even greater maturity. They will be first to lift his hands from carrying all the burdens of ministry, and become leaders of ten, fifty or a hundred others. You might call this the Jethro principle, something which he taught his son-in-law Moses to prevent him from “wearing himself out” (Exodus 18:17-26). The pastor will not neglect to counsel those who ask for it or need it, nor will he fail to minister to attempt to minister to everyone, as he is able. But he knows the only way to achieve regular and thorough every-member ministry will be to equip the saints who will minister to each other.

His third priority will be overseeing the entire ministry of the church, with its members (and their faithfulness and service), ministries, services, finances, missionaries, events, outreaches, promotion, and physical resources. Again, this is too much for one man, so his priority will be to organise the delegation of these tasks, and continually supervise.

In any given week, most full-time pastors won’t be able to get away with less than 10 to 12 hours of sermon preparation, another 6 of further study and prayer, 10 hours of training, discipling, evangelising, counselling and following up with members, and another 12 of general administration. That puts him at 40 hours, not counting the 8 hours of public services. If he wishes to conduct ministry beyond his local church, such as writing, teaching in a seminary, serving on boards, or other media production, that’s over and above his local church commitments. For this reason, most pastors work six days out of seven, to fit it all in. And spare a thought for the bi-vocational pastor, who is trying to do all this work alongside earning a living and providing for his family.

Make no mistake, a pastor can be as lazy as the worst of men. A. W. Tozer said, “It is easy for the minister to be turned into a privileged idler… He has no boss within sight; he is not often required to keep regular hours, so he can work out a comfortable pattern of life that permits him to loaf, putter, play, doze and run about at his pleasure. And many do just that.”

But if a church has hired a pastor who imposes on himself, as Tozer put it, “a way of life no less rugged than that of the workers who support him”, then they will have a very, very busy pastor.

Three takeaways:

1. The more a church financially frees a man up, the more pastoral ministry they will get from him. Not every congregation can do that, but it should be their goal to let their pastor be full-time.
2. A church should expect equipping from their pastor, but ministry from every member. The pastor is included in that membership, so he will certainly do some of that ministry. But a church which expects sufficient personal ministry to every member from one man is dooming itself to mediocre ministry, a burnt-out pastor, and a disgruntled membership. A church which looks to their pastor to focus his time on equipping them with the Word will flourish.
3. The more a church ministers to one another, the more they free their pastor to do equipping work, which further improves their ministry to one another. The grand result is the “whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.”(Ephesians 4:16)