Do you take off Fridays or Mondays? This is a question that is often asked among pastors and church planters when hanging out in the halls of conferences and pastors retreats. I’ve had this discussion with numerous pastors and church planters that I have coached over the years. The question of the day off flows out of many prudent concerns.
First, human beings have all been designed by God to have a rhythm of work and rest in their lives. This is built into and mirrors God’s good design for his world and his creatures. Various social experiments over the years have demonstrated that constant work is not good for humans nor is it actually good for accomplishing good work. The biblical model is to work six days and rest the seventh. This is reflective of God’s own work and the creation narrative of the book of Genesis. (Genesis 2:1-3, Exodus 20:8-11) Second, the Western weekend is somewhat of a sandwich made up by the traditional Jewish Sabbath (Saturday) and Christian day of worship (Sunday) traditions. Both seek to follow God’s creation, design, and command to separate work with rest. This Judaeo-Christian heritage of the West has given us our work week, but is a bit complicated for those whose labors are extended into Sundays.
For the majority of pastors, Sunday is a workday and Saturday is clearly a day off. The exception to this, of course, is the Saturday night vigil with the Lord and the sermon. This leaves us with our current question: If in our modern cultural context it is helpful to have an additional day off, which day should a pastor take off?
Over the years I have experimented with various days off during my time in pastoral service. When I was on staff at a large church, the staff team who had Sunday obligations all synced up so that they would be off on Fridays. Other pastoral teams have opted for Monday being the ideal day off, albeit for different reasons.
When you are working in a church planting context, the schedule can be a bit more fluid and flexible. When I was planting in New Jersey, some kind people helped me order things a bit. First, to keep me from working around the clock, both my external advisory board and my internal advisory board, a.k.a. my family, required me to be off Saturday and one additional day. Which day would it be? I think I have tried every day of the week except Thursday.
In the latter part of this post I will comment on Friday and Monday and my experiments with them. I will then wrap with why I landed with Tuesdays as the day I recommend to be off for pastors.
TGIF - Thank God It's Friday?
There is a reason why Friday is a popular day off for pastoral teams. First, it gives you two days back to back that simulates the modern weekend. Many also use Friday off to create a hard stop on Thursday night for any work preparing for the Sunday morning worship gathering. Yet somehow I always thought it was a huge momentum killer in my preparations for preaching. I was never really able to turn it off when I knew Sunday was coming!
Monday, Monday
Monday is great because Sunday can be a heavy day of preaching, multiple gatherings, member classes, meetings, and other responsibilities. At the end of the day on Sunday almost every pastor just needs to crash and take a long nap. Monday off is the best for this reason; the minister is wiped out. The weakness I found with Monday was that there was always so much to do coming out of the weekend. There are administrative tasks, people to follow up with, meetings to have, and desire to get a good start on the new week. And if you are truly wiped out is that really the best day for you to help with your family and spend time with them? I also felt like a slacker being off on Mondays for some reason. I don’t really know why but the feeling was real for me. But always try and hit up that late Sunday afternoon nap whenever you can!
I’ll Gladly Pay You Tuesday?
Thus we come to Tuesday. Tuesday!? Yeah, Tuesday! I cannot claim any wisdom or breakthrough in trying out being off on Tuesday. I have to credit this to the recommendation of my friend Ed Marcelle, Pastor of Terra Nova Church in Troy, NY. I don’t even know if Ed takes off Tuesdays today, but I do know that I tried it out and it really worked for me during my last few years as a lead pastor. It also saved my Fridays and Mondays for the work I really desired to do on those days. It was also the day where rest made the most sense. It also allowed space to help my wife with various family duties related to the kids and allowed me time to regain energy and momentum towards the weekend.
My Fridays could now be focused on finishing up the sermon. Usually this would be a creative day on which I needed space. The work of exegeting a passage of Scripture and creating basic sermon structure would be completed earlier in the week. From there, the most important thing for me was finalizing the sermon in two ways. The first was to remove and edit out the chaff of excessive content which would bog down my sermons. When pastors run out of time in the week, they can skip this important task. The second was to work creatively on illustrations, transitions between ideas, and on sewing together my categorical introduction with a Christ focused conclusion. Being able to do this work on Fridays made Saturdays truly “off.” This created a freedom to run around with my Home Team unencumbered by a looming and incomplete sermon.
In addition to utilizing Fridays, Mondays became my longest workday. On Monday our team would follow up on people and details from connections made on Sunday morning. We would have staff team meetings to aim the week well together. I would have preparation time in the afternoons to write and dial in content for Monday evening meetings which I sought to maximize. My Monday evenings would rotate between elder meetings, leadership development groups, and later, our apologetics club. Mondays were almost always 12 to 15 hour days for me and I would finish both grateful and exhausted. I would finish up with a deep desire for rest, connection with the Lord, and a need for a true exhale from my labors. So I started calling that feeling: Tuesday.