I sometimes like to tell people that pastors are invisible six days a week and incomprehensible on the seventh. It usually gets a laugh, but it does point out something very real about pastoral ministry. Many people do not know what we do, and this makes it very easy for a pastor to fall into two errors.
One is pastors can become rather lazy. As a resource minister with our judicatory I once had a pastor who played golf 4-5 days a week. He couldn't understand why people in the church had a problem with that. I finally told him one day that he needed to decide if God had called him into ministry or if he should get his PGA pro card. He left that church in less than a year and took a position as an associate pastor in another church. At a seminar one day his senior pastor confided to me that he could not get that young man to do anything without being told. I told him his associate was like an old Harley-Davidson. You had to kick start him to get him going.
This young man is an extreme example, but it is easy to let pastoral duties slide. Most of the time people do not know where you are or what you are doing. They assume you are ministering somewhere to someone, but nobody really knows. This can be true for those of us who have been in ministry for some time. The old sermon barrel can look pretty comforting even though those old sermons may not really be applicable today for your church. Some of those old messages can be repeated, and some of them probably shouldn't have been preached in the first place, but using them saves a lot of time in preparing a new message.
The other extreme are those pastors who work too much. A fully-funded pastor can easily work 50-60 hours a week, and some work more than that. Once you exceed that 50 hour mark you are probably sacrificing time that should be spent elsewhere...like maybe with your family. I realize that some weeks may require more hours than that. There are unexpected events such as hospitalizations and funerals that can take more time in a given week, but when pastors regularly schedule too many hours on their calendar, there is a problem.
When I served as a pastor I scheduled family time on my calendar. A date night with my wife was a weekly occurrence, and it was written on my calendar. If someone wanted me to do something during that time I told them I already had an appointment for then. There was never a problem. If a true emergency came up, then we would reschedule the date, but this seldom happened. I had set times for reading and sermon preparation, and I tried to protect those times from those who just wanted to see the pastor for a few minutes. (Have you ever noticed that people who have nothing to do want to do it with you?)
Every pastor needs to find a balance in his or her ministry. We have been called by God to an exciting, fulfilling task, but it is not a task that should consume our every waking minute. Even Jesus took time to go off by Himself and rest and pray. Many pastors could have avoided burnout if they had just created more balance in their lives and ministries.
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