Thoughts on "Sundays"

Here is what I have learned over this past year of ministry about SUNDAYS: they are always coming. Even on Monday, you can always know that Sunday is only days away. As my senior pastor would say, "Sundays come with astounding regularity."

And so on a week like this when I'm faced with a holiday (Remembrance Day on Friday is a day off work for me), I just want to cry. A part of my brain says, "You need the break". My senior pastor says, "You WILL take a break." But Sunday is still coming. To take any time "off" just means cramming the same amount of work into a shorter period of time.

I don't know how pastors do it every week for so many years. I mean, there's a lot of performance-oriented events that come with the same kind of regularity, but you would assume that the stresses of putting out the daily news or live TV programming or other such things would be somewhat carried by having adequate people-power to make it happen.

Not so in most churches. In a small church like mine, it's easy to get caught in the Sunday-Cycle. In order to lighten the load of TASKS and free yourself up to LEAD, you need to put the time into building teams. But you don't have enough time to do it well (or at all), because Sunday is coming, and all the tasks that need to be done with it. If Sunday wasn't coming, I would have time to mentor and teach and train and be a better administrator.

I suppose that being at big churches with big staffs and good systems in place carry their own challenges. But it must be incredible to be able to LEAD rather than slave away at TASKS in those environments. To actually be able to "train people for the work of the ministry" rather than DO the ministry to keep the people from reacting badly.

People don't often understand why I loved working at Payless so much. Here's the reason: You go to work, you sell shoes. If there's a holiday, I'm not sitting home stressing about the shoes I could have been selling. I just sell shoes the next day. And when you go home, you don't have to think about the shoes or your customers or whatever. The man who bought that pair of loafers two days ago isn't going to be calling you during your date night with your husband to complain about such-and-such or use you as a phone directory. And if someone returns a pair of shoes, it's not a personal affront to you, and no one's going to make it that.

But I love the Church. I love what it stands for, I love the potential it has, I love the community it provides and the haven it offers. I love its mission.
In essense, I love the ideal church. And my heart breaks for the ACTUAL church.

The church is not SUNDAY. The church is the body of Christ charged to be His hands and feet and voice and heart in this hurting and dark world. My head says, "Is this what Jesus died for?" My spirit say, "Forgive us, Father, for we don't know what we're doing."