A church production schedule is tough enough when you’re young, so it only gets more difficult to juggle after marriage and a few kids enter the equation.
“...but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant, or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates, that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you.”
Deuteronomy 5:14
From one tech leader to another—when are you resting, friend?
I’d guess that’s a tough question to answer, since our schedules are nothing less than varied; we certainly don’t keep banker’s hours. A church production schedule is tough enough when you’re young, so it only gets more difficult to juggle after marriage and a few kids enter the equation. I have four kids myself, ranging from 13 down to 3, so the motto at our house is “There’s always something going on” between school, extra-curriculars, chores, projects, and whatever happens to be going on at church this week. After writing this tonight, I have to “log on” and set up a propresenter flow for an event tomorrow.
A lifestyle that embraces sabbath rest is going to look different for us than the rest of the church staff. Here’s a few things I’ve learned over the years to make it work for me and my family.
Limit Nights at Work
This is particularly meant for tech leaders with kids. Obviously, working evenings is unavoidable as almost any non-sunday event or service will be held in the evening, and for young, unattached tech leaders that’s no big deal. But once family life settles in, especially with kids, those few hours between school and bedtime are crucial hours of love, connection, and influence. Fathers and mothers must be there for them.
But how, you ask? Here are a couple of ideas:
Delegation
Chances are, the little event or class that’s happening on a Thursday night doesn’t need much more than a mic and maybe a couple of propresenter slides. What I’ve found is that most event and class leaders are more than willing to learn how to fire up a PA and work with ProPresenter Remote on an iPhone or iPad, so long as you’re willing to teach them.
Take a Few Phone Calls
What I mean is that if you delegate, it might take a few weeks for the person you taught to really get it right and be comfortable with what might seem really basic to you, which means you need to be available for a quick phone call or facetime to help them. It’s a little inconvenient, but it’s significantly more convenient than needing to be at the church any time the audio console needs to be turned on.
Talk to Your Leadership
If you’re away from home too much, sit down with your executive pastor or direct oversight and tell them your predicament. If they’re good leaders, they’ll work with you.
We ran into this with funerals at LifeMission. For about 18 months in 2022-2023, we were running one or two funerals a month at one of our main campus spaces, usually on off days from my team’s normal schedule. As much as my team wanted to help, regularly not being home on one of our scheduled weekend days was getting tough. So I asked for a meeting with senior leadership and explained to them that hosting funerals for non-members probably wasn’t the best use of my team’s resources. I came with an attitude that said, “We can keep doing this, but we’re asking a lot of the team beyond their main focus, which is weekend services, and funeral homes are much better equipped and capable to host these funerals, most of which have less than 70 people in attendance.”
They agreed with me and now my team (and I) can focus on what we do best.
A Little Goes a Long Way
Jesus said, “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.” ( Mark 2:27 ESV) What he meant was that God designed us to need rest and then commanded us to rest because he knew we couldn’t help but work too hard, but sabbath is not our God. Resting is not an end unto itself; it’s just a tool that we have to use to function properly.
Undoubtedly, the preferred way to practice sabbath is to have one day of the week where you are “off,” but that’s simply not possible for those of us with kids or odd schedules. This means that you’re going to need to think about a sabbath lifestyle, which means that we live from a place of rest, trusting that the Lord will help us accomplish the work set before so that we can easily set down our tasks and clear our minds to rest in the intermittent spaces of time we choose.
This requires intention—you’ll need to sit down and talk with your spouse about your week and where you can find space to rest well together, and that will probably look like a few hours here and there throughout the week. Perhaps you can find places where you can give the other person rest, which might look like Dad taking full responsibility for the kids on a Sunday evening while Mom gets out of the house to shop and meet up with a friend for dinner, or maybe Mom handles the littles for a friday morning so that Dad can get in a quiet round of golf with a good buddy.
However you work it out, you should never feel shame or guilt about not getting a whole day off if that’s just not possible. Again, sabbath is a tool for you to find rest; it is not a god that you serve.
Take an Actual Vacation, Probably Outside
According to Pew Research in 2023, nearly half of all US workers don’t use up their PTO. I know plenty of church staffers that simply don’t take real vacations.
Now, don’t get me wrong here—this doesn’t need to be anything extravagant. I understand that a lot of us aren’t exactly making what we could in the marketplace. Thankfully, there’s plenty of options for simple get-aways that cost less than a couple thousand dollars, and if you really want to be frugal, you can swing a few days at an Airbnb within driving distance of your home or at a GetAway House for less than $500 with gas and food.
However you swing it, use your PTO. Leave town. Or don’t leave town—a stay-cation is better than nothing. Regardless, I think that all of us need dedicated time off to fully unwind from our hustles.
I want to push you a step farther, though, and challenge you to get out of your comfort zone a little bit by planning a vacation with some outdoor activities. I’m an avid flyfisherman, a long distance runner, and my wife and I love to hike, but you can do whatever gets you outside. You are made from the earth, and so you are connected to it on a soul level. The Lord designed you to find rest when you are outside, so try getting outside and see just how quickly it can undo the knots in your soul.
A Prayer for Sabbath Rest
Lord, thank you for giving me rest; help me to take the rest you have given me. I repent from the need to “do it all” on my own, and I choose to believe that I can do more in six days with rest than in seven without. Help me to find your presence in the places of rest you’ve set apart for me.
Amen.
