6 days a week

Alastair Bain sparked some interesting conversation over on his blog with this comment:

So I'm still in Sydney. And I'm hearing more of the "if you're in full time paid ministry and you aren't working 6 days a week then you're lazy" mantra. They talk of the creation mandate.

But I've never heard these guys say that if a lawyer or teacher or carpenter or carpet layer doesn't work 6 days a week then she's lazy. But it would follow wouldn't it?

I'm really just recording this so that I have my own record, but to fill you in, my first comment was:

It's interesting, isn't it. The revealed pattern is 6 days work, 1 day rest. Surely it's a sign of our affluence that in our country we only work five days.

But the expectation of most churches is that people work 5 days in their job and give a day to serving at church. So this is a lot of the reasoning behind ministers I know working 6 days.

Would it be godly to have an attitude that you 'rest as much as you need to, in order to work as well as you can?' I have a feeling that would lead more people to work 7 days than 4.

Stu fired back with this helpful comment:

The problem is the "revealed" pattern isn't easily relatable to the modern working life.

1 day rest in the OT didn't mean a day off vocational work in order to mow the lawns, help out round the house, cook tea and play with the kids, it meant absolutely no work!

Christians in vocational ministry ought to be exemplars of both balance between domestic work (eg. helping bath the kids) and vocational work, and balance between work and play.

Sadly, it seems to me, many ministers are so absorbed by one particular type of work they end up sacrificing their families and themselves, and not in a good way, but a wholly unproductive way.

Well, Stu certainly got me thinking.

The problem is the "revealed" pattern isn't easily relatable to the modern working life.

1 day rest in the OT didn't mean a day off vocational work in order to mow the lawns, help out round the house, cook tea and play with the kids, it meant absolutely no work!

Is it really so unrelatable? As soon as we start talking about what constitutes work, we're asking the wrong questions, aren't we? Rest is rest. God says rest, so rest. Whatever feels like work is work. God says take a day off, so take a day off. Sure, accuse me of ignorance and idealism, but it all seems pretty straightforward in my mind.

Christians in vocational ministry ought to be exemplars of both balance between domestic work (eg. helping bath the kids) and vocational work, and balance between work and play.

I agree, but to join this discussion re:family/work balance to taking a day off is not necessarily needed.

Either way, personally I think balance is the wrong word. I long held the view that family was my first ministry, which was a healthy corrective. But this is also fundamentally flawed. My first obligation, and as a family our first obligation is not to each other but to serving God. That will mean I'm not neglectful of Sarah, and also that she will take priority oftentimes over serving the wider body of Christ, but not always.

But of course this all revolves around the particular temperament of your wife and family. I am blessed with a wife who is happy to bash me around the ears if I'm not caring for her, but is also happy to sacrifice her own needs for others.

Even last night, Sarah wanted to head straight home after church, but I ended up in an important discussion with a guy who was having a hard time. Even though we'd discussed leaving straight away, as Sarah came towards me with the "I'm ready to go" look in her eyes, a simple subtle shake of my head to say, "Don't come over now" was met with another subtle nod, and she went and caught up with someone else for a while. No bitterness on the way home, we just spoke about how best to care for the guy I was talking to.