On Sabbatical
I used my sabbatical to study the Sabbath. Here’s what I learned.
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The last relatively lengthy break from pastoral work or theological study I had was when I took paternity leave for the birth of my daughter thirteen years ago. It’s an option that, thankfully, is available to Canadian pastors due to the country’s Employment Insurance legislation. That sounds like a generous thing to do for my family, but it was more of an act of desperation. The hospital serving the northern Canadian city where I was ministering at the time didn’t have the extra neonatal services we were advised we would need, and paternity leave became a way to move my family to another city for the better part of a month without draining all my vacation time.
I don’t consider myself the hardest-working pastor or student, but I strive to rise to the occasion and fulfill my responsibilities because I am driven by an overriding sense that the work I do matters for eternity and requires sacrifices. The intensity of that feeling rose during my (uncompleted) doctoral studies at Andrews, when I felt the weight, not only of the opportunity being afforded me at others’ expense, but also of the urgency of making the transformative ideas I was learning available for the benefit of others facing various crises that emerged around the same time. My transition back to pastoral ministry was immediately followed by the COVID pandemic, which effectively required me to lead my church to online-only ministry ten weeks after I’d arrived. Pastoring a mid-sized downtown church through the pandemic was the most demanding experience of my career, and, looking back, I don’t think I ever fully recovered from it because I spent the following years piecing the church back together.
The Decision Point
Then, starting in the spring of this year, I faced three church crises in quick succession that required me to stand on principle in ways that, from the outside, appeared self-serving or overreacting. This required me to spend hours on the phone with my supervisors, my associate pastor and elders, outside confidants and consultants, not to mention those directly involved. It reduced my free time to almost nil and was emotionally draining.
However, I had a clear conscience before God and the support of those to whom I was accountable and held myself accountable, and the crises were resolved by the time camp meeting rolled around. I thought I would go on vacation and arrive back ready to catch up on the evangelism preparations that the crises had required me to postpone. But the reality was that when I returned, I barely had the mental energy to do the minimum. That‘s when I knew I needed to go on sabbatical.
My conference’s policy allows pastors to take a one-month sabbatical after five years in one church/district or seven years in two. I had known that I was due for a sabbatical this year and had even discussed my eligibility with the ministerial director, but I didn’t know how well that would work with what I had planned to accomplish at my church. Yet when I discovered my unusually low level of motivation, I set my ambition aside and decided that the church would be better off with eleven months of me closer to 100% than twelve months of me at 50% or less. Not to mention that I would be better off if I didn’t run myself past the point of burnout.
The Purpose in the Practice
When I announced that I was going on sabbatical, people would ask me, “What are you going to do?”
My answer was, “Whatever I feel like doing.” I didn’t want to go in with any specific goals to accomplish, because that would defeat the purpose. The only thing I didn’t do that I wanted to do was worship with my church on Sabbath mornings. I like my church and would probably worship there every week, even if I weren’t the pastor. But I knew that if I went, I would get drawn into work-related things, which would, again, defeat the purpose.
Instead—because I know that corporate Sabbath worship is good for me—I went to other Adventist churches in my area that I hadn’t worshipped at before, as well as a synagogue. For my devotional practice, I studied the Psalms while compiling a Spotify playlist of all 150 psalms set to contemporary music. I went mountain climbing with a friend (at least, as far as one can climb in two-and-a-half feet of snow) but mostly relaxed at home. My wife and I read marriage books while the kids were at school. I kept my local theological reading group for pastors running because that’s just fun for me.
Honestly, the vast majority of my time was spent working on my passion project that keeps my theological brain engaged, while I cannot study for my degree due to having to take side-hustles like editing this newsletter. It’s a comprehensive and systematic outline of a case for the seventh-day Sabbath that I have been improving by iteratively testing it against the best large-language models (LLMs). Early in my sabbatical, Gemini 3 dropped. The model’s far superior to understand and stress-test my document was a game-changer, and the focused time made it possible for me to make rapid, extensive progress in my understanding of certain topics.
A Hard Reset
One of the ideas that the model most appreciated was the understanding of the Sabbath as a structurally unavailable time that has the potential to ameliorate the modern meaning crisis Hartmut Rosa has identified as resulting from acting as if the meaning of life is to make everything fully available for our use. In reality, this total “instrumentalization” makes our lives far less meaningful because we don’t let reality ‘push back’ against us in such a way that we can “resonate” with it. Sabbath, on the other hand, when practiced as inculcating total dependence on God, can allow us to relax our iron grip on reality so that we can interrupt the feedback loops that cause us to spiral out of control into unsustainable striving. Gemini 3 identified this as a “negentropic reset” that all complex systems that run on feedback loops (including Adventist pastors) need to avoid crashing.
What I learned on my sabbatical was that a once-a-week day of rest isn’t a hard enough reset for certain times in our lives. Like the old covenant had sabbatical years, I’m glad that my conference allows for pentennial months. Not that one sabbatical year out of every seven would necessarily be a bad idea for pastors. Perhaps we would run things differently if we knew that our work would be tested by a prolonged absence after which we would return to face the consequences. I, for one, would like to think that “I can sleep when the wind blows” in anticipation of the ultimate test of my work in God’s church (1 Corinthians 3:10–13).
When some of my church members heard that I was getting a month-long sabbatical, their reaction was, “That’s all?” I never got the opposite reaction. Perhaps there are skeptics of my sabbatical in my congregation who have the good graces not to say anything at all about it if they couldn’t say something nice. Regardless, it feels like that month off was a good start. I’m not sure if I’m back to 100%, but my energy and motivation are much higher than they were before I went on sabbatical.