I sat with two other young pastors gazing at Flathead Lake in Montana. We were there to learn from Eugene Peterson in real time in his home environment. Over the next 48 hours, he showered us with wisdom, but one particular phrase hit me between the eyes: “A busy pastor is a lazy pastor.”
Ouch! The words stung like salt in a fresh cut. I had been running 100 miles an hour for months. It was a major ordeal even to carve out a few days to retreat to Montana for those few precious days.
The No. 1 word I hear from kingdom leaders during the fall season and beyond is “busy.” This busyness didn’t creep up on us overnight. Since the Industrial Revolution, our society has put the focus on efficiency, doing as many things as fast as we can, in order to maximize our output. In other words, we are very busy.
Being busy feels right, like it is good stewardship of our time. But an attitude of busyness depersonalizes us, melting us down to machines, separating us from those we serve and grinding down our souls. Efficiency thinking has led to a burnout epidemic that has hollowed out our sacred work. We move fast, we do a lot of things, but we’re never really present or fulfilled. We’ve allowed ourselves to become busy leaders.
If we’re going to slow down and become more present to families, teams and congregations, we must make a shift from an efficiency mindset to an effectiveness mindset. Peter Drucker, the father of organizational thinking, defined “effective” as doing the right things well. Focusing on the right things requires prioritizing what is best. This is challenging but necessary work in our culture of excess.
We hate saying no, and we fear disappointing those we are here to serve. We got into this work to say yes to God and his people. Once we have done the painful pruning work we need to do, we will discover a new freedom to do a few things well. Pruning makes way for the excellence of doing a few things well.
I have coached many pastors who have made this shift. The pastors leading in this effectiveness mindset narrow their focus and slow down their pace each season. Priorities shift, and they readjust. They focus on a few areas of deep impact and learn the freedom of limits.
For many churches, each new season brings momentum, but it also brings pressure to relaunch and reload (or re-overload) the programs, the staff and the congregation. The pressures of efficiency are alive and well, even in the local church. We simply must resist the belief that more actually is more.
Here are a few questions that can help you focus on effectiveness:
* What few “best” things should I be doing?
* What good things must I prune in order to pursue the best things?
* What would have to be true for me to do these things well?