Welcome Back From Sabbatical, Pastor!

Rev. Libby Howe, WCC Congregational Support Coordinator for Peace & Justice Ministries

A LOT of my pastor friends are returning from sabbaticals right now. The pandemic delayed sabbaticals for over 2 years, not to mention made them feel super necessary, so everyone seemed to be catching up this summer. I’ve read a lot about preparing for sabbaticals, both as pastors and congregations, but very little about what to expect and plan for when returning. 

One of the most asked questions to pastors about sabbatical is “how was it?” Depending on the context of the question, the answer will vary. But it’s unlikely that the quick, casual going-through-the-line-after-worship moment will be able to support this conversation. A lot can happen in 3 months. First there’s the normal life stuff like family transitions, health issues, and world events. Add to that the many “extras” that sabbatical allows–visits to far away places, new experiences and cultures, time to read, pursue a physical challenge, meet new people and reconnect with friends and family from other life chapters. “How was sabbatical?” is a pretty loaded question. If you’re someone asking it, be ready for either a very long answer or a very short one until a pastor has a while to put that answer together. If you’re returning from a sabbatical, it would be good to expect that question and consider both the short and long answer.

I took a sabbatical in 2016. Upon return my short answer was “Thanks for asking. It was important. I’m still learning from it…and I imagine I will keep learning from it for a while. I’m working on the longer answer to your question. And I’m really grateful.” About 6 months after my sabbatical in the summer of 2016, I made 7 quick facebook posts about my learnings from sabbatical that became the long answer. Sabbatical is a good chunk of your life and you don’t have to have it all figured out the moment you return. Give yourself a minute, or month, or six, to put it out there. But DO put it out there. It matters. It’s a ministry opportunity to share what you’ve learned about rest and work and God and relationships and life.  I suggest within the first few months of your re-entry some kind of written or extended verbal report. People want to know, which is great. But it’s a lot, and it’s worth taking the time to craft the answer to “how was it?” in an intentional way. 

Another reason it took me a while to process and respond was because of the thwarted and unmet expectations of my sabbatical. Most people and professions don’t “get” sabbaticals.Therefore, justifying a sabbatical is no easy task.  And even though they’re pretty standard fare in most mainline faith communities that employ full-time trained/ordained professional religious leaders, they are still a tremendously privileged experience. So with that in mind, I wasn’t too excited to come back and talk about the losses and disappointments that made sabbatical hard. But I’m also unwaveringly averse to lying or pretending things were great when they weren’t. The truth was my sabbatical started with a big, fat, life-threatening health scare (anaphylactic allergic response to wasp stings) that seriously bungled almost every plan I had made for the next 10 weeks. My sabbatical was consumed with recovery and adjustment to that new reality, and being apart from the regular rhythm and people of my life forced me to do that in an uncharacteristically isolated way. I did eventually share all of this with people, but I didn’t want to communicate a lack of perspective or gratitude. 

Most new pastors in mainlines can expect that a full time call/assignment will include a 3 month sabbatical for them every 5-7 years. Many pastors and congregations apply for and receive grants to fund special plans for sabbaticals. And there is often a lot of anticipation and hype about a sabbatical which gives way to the expectation that it will be 3 months of AMAZING. Why shouldn’t it be? It’s such a tremendous and rare gift…one that should be available to more people but still largely resides in the specialized worlds of academia and religious life. The most important thing I learned, and now share with pastors and congregations about that sabbatical time, is to measure your expectations. Sabbatical is 3 months of life. 3 months of you. 3 months of not working at your regular day job. Whatever might happen in the next 3 months with you or your relationships or your health if you weren’t on sabbatical, it’s going to happen even though you are on sabbatical. Your life doesn’t know that these are supposed to be the best 3 months of your life so far. By all means, plan and hope for something extraordinary, but don’t be surprised to find quite a bit of ordinary, too. 

Stories abound of amazing and transformative sabbaticals. I don’t want to discount that at all.  But the purpose of sabbatical is quite basic: rest. That’s it. We can load a whole lot of other goals and hopes and expectations, but in a culture and church that is driven by an exploitative work ethic, learning to rest is a huge deal.  If you’re like me, you may have told yourself over the years that not resting was about not having the time to rest. My sabbatical blew up that theory right quick. My health scare forced me to rest, and I have never been so restless. There I was with all kinds of time to rest, and all I wanted to do was GO. I was angry and sad. This shouldn’t have surprised me, because I’ve read the best book out there on this subject (and of course knowing about something always translates to doing it perfectly :). The book is Sabbath As Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now  by the brilliant prophet, Walter Brueggeman, wherein he writes, “In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath [sabbatical] is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods” . 

If sabbatical does anything for us, I hope it helps us wrestle with our messed up relationship to work and rest. That wrestling is a lifelong endeavor. I’m a member of a church who is generous in granting sabbaticals to its pastors (one of them just returned), respects staff days off, and provides generous paid time for vacation, continuing ed, holidays, and personal leave. But I still worry that the culture of my congregation reflects more of a work/busy/earn everything ethic than a rest/sabbath/receive grace ethic. This is especially evident as people speak of THE FALL coming soon. It’s the beginning of the program year, and it feels like we all have to brace ourselves for nine months of no breathing so that we can have a few months to breathe when we come up for air next June. Do you see and feel that in your setting? What can we do to resist that? How can we imagine embracing something more humane and human? 

After reading Brueggemann’s book, I admit some ambivalence about sabbaticals, because I don’t want the church to treat rest like it is something extraordinary, rare, and privileged instead of what it really is: a basic human need. I hope that sabbaticals have not become another way for churches to justify unjust expectations of themselves and their leaders to be in constant motion and constant productivity mode. Some better questions to ask a pastor when they return from sabbatical are “Tell me about Rest. What was rest like for you?” and “What  do we need to do as a community to perpetuate a healthy rest ethic here, for everyone?” It just might be that the most transformative sabbatical experiences happen upon your return. 

Welcome back from sabbatical, pastor! Rest well.