I’m a worship pastor.  I’m also a lazy hireling.

At least, I am during the day.  Our congregants expect our staff to be in from 8-4 Monday through Friday just like them.  Of course, most of what I accomplish during the day consists of learning new music, fixing our broken sound equipment in our sanctuary (which has earned me quite a few callouses, let me assure you), restaging the entire look of our sanctuary every six weeks (again, callouses), resighting our lights because they can’t seem to stay in the right place (40 foot ladders, anyone?  And, I’ve been electrocuted twice), etc.  On top of that is visitation (yes, worship pastors do visitation) and counseling (okay, maybe more “listening and referring” than “counseling”...I’m as qualified to counsel as our youth pastor is, at any rate--a little inside joke I’ve got with him, all in good fun… ;-D).  Fortunately, I’m rarely on deck to preach--usually the hierarchy for that goes “Head Pastor, Youth Pastor, Administrative Pastor, Me”, but those pesky conferences will do you in from time to time…

Yeah, I would say that I’m pretty lazy during the day.  Because after my work day is over and all of my little “projects” are taken care of, the real work begins.  Monday nights I meet with my creative team.  That usually runs two and a half hours.  Tuesday nights, I lead worship AND oversee tech for one of our ministries.  Which means I do my own mix, take care of lighting, get videos queued up, etc, and then I lead worship.  That’s a three-to-four hour night.  Wednesday is three hours helping out with the youth worship team--running tech for the youth group and such.  Saturday mornings are more meetings.  Friday is two to three hours of rehearsal time for Sundays.  Sunday is not so bad--coming in at 7:00, and services are usually over by noon.  But after service is rehearsal time for the youth team, which I supervise, mentor, generally advise, etc.  They’re typically done by 3:00, so all in all it’s not so bad--back in college, I did an internship at a church with five services on two campuses.  We would literally be playing non-stop; finishing one set at main campus before running out to our other campus, and then running right back after we finished playing there.  Literally, we’d be playing from soundcheck at 7:00am until the end of the music in the fifth service, around noon.  Only then would we get to hear the message!

Thank God for Thursday nights, or I’d never see my wife.

I agree with one of the earlier posters--the big stress in ministry comes from a lack of tangible evidence that one can point to and say “I got this done.” As one of my professors in college used to say; “Sunday never stops coming.” There’s rarely any downtime--usually, the only variation is when things ramp up for Easter, Lent, or Christmas.

But the big burnouts usually happen when a Pastor realizes that he can’t turn off his cell phone when he finally gets to use that one week a year of vacation.