I hate being in my office.
This profound thought hit me today as my mind began bouncing pointlessly from wall to wall that I am the most unproductive when I am surrounding by four walls; I get bored, distracted, restless. I wait for the phone to ring or someone, anyone, to come wander into my basement office. I make coffee and let it get cold and then wander upstairs to reheat it. Sometimes I can reheat the same cup of coffee four or five times before ever taking a sip. By the time I get to hour five of office time I am ready to make a window through the concrete walls with my head.
As a new-bee in ministry I have been repeatedly shocked at both how much time congregations expect a minister to be in their office and likewise how guilty I feel if I don't perceive myself to be meeting those undefined expectations. With such a widespread emphasis on the pastor's presence in the office you would think office hours were a direct correlation to pastoral effectiveness. But they are definitely not. The more I read about patterns of effective pastors (measured I supposed as those pastors who grow churches) the more I hear that the opposite is true: the less time a pastor spends in their office and the more time they spend making intentional connections in the community, the more effective a pastor is.
Seeing a correlation between intentional outreach and effective pastoring makes me feel much better about my current attitude toward my office; "I can tolerate you for a while, yellow room, but after five hours you start to get on my nerves and I want to take a sledgehammer to you." Don't get me wrong, it isn't so much that I never want to be there as much as I don't always want to be there. Or even more, I don't want other people to perceive me as not working when I am out of the office when if I am in my office I feel as though I am procrastinating working. For example, when I am in my office I often feel comfortable that I am putting in my hours but all I can think is, "I have so much work I need to be doing!" Suddenly my office has become a holding cell for ministry and I have allowed myself to enter a situation in which I never feel like I am really working.
This friction between being in the office and fulfilling a Call to service might also be a sign of changes times and increased technology. An opportunity to change the way face time is defined. While being in the office used to be required to know what was happening in the office, I can be plugged in wherever I am. I can reply to an email, check Facebook, make a call or send a text message from anywhere. It's a workaholics worst nightmare but with appropriate boundaries it can be a great way to be connected to both the church building and Jesus' call to Discipleship.
But where I am really stuck is not so much with how to make peace with these four walls closing in on me as much as how to encourage my congregation and my denomination to support my intentional outreach to the community. To see it as Work, as "office hours." To have someone come into the office and instead of asking where everyone is with frustration to be frustrated if everyone was just sitting in their offices; "we're not paying you to just sit in the building!"
I am just waiting for the day when Jesus walks into my office and yells "What are you doing in here?!"...shaking his head at my soft feet and prettily painted toes, perhaps tipping my desk over in typical Jesus style. "Those aren't the feet of a Disciple!" He would say. And I would go, "No but they are the feet of an employed Associate Pastor in the United Methodist Church, Jesus." -I really hope there are other people who have a running commentary with Jesus or you are really going to think this office has driven me nuts.-
I don't have the answers or even a nice tidy ending to this blog post. Being honest, even if my congregation were outreach focused I would be behind the learning curve in where to start. Where would I go? Who needs a pastor without an office? Without a congregation? Inspite of my total and complete ignorance about how to be a pastor and serve the community as Jesus calls us all to, I'm not afraid to admit I think that the health of our ministry can be measured not in the numbers that make up our churches but more truly in how closely the call of Jesus to be Disciples and the congregation's expectations of their pastors align. It doesn't seem right that as persons ordained to serve, that serving Jesus would be something we were only allowed to do on our free time. Perhaps the fact that the walls of my office have become the symbolic antithesis to my call to ministry defines my calling as a mainline pastor to throw out the bathroom passes, hang up my "Out to Work" sign on my closed office door and begin creating a congregation that is outwardly focused. And Jesus said, "You go girl!"
