Article, "Your Pastor's Job Has No Edge"

Why a Sabbatical Is Not a Perk You Grant. It Is Maintenance on the Instrument Your Church Leans on Most

By Chris Reinolds

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Chris Reinolds served as the featured speaker at the Holston Baptist Association's 2026 Spring Meeting, where he delivered the message, "What Kind of Church Are You?" and led a workshop on "Raising the Level of Urgency Without Blowing Things Up."

In the Following Article, Chris addresses another important issue in the life of the local church: the need for churches to care for those who pastor and care for them. He argues that pastoral sabbaticals should not be regarded simply as an added benefit or extended vacation, but as a wise investment in the long-term health of both the pastor and the congregation.

We are grateful for Chris's ministry and for his permission to share this article in full, and we hope it will encourage thoughtful conversations among pastors, church leaders, and congregations throughout the HBA, for the health of our churches and for the glory of our Lord.

The following article was originally published by Chris Reinolds on his Substack and republished here with permission:

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Your Pastor's Job Has No Edge

Why a Sabbatical is not a perk you grant. It is maintenance on the instrument your church leans on most.

The word "sabbatical" is an interesting term.

Say it out loud in a personnel committee meeting or a business meeting, and all of a sudden the room feels uneasy. Sabbatical. When you first hear it, the word carries the faint aroma of college professors, paid vacations, and the stale odor of a large library. Even the people who like the pastor hear it and start quietly doing the math on how many Sundays one of those takes and how much the supply preacher is going to cost. And while no one says it out loud, the internal monologue sounds like this: Is this really necessary, or is this just the new thing these young pastors are asking for now?

To be fair, it is a fair question, and it deserves more than a passing answer, so let me give it to you as someone outside your current circumstances.

To put it plainly: Your pastor’s work is not primarily difficult because of the hours; it is difficult because it has no edge.

There is no clean line where the job stops, and his life begins. Think about it this way: His employer, his friendships, his entire family’s social world, his spiritual food, and his family’s income all occupy a single address. A sabbatical rest, then, should not be viewed as a perk granted to him. It is maintenance on the primary instrument your church leans on most.

Let me put it another way: either schedule and strategize for it, or eventually pay for the repair at your congregation’s detriment and at the disintegration of the man you claim to care for.

Foolish things people say:

“Our last pastor never needed one.”

That is probably not accurate. What is more likely is that he paid for not doing it privately, and you never saw the invoice on his soul.

I am aware of far too many circumstances where those men absorbed the cost to the detriment of their bodies, and you would have seen it if you had known to look: the bags under the eyes, the hollowness of the answers, the avoidance of peers who might sharpen or strengthen him. Others absorbed it in their marriages as their wives grew in resentment toward the church. Some allowed it to be absorbed in their kids, and if you are curious how that turned out, look at how many stories there are of pastors’ children who have avoided the organized church entirely, and how many more who are simply average attenders. Some of those pastors never had the bandwidth to teach their congregation why rest mattered, because teaching it would have required energy to fight the negativity and the pushback, and asking would have felt like weakness in front of the very people they were supposed to be leading.

The absence of a request is not evidence that the need did not, or does not, exist. Sometimes it is only evidence that a man decided the ask would cost him more than the exhaustion would.

“Well, Jesus didn’t take sabbaticals.”

That is partially true. Jesus was in public ministry for roughly three years, and then He was executed (and rose again three days later, which wasn’t really a sabbatical). So if your plan is to crucify the fellow in your pulpit at the end of year three, then at least that is a coherent strategy, though it would be a courtesy to let him know now so he can update his resume before his scheduled expiration date.

What Scripture does, in fact, show us is that Jesus modeled withdrawing from the crowds regularly and deliberately. Luke says that He would withdraw to desolate places and pray, and Luke says it the way you describe a habit, not an incident brought on by a crisis. Mark tells us Jesus rose long before daylight and went out to a solitary place. And when the apostles returned from ministry with so many people coming and going that they could not manage it, Jesus told them to come away by themselves and rest a while.

That was not a concession to their weakness; those were His instructions to the men charged with carrying His message.

Think about this: Rest is older than the tiredness that requires it.

Before there was ever such a thing as fatigue or exhaustion or burnout to recover from, God rested on the seventh day. Then, as if the modeling were not enough, He codified it, writing it into the commandments as the pattern for our regular rhythms, not as a reward for productivity but as the behavior of His people.

What you are actually asking him to carry

Most members evaluate a pastor’s job based on what they can see, which is the sermon and the weekly services. That is merely a fraction. Consider the rest.

He is on call for every crisis in the congregation, which means middle-of-the-night hospital calls, emergency room waiting, being present at a death notification, spending hours with a family in the rawest, worst moment of their lives, and facing circumstances most people never want to imagine. When is the last time you counseled a parent who found their own child after a suicide? Or arrived on the scene after a family discovered a toddler at the bottom of a pool? Or comforted a spouse and children after their mother or father decided to abandon them and start a new family? He is in the conversations with relatives who have not spoken in years, building the schedule for a funeral no one could have imagined. Have you written a eulogy in a day, stood at the graveside, and shared a meal afterward? Are you the one there for the miscarriages, the suicides, the overdoses, the relapses, the arrests, the affairs discovered, the marriages ending, and the adult children who simply walk away?

This man carries confidences he cannot discuss with anyone, including his spouse, depending on the situation.

He counsels: premarital, marital, grief, vocational, spiritual, and financial, usually without the training and never with the compensation of a licensed counselor.

He administers: budget preparation, finance committee, personnel committee, deacons, nominating committee, staff supervision and evaluation, background checks, child protection policy, insurance renewals, vendor bids, the roof, the HVAC, the copier, building use requests, the church calendar, and the cemetery.

He communicates: bulletin, newsletter, website, livestream, social media, and the email and text traffic that now arrives at all hours with an expectation of same-day response.

He develops people: new member classes, baptism conversations, teacher recruitment, curriculum review, Sunday school leadership, Wednesday night, camp, VBS, and the long slow work of finding the next generation of leaders.

He represents you elsewhere: associational and state meetings, ordination councils, community funerals for people who never attended, first responders, ballgames, graduations, and hospital visits for families who are not members but called him anyway.

He absorbs conflict: complaints about music and temperature and carpet, anonymous letters, the member who threatens to leave, the family who already left and is explaining to others why, and staff friction that has no neutral party to referee it.

And underneath all of it, he is expected to be spiritually full, theologically ready, emotionally available, and to have an answer. Not sometimes. Always.

He greets you at the door forty minutes after leaving a deathbed, and you have no way of knowing, which is not your fault; it is simply the nature of the work. His wife is watched. His kids are watched. He cannot buy groceries, go to the ball game, go out to a restaurant, or go to the hardware store without being on duty.

If you feel overwhelmed reading that, good. That is precisely why a sabbatical is necessary.

So what can you do about it?

From a strategic outsider’s vantage point I would advise you do the following things:

Start writing it down before you need it. Put language in your policies naming vacation, an annual study and planning week, and the interval at which an extended sabbatical is expected rather than merely permitted. Three months is the goal; six weeks is the floor.

Fund the coverage in the budget, so the conversation is never about whether the church can afford for him to be away.

Build the bench now. Decide who preaches, who takes hospital calls, and which deacons handle crises, and let those people practice while the pastor is still in town.

Protect one day a week and say so publicly, so that the member who calls him on his day off hears about it from another member and not from him.

Plan the return. A man who comes back to eight weeks of piled-up decisions has not rested; he has deferred.

Then do the thing only you can do. Become his advocate in the rooms he is not in. When somebody in the parking lot says it must be nice, you be the one who explains why it is necessary. He cannot make that argument for himself without it sounding like special pleading, and that is precisely why it has to come from you.