Do Pastors Really Need Sabbaticals Every Year?
RELATED - Conversation with Phillip Miller
FULL TRANSCRIPT
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He's just a regular guy with a cool job that God loves for some reason. Welcome to The Steve Marston Show, a daily journey in learning how to live more like Jesus, conversations with those that God is working through, and dad jokes. It's the most unique show you'll hear today. Now here's Steve. Okay, thank you for being here. Welcome in. It's a fun Friday on The Steve Marston Show. Especially grateful for all of you listening on the radio.
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As we are here every weekday at 3 PM on AM 6 30, the word in San Antonio, Texas, you know, gone right as well as 99.5 the word in Little Rock. Both of those audiences are huge and we're so thankful to be a part of it. They were kind of the foundation of what we've been doing around here. Now the rest of you are joining us through the podcast. You're listening on.
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your own time on your own schedule. And that's awesome too. And as we get started today, I wanted to talk about something that just kind of popped up. You know, I feel like my life is not too unlike yours. I feel like we are just on the same road together in the things that inspire me, the things that challenge me, the things that move me. I think we'll do the same for you and
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I was just minding my own business as I like to do on social media and I came across a guy on X and he was talking about the importance of a pastor's sabbatical and he listed all of this long list of reasons why a pastor needs to have one of these and that churches need to make sure that their pastor is taking part in these. Now on the surface I really agree with that.
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In fact, we just did an episode, episode 478, I think, 476, no, 476, with Pastor Philip Miller, and we talked about pastor burnout, and we went through his story and some things to be on the lookout for as congregants to see if our pastor is experiencing burnout and to try to, you know, head it off at the past to be able to...
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make sure that they are taken care of because they do have an extremely hard job. Now look, I have never been a pastor in my life, but I have been a deacon at a church for over 20 years. And I have seen up close and personal what pastors go through on a daily basis. And it is a difficult and hard job. They are on the front lines for us. They do spend a lot of time
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in prayer over you and your family, whether you realize it or not. They do stem the tide of the culture trying to hold it back while promoting what Christ has said. They do amazing work and we need to take care of them. We need to make sure that we are out in front making sure that they don't get so far over
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exposed that they are just running on fumes. Nobody needs that, but especially our pastors. However, looking at this ex post, I was just kind of struck that a sabbatical every single year, is that really necessary? Is that really helpful? And I tweeted back with a little pushback because I said, look, I understand the need for a pastor at some points.
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to go on a sabbatical, to take three, four weeks or so, and just to get away from everything, recharge your battery with their spouse, and reconnect with them and their family. Yes, absolutely. I think that's needed on occasion. However, I just see so many of these pastors that are going on these quote unquote sabbaticals every single year, and they leave like at the end of May,
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and are gone through September. And they go to the beach or they go to Europe or they go somewhere off and they are spending a lot of time away from their ministry. Now look, I'm no place to judge whether that pastor is really seeking God in that time. Because look, if you go to the beach and you spend six weeks there, are you really looking...
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and spending time in God's Word multiple hours a day, are you really seeking His face in prayer, as well as, you know, taking advantage of the recreation time and stuff that's down there as well? Are you really doing that? I can't say. I don't know. Maybe they are. But I do think when you have such a long time off for a pastor that the rest of the congregation
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me included, looks and says, you know, the pastor's on some kind of pedestal. Whether we acknowledge it verbally or not, I can't take six weeks off, I can't take eight weeks off of my job and still expect to have it, right? Even though I may desperately need time away and desperately need a chance to just recharge my batteries with my family and spend time alone with God, yes.
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I may desperately need that, but I can't do that, and you can't do that either. So when churches allow their pastors to do that, it can cause, I think, alienation. I think it can make it a situation to where these pastors are all of a sudden now more isolated than the regular person in the pew. And when that happens, that's when things can go bad. Now, I'm not going to say that they do.
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But what I am saying is there's the possibility of not being the shepherd that they need to be. And we see it all the time. And it's not just with sabbaticals, but we see it when pastors are called away to do conferences all the time. And they're going on all of these other extra ministry things, and they're writing books, and they're doing all of these other wonderful things on the surface.
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but it's getting them further and further away from the people that they're supposed to be serving, that the church that God has called them to be at. And that makes me nervous for them because the more you get separated, the more you get isolated from anything, that's when Satan can really start to work on somebody. That's when we can start seeing a lot of these pastors fall. And guess what? We have seen a lot of these pastors fall.
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So again, I'm not just completely going to say that a sabbatical is totally wrong and you can't allow a pastor to do that. I just think it's a slippery slope. You've got to be really careful. Now again, and I'm talking about sabbaticals. I'm not talking about just normal vacations because we all need normal vacations. You know, two weeks. I know there's some churches that can't afford to pay their pastor a chance to go on vacation for a couple of weeks, but
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The pastors need to take it anyway, right? We all need time away from our jobs. That's not what I'm saying. I'm talking about these extended, quote-unquote, sabbaticals. And again, I encourage you to go back and listen to our episode 476 with Philip Miller, because there are some great points that he made that we as congregants can help our pastors and take some things off of their plate to make sure that they don't have spiritual burnout, because we don't want that either, right?
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We don't want our pastors going and running just so hard and running on empty that they can't function within their own families, much less be able to pour into us as their church members, right? So again, it's just one of these things that I think in church culture needs to be really examined. And again, maybe you and your church sits down with the pastor and says,
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what we want you to do, and we want you to take this sabbatical for an extended period of time every single year. Whether you want to or not, we are saying that you have to. Look, okay, that's fine, but just know that that can turn, and that can be more detrimental than it is helpful. Just my thoughts on it there. All right, hey, I want to let you know that we've got our free PDF available for you. We talk a lot about Bible study on this program.
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And sometimes you don't have a chance to open your Bible and really get the most out of it because you don't know where to start. Well, this free PDF we have is called Five Tips for Bible Study. It's at our website, SteveMarshtonShow.com, and it's just designed to help you in a strategic way. These are just five little things you can do every time you open up your Bible, and it'll help you learn and it'll help you rightly divide.
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God's Word and in truth. So you can check it out for yourself again. It's just a free resource we want to get into your hands. You just fill out the little form and we email you a link and boom there it is. You can have it for yourself. Five tips for Bible study at SteveMarsonShow.com. Stay with us more coming up.
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The Steve Marston Show continues. Thank you for listening. It's the Christian radio show slash podcast that matters. And on Fridays, we like to take a little trip through the online newspaper slash magazine of record on this program. It's not the New York Times. It's not the New York Post. It's not Politico. It's not Breitbart.
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It's not even the Washington Times or the Washington Post or the New Orleans Times pick a you for crying out loud. No, no. What we go over, what we review is the website, the Babylon Bee because of its satirical nature, because it pokes fun at the church bubble, which I have been in just about all of my adult life. It does other things too, but that's its foundation. And since I feel like
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I should have probably created this because I'm a smart, elegant heart. And I've, like I say, grown up in the Christian bubble. This should have been right in my wheelhouse. I don't know why I didn't think about it. So, since I haven't that creative gene to be able to have done it, I like to review it and tell you what is in it every week. So, let's get to the review of this week's Babylon Bee and...
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This one is pretty interesting because it's the Babylon B's guide to the church worship team. And it starts off by saying, ever since the very first evangelical mega church, which of course was founded in Jerusalem 2000 years ago, because right, there was 3000 people added in one day, right? Yeah. Well, the heartbeat of the Christian church, according to the Babylon B has always been the worship team. So the Babylon B being
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God's favorite Christian satire site, which by the way, I'm not sure that there's any others, but maybe there are, I don't know. They're just not as well known. So the bee is here with a handy explainer. I love that word, explainer. Breaking down the various members of the worship team. This is interesting, so here we go. Not that we've hit the minimum word count for these introductions, no one's reads anyway, but here's each member of the worship team explained.
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Little inside baseball there. So here we go, the Babylon Bee and their guide to your church's worship team. First we'll start with the bassist. The bassist is the cool aloof guy standing off to the side, bobbing his head like he's in the red hot chili peppers. He's always fashionably late to practice and rarely ventures off the E string. Sadly, his amp hasn't been plugged in for years. There's some truth there.
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Not saying which part, but there is truth there. How about the lead guitarist? Well, the lead guitarist was in a rock band in high school and they totally would have hit huge if they hadn't broken up due to some relationship drama. He's fulfilling his fantasy of being in a big rock band by playing U2-ish riffs between every single verse. Again, truth there as well. The rhythm guitar player.
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This guy is just like the lead guitarist, but he's less skilled. So he's relegated to playing power chords. Just don't play a song with B minor or an F. He's still pretty shaky on those. Now we move to the drummer in the Babylon B's guide to your church's worship team. The drummer, extremely hyperactive and unstable. Everyone thought it would just be safer to keep him enclosed in plexiglass. When he's on vacation,
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One of the elderly church members fills in, but he only uses the drum brushes instead of the drum sticks. We think he was in a jazz band back in 1992. Let's see, who else? Oh, the cowbellist. You can't have a worship team without a cowbellist, am I right? The backbone of the entire worship team, the Babylon Bee says, sometimes also uses the tambourine. And it's always barefoot for some reason. You have to check on.
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Nobody wants to see the dogs out on Sunday morning on stage, am I right? We move on in the Babylon B's guide to your worship team at church, the Triangle Player. Yeah, classically trained percussionist, the Triangle Player practices more than anybody else in the band combined. Wouldn't doubt that. And here's one. How about the special music, quote unquote, lady? Just bless her heart.
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She's been attending the church faithfully for 120 years. Singing the quote unquote special music gives her more joy than anything else in the world. Just let her have it. Just let her have it. Then there's the background singers. Oh yeah, you look up there and they're always smiling and swaying and raising their hand. They add so much to Sunday morning worship. Just as long as you don't plug their mics in. Yeesh, again, some truth there as well.
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Not gonna say which part. Continuing on with this list from the Babylon Bee about your worship team and the guide to them, we have made it up to the worship leader. Looking like he was pulled straight off the set of a cologne commercial. The worship leader is the impossibly pretty face of the band who wears the impossibly skinny jeans to help him hit those high notes.
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A true expert at filling awkward dead space in the service with ad-lib prayers. Just Lord, just, just, just Lord, just, just be with us today. Then of course, you can't have a worship team without the tech guy. The tech guy. He shuffled in off the street one day covered in Cheetos dust wearing a Star Wars t-shirt and greeters knew they had finally found their tech guy. He's great to have around since you can blame
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everything on him when things go wrong. And then finally here for the Babylon Bee's guide to your church's worship team, the Keyboardist, a wizard of epic sound and glittering tech. The Keyboardist is the only musician on the platform whose instrument is actually turned up in the mix. There you go. It pretty much covers it, the Babylon Bee says. So make sure you share this with your worship leader, drummer, bassist, and
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and guitarist say this is totally you. Or you can just send them a share of this video and audio podcast. That would be about the same thing too. So again, thanks to our friends over at the Babylon Bee for the humor and the fun. Always, always encouraging love, love those guys so much. Speaking of websites, I'd love for you to visit my website, SteveMarshtonShow.com.
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It is all new. kind of stripped it down to the studs not long ago and we have built it back up and it's something more than just a place for a podcast radio show. It is really becoming a library of resource that is being used much more than just this little platform. People on Google are being exposed to our stuff as well as YouTube when they search the kind of keywords and topics that we cover here on the program about discipleship.
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about learning to follow Jesus closer and better, yeah, people on those big sites are being exposed to it. So check it out, SteveMarsdenShow.com. Click around, let me know what you think. Back with more coming up.
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The Steve Marston Show rolls on. It's where faith and fun are both taken seriously. Thank you for joining us. Again, whatever your story is, if you're listening on radio, amazing. We're grateful. Ditto for those of you that are listening online. Let's get to some of the stories you may have missed. Now, I don't know if you're a big baseball fan or not, but there is a young man by the name of Sal Stewart, and he plays infield for the Cincinnati Reds, and his
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having an incredible year and it's putting him in contention for being Rookie of the Year. But amid all the baseball statistics and accolades, this 22-year-old kid is making sure that Jesus is known by everyone. After a recent 6 RBI performance against the New York Yankees, a reporter asked the rookie how grateful he was and he said, how grateful am I? Jesus bless me, I'm 22 years old, I'm playing at Yankee Stadium.
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My family's in the stands. mean, Jesus is just the greatest. He also, like I say, shared a lot about his Christian faith. He was an All-Star selection this year, and a reporter at the All-Star game asked him where he puts his identity. He says, in Jesus, because baseball can come and go in a heartbeat, but Jesus is everlasting. He went on to say, when my identity is in Christ, I always know who I am. On the day he was drafted,
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Stuart promised all the fans in Cincinnati, you're gonna get my all. He also thanked Jesus, his Lord and Savior, because without him nothing in my life is possible. So I love that, and those are great, and I love his perspective, and I just hope that he's able to keep that perspective, because we all know the trappings of a big successful life are hard to navigate and stay faithful. It's not saying it can't be done, but it is difficult.
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Good to see him with an opportunity to have his alright that are that he has his head on straight for the all these opportunities that have been opened up to him So really really positive story there Bryce Crawford this kid ought to get You know, ought to start paying taxes for as much airtime as he's getting on our program Because he's a part of the show so much. Well, you know, we had him on just the other day talking with Howie Mandel's on
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his podcast. Then he had JD Vance, the vice president, on Bryce's podcast. Now Bryce is also on Jack Osborne, who is the son of Ozzy Osborne's podcast. Now this one is called Trying Not to Die, and Jack is always very curious, it always has been, about Christianity, he was telling Bryce. They talked a lot about Jesus and what it really means to follow him and what it kind of means not.
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to follow him and what both of those really look like. And Jack made this interesting comment. I want you to hear it. Here's Jack Osborne, the son of Ozzy, on his most recent podcast with Bryce Crawford. It's funny, when anyone kind of asks me about like, oh, know, do you believe in God? you believe in that? You know, what do you believe in? I always say, I 100 % believe in God and I'm Christ curious. That's how I classify myself.
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I like it. Because it's, I'm just, I just have a lot of, I have a lot of struggles with it. And I don't necessarily know, I think where I struggle with that is,
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is a lot of the, some of the miraculous stuff. But as I say that, I go, yeah, but I've seen miracles. I've seen things happen that I can't explain that defy logic that if I were to tell some quantum physicist about what I experienced, he would go, well, actually the reason why that happened and try and science it away. And so maybe I am even contradicting myself in that, but I've yeah, like I've always kind of
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circled around it. I've just never really found the shoe that really correctly fits me. Again, that's Jack Osborne, the son of Ozzy Osborne, on his most recent podcast when he had Bryce Crawford on. I appreciate and am encouraged a little by what he's saying. He's a seeker, and that's great, and I'm thankful for that, and I hope he continues to seek out Jesus and that Jesus would make himself real to him. Those are all prayers that we ought to pray, but
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That last part of that just honestly makes me little queasy because it's always that way with non-believers. They want to find God that fits them and are able to be okay with God the way they want him to be, to fit in their tight box. But the God of the Bible, that's not how he operates. He doesn't operate on your standards.
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you have to come to him on his because after all, he's the God of the universe and you are a mere creation. Yes, you're important. Yes, you're valued, but he is more important and more valued because he has done so much and you have not. And so therefore it's his terms that you have to come to grips with and come to him through not your own. So hopefully Jack Osborne,
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and others that are like him will understand that and submit themselves because that's the hardest part, right? The humbling of ourselves, realizing we can't do it all. We can't come to Him with our goodness. We have to realize that it's His goodness that will be the only thing that makes a difference and will be able to not separate us from God in this life and in the one to come. Speaking of the one to come, Mel Gibson.
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is back talking more about the resurrection of the Christ, the new movie that he'll have out real soon. And he's been talking about just some bits and pieces of what's going to be in the new movie. Like he was talking about the place that's called Sheol or Abraham's bosom, along with Gehenna and the lake of fire. All of that's going to be talked about and shown in this new movie. He says, you're going to see different realms. He said, I mean,
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You'll be in the firmament before the creation, as we're talking about in the early part of Genesis. You'll be in the hell of the just, and then you'll be in the hell of the damned. So it jumps around a little bit, Mel Gibson says. It doesn't just stay on the planet here, it gets around. And then he goes on to say that the movie is going to also have depictions of the fall of the angels and Lucifer and the creation of the world. He said, you've got to have Satan's origin in it.
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I have ideas of how to do that, of how to evoke things to depict that. I've been thinking about it a long time," he says, and I'm going to require, it's going to require a lot of planning and I'm not sure I can pull it all off because it is super ambitious, but I'm going to take a crack at it. It's about trying to find a way that's cheesy or not or obvious, but almost like a magic trick. He said the story is going to go from the fall of the angels to the death of the last apostle.
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and he says the movie should be available coming up in May of next year and will be released in two installments. And again, the first one coming out May 6th of 2027. But based on that first movie, The Passion of the Christ, which is still to me the greatest movie ever made, man, that is amazing stuff. I can't wait to see what's next from Mel Gibson in this new movie. It should be good. Okay, stay with us. We've got more coming up before you know it.
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Here at the Steve Marston show, we're serious about faith, but we love a good dad joke too. The dad joke of the day comes to us from the home office in Sherwood, Arkansas. I told my wife she was drawing her eyebrows too high. She looks surprised.
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You always have to be careful when you approach your wife in those situations though, am I right? Use caution. Urge yourself. Welcome back, it's the Steve Marston Show. Discipleship has never been more fun. And we want to tell you about a chance for you to partner with us. We are in the radio business and in the podcast business. That means we can help you get your business and or church and or ministry.
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word out to a big audience because our audience is all about wanting to be closer to Jesus than they were the day before. That's who we're broadcasting to. That's the people that we're really trying to reach. And if you want to help do that, you can by joining us. And we'd love to be able to partner with you. Whether you're listening on the radio in San Antonio or listening to the radio in Little Rock, we can help you out.
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just let me know, steve at Salemmedia.com. And if you're somewhere other than those two amazing cities, well then that's great too. We can help you get digital or radio marketing or a combination of both out to this vast audience. So just let me know, steve at Salemmedia.com if you'd like to find out more about it.
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It's just a simple email, no strings, no obligations or anything like that. Just steve at Salemmedia.com and I'll tell you something just between you and I and nobody else. Let's just keep this on the down low. It's very inexpensive. Really, really affordable to get your message out to this audience. So just let me know, okay? As we wrap up today, we're gonna finish up learning our verse that we started way back on Monday. It's Faith Between Your Ears.
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And our verse this week is from the book of Micah. Micah chapter 6 verse 8, which is almost at the end of the Old Testament, but it is a really good verse for us to have between our ears because it really breaks down what God expects of us. In fact, it even says that. The Bible verse says, has told you, O man, what is good and what does the Lord require of you? He almost answers the question like, well,
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What did he mean by that? Well, he answers it. What does the Lord require of you? To do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God. It kind of just puts those 10 commandments down to a little pithy saying with three little instructions. So there you go. I hope you've got that memorized. If you haven't, it's not too late. And the final thing we do every day is give you a call to action, your next step.
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I think your next step is again to be on the lookout for your pastor. Make sure that he's not showing any signs of burnout because if he is, that's serious and we want to make sure you nip that in the bud. Am I right? Okay, we are out of time. Thank you so much for being a part of the Steve Marston show. Not only today, but all week long. We really do appreciate you, especially those of you listening on radio. We will be back Tuesday after the holiday at 3 p.m. Hope you'll join us then.
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missed anything or you just want to catch up on some episodes, check out SteveMarsdenShow.com. Till next week, adios!
