All We Have Is Time

Being busy about being unbusy

Early in my Christian life my Methodist pastor, the Reverend Russell B. Foote, called me, a teenager, to see how I was doing. He’d heard reports of some distress, and in a fifteen minute phone call left a lasting impression of what pastoral discipleship and care was all about.

Reverend Foote’s colleague across town, Lutheran pastor Thomas Stroeh opened his church every Thursday morning at 6AM so that I and my high school friends could gather, eat donuts, and practice being Christian. I never attended his church and never heard him preach, but he was there, a quiet presence modeling Christianity for a bunch of kids.

The preaching of Baptist-leaning pastor Willard Michael changed my whole orientation toward the pulpit when I came to his church as a college sophomore. But it was his open house and his genuine interest in me as a person that taught me what Christian hospitality could be and do.

And I don’t remember any of the texts on which Presbyterian pastor George Stulac preached during my years in his church. I remember vividly, however, the verse of Scripture¹ he spoke gently to me at a corner table when I, a confused seminarian, needed some clarity.

I am who I am because of the faithful presence of pastors like these who despite their differing denominational labels practiced a particular kind of pastoral vision. They spent time with God and spent time with people. Time is what they had to give and they gave some of it to me.

Years later when I was asked to articulate my strategy for discipleship, I wasn’t sure I had a “strategy” as such. I meet with people. Mostly I have no script or agenda. My job is to listen so as to understand what’s important in their lives and to hear the questions they’re asking. At the same time, for better or for worse, I’m modeling my own vision for the Christian life in front of them. I’ve fallen into this largely by my experience of those who breathed such care into my life. And though I often leave such meetings wondering if anything at all was accomplished, I’m reminded how God used many such interactions to shape me.

My “method” is therefore pretty unmethodical. It’s slow and unstructured. Its results are often invisible and unmeasurable. And it’s time consuming.

An aspiring pastor recently thanked me profusely for letting him “consume” some of my time. It occurred to me then that the only thing I, or any of us, have to give is our time. People can find much better sermons than mine on the internet. They can, thanks to COVID inspired live streams, stay home and “attend” a church in another city, state, or country if they want. But our time they can only get from us.

Ministry is something that cannot be outsourced. Thomas Friedman in his book on the world’s changing global economy, The World Is Flat, argues that there are certain industries that cannot but be local. My leaky faucet cannot be fixed in China. I can’t have my afternoon latte shipped in from Jakarta. Similarly, that cool pastor from Cincinnati is not going to sit down with someone in Houston to see how his marriage or job or even his fantasy football team is doing. Ministry cannot be outsourced. It always has been and always will be inefficiently local.²

I’ve railed often about our American idolization of efficiency. So why do I read books on getting stuff done? Is it hypocritical that I have task lists for everything, that I have software that will cut off the distractions of the internet when necessary, or that I frequently calculate how to get the most things to the breakfast table in the fewest number of trips? I’m obsessively committed to a certain kind of efficiency because to be efficient in the business of running the church frees pastors to be inefficient with people. We’re to be busy about our stuff so we can be unbusy for those who need us. All we have to give is time. And time is the thing people need.

A pastor I know works hard at his preaching, as he should. But his greatest impact comes from the dozens of broken kids who wander through his very open and very safe front door and have dinner around his table on a weekly basis. He’s generous with this treasure of his, his time, and there are kids whose lives will be changed by that.

All we have to give is time. And that is a precious gift.

That Jesus preached to thousands is not unimportant. But neither is it unimportant that the world was transformed by the ones he ate dinner with and those whose feet he washed. His time was short, but what time he had to give, he gave to them.

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1. Jesus’ words from John 15:7: “Apart from me, you can do nothing.”

2. I know that Zoom and other apps has now made it possible to have transnational relationships. I continue relationships across time zones in this way, but I cannot say that I’ve ever developed a relationship very well in this way. Ministry in a digital age is still best practiced locally.