Hello world. This is my first post on my first blog. Just as the title says, this blog has everything to do with a three month sabbatical I will take in 2011, or to be more exact, May 8, 2011-August 13, 2011. With many words of support and encouragement, the First Baptist Church of Springfield agreed to a sabbatical policy even before I moved into the church and city. This was reflective of the kind of mutual trust, support and love that permeates this church.
The only difficulty mentioned was the cost, especially the cost of an interim pastor while I was out and about learning and being renewed. Given the tough economic times we are all facing, this was and is a realistic concern. However, what if we could find a grant to underwrite the sabbatical? We discovered two sources of such grants, the Lilly Endowment and the Louisville Foundation. Well, to shorten a long story, we wrote an application for the Lilly Endowment's Clergy Renewal Program and won! This was an extremely competitive process and the church and I wrote an exciting proposal. And now we have begun to create and implement a dynamic plan for both pastor and church.
Before I say more about this plan, I'd like to view this sabbatical from the perspective of my only other sabbatical. This sabbatical was taken during the summer of 1988 while I was pastor of the First Baptist Church of Littleton, MA Church's like FBC Littleton never offered their pastor's sabbaticals. It was extremely rare for any church to grant a sabbatical. But what if ours is a profession that requires expanded times for learning and renewal? What if burn out is always a possibility? What if a pastor who is taking care of a church absolutely needs a church that is taking care of a pastor? I asked about a sabbatical. The Pastoral Relations Committee wrote a sabbatical policy. The church held informal meetings to discuss the policy and then finally an official meeting to vote. By the time we got to the vote almost everyone supported the decision to create a sabbatical policy. Having been at the church for far longer than the required 5 years, I immediately scheduled the sabbatical. We had very little money but that did not seem to hinder our planning in the least. We had a family homestead where we could stay for the summer and I had enough money to attend two conferences. The rest of the time I focused on learning woodworking skills and on spiritual formation and hospitality. What an awesome summer! My life and ministry were expanded and deepened. It was a time of healing and discovery. From everything I heard, the church also had a wonderful summer. (AND, I know of at least two other pastors at the First Baptist Church of Littleton who have had sabbaticals because of the ground breaking work done in 1988.)
How much more valuable could a sabbatical be if both the church and the pastor had plenty of resources and a common vision? What if the major learning goals of the sabbatical were both the church's and the pastor's goals? What if, for example, the pastor was to spend ten days learning about ministries of other churches to the diversity of their cities while the church was following its own plan to learn about the same things? What if the church and the pastor decided on various ways to keep communicating during the sabbatical and then followed through on those decisions? It was exactly that kind of plan and such goals that the Lilly Endowment required from us in order to win the sabbatical grant.
