SPE Program Spotlight
Sabbath Rest Gives Urban Pastors New Life for Ministry
With all their cultural and social amenities, from theaters and concerts to fine restaurants and stores, cities can be exciting places to live. But they can also be tough places to live—and even tougher places to be a pastor, says Bryan Stone, director of the Sustaining Urban Pastoral Excellence program at Boston University School of Theology.
The concentrated humanity that makes a city a city also brings concentrated human need, he says. Crime, poverty, homelessness, racial and ethnic tensions and other societal ills exist everywhere, but they can be a particularly prominent part of the urban landscape.
“There is intense human need in urban areas that is laid at the door of the church and which, in turn, places intense demands on pastors,” says Stone, who also co-directs the school’s Center for Practical Theology. “Every pastor thinks he or she has a lot of demands placed upon them, but urban living can present enormous challenges for pastors and their competencies.”
Thanks to the Sustaining Urban Pastoral Excellence program, however, select groups of pastors from cities across the nation are finding a powerful antidote to the pressures of urban ministry. Amidst the noise and busyness of the city, they are finding new life and vigor for ministry in the quiet and peace of sabbatical and Sabbath rest.
For the Rev. Lewis Nicholson, pastor of First Community Church, a non-denominational African-American congregation in Newport News, Va., the Boston SPE program was revolutionary, completely changing his life and ministry.
“It’s like it says in Joel 2:25,” says Nicholson. “‘And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.’”
Under the Boston program, partnerships of four pastors, all of whom must live in the same city, commit to meet as a peer group for six months, jointly study a question or issue of their choosing, and take a sabbatical of four to eight weeks. Theological reflection on Sabbath rest and other spiritual practices are interwoven throughout the program.
Since it began in 2003, 96 pastors from 19 cities across the United States have taken part in the project. Men and women, black, white, and Latino, they represent 16 different denominations and live in cities large, medium and small, from New York and Los Angeles to Baltimore and Birmingham, Ala., from Seattle and Portland, Ore., to Chattanooga, Tenn., and Bangor, Maine.
Looking back, Nicholson now realizes that for more than 20 years, he was being slowly consumed by the burdens of pastoral ministry. A “recovering workaholic,” Nicholson had worked every day, seven days a week, at his previous church in Newport News, overseeing its worship life, launching several large and successful community development programs, and serving on the city’s housing authority board and a half dozen or so other community boards and commissions. In the process, he says, his wife and family were always a second priority. Eventually, his marriage crumbled and ended in divorce.
Leaving that church after his divorce, Nicholson started over in ministry, organizing First Community in October 2003. Not long after, he and three colleagues—all African American pastors from various black church traditions—applied to the Boston program, choosing clergy divorce as the subject of their study question. Two of the pastors had been through divorce and two had not, but all wanted to learn more about it and the toll that pastoral ministry can take on a marriage. Clergy divorce can be a taboo subject—especially for African-American clergy—says Nicholson, but he was determined to study and understand it.
“I had gone through a divorce that had left me shaken and torn and I needed to rework myself spiritually,” says Nicholson. “I wanted to talk about what I went through and how I felt and what it takes to recover.”
For six months, the pastors studied clergy divorce, even surveying more than 6,000 pastors who attended the annual Hampton University Ministers’ Conference in Hampton, Va. Of those who responded, most reported spending very little time with their spouses and families, says Nicholson.
“The fact that pastors’ families suffer and that pastors are not spending time with their spouse on a regular basis and communicating with one another, we believe are major causes of clergy divorce,” says Nicholson.
The research on divorce was eye-opening for Nicholson, but he found real healing when he learned about the importance of Sabbath. When his group went to the Boston University campus for an orientation session, the program’s associate director, Claire Wolfteich, spoke to them about sabbaticals and Sabbath as a spiritual practice.
Nicholson had never heard anything like it. In 28 years as a pastor, he had never been on a sabbatical or a break of any kind and had never thought about the practice of Sabbath.
“In the black church, we don’t celebrate Sabbath per se,” he says. “For us, Sabbath is Sunday when we go to church and get sweaty. The notion of Sabbath as rest, as recreation, as recollecting yourself was unknown to me. It was completely revolutionary to me.”
Nicholson poured himself into learning about Sabbath as a spiritual practice. He studied about and began practicing lectio divina, meditation and contemplative prayer, and he changed his entire approach to ministry.
“I began to receive what I consider to be more revelations from God about things around me because I became closer to Him and nature, to my fellow human beings and to myself,” he says. “I found out that there is a whole lot I don’t know about anything.”
Today, in his new family (he has remarried) and in his new church, Nicholson regularly practices Sabbath. In addition to taking every Friday off to spend time with his wife and family, he makes sure he practices at least a little Sabbath daily.
“Every day, I take some time to do nothing,” he says. “I’m learning to pray the Scriptures and I set aside 15 minutes to an hour every day to just pray and reflect and meditate on the word of God.”
Nicholson has also taught his congregation about the importance of Sabbath and they too are taking up the practice. At first, Nicholson says, church members found his talk about Sabbath strange, but they followed his advice to turn off the television and the computer, remove their watches, and sit quietly or take a walk.
“I was so excited about this newfound knowledge that it was infectious,” he says. “At first, they looked at me like I was weird but then they decided that ‘If it’s this important to him and it’s done this for him then maybe we need to try it.’”
The Urban Pastoral Excellence program’s emphasis on Sabbatical and Sabbath rest has clearly resonated with pastors, says Stone. That and the peer group support are repeatedly cited by participants as the most important and transformative aspects of their SPE experience.
The task of studying a question or issue together has also been useful, Stone says, both for the new insights pastors gain but even more for simply giving the pastors an excuse to get together and work in partnership. While Nicholson’s group studied the subject of divorce, most participants have investigated issues more directly related to urban ministry, such as how to understand changing demographics in the inner city.
The study subjects have been as varied as the pastor peer groups themselves, says Stone. A group of pastors in El Paso focused on how to develop a more active prayer life amidst the busyness of city life. Pastors from peace churches in Chicago looked at how to be an instrument of peace with the context of urban violence. In New York, four Moravian pastors studied financial, educational and other issues facing immigrant communities.
In Boston, four women pastors from various denominations decided to learn about trauma and how to minister to those who have been its victims. Here too, the notions of Sabbath and rest were integral to their work. All pastors of inner-city churches, the four women serve congregations with several members who are poor, homeless, mentally ill, or who otherwise experience trauma in their daily lives. As part of their research, they also studied the secondary trauma that pastors experience ministering to disenfranchised populations, and what it means to practice Sabbath and, in turn, pass it on to others.
The Rev. Lorraine Anderson, pastor of International Community Church in Boston, said she and the other three pastors quickly learned that they had to experience Sabbath deeply in their own lives if they were to have any chance of passing it on to others.
“We wanted to know how we as pastors can be midwives of God’s Sabbath rest in communities where people are exposed to various forms of trauma,” she says. “We found that unless we are rested deeply and not just in a superficial way, unless we are experiencing Sabbath rest in our own lives as pastors, then there is no way we can pass it on.”
Like Nicholson, Anderson had not thought much about Sabbath and sabbaticals before her SPE experience. Believing they were remedies for pastors on the verge of burnout, she thought she probably didn’t qualify for the SPE program when her colleagues approached her about applying with them.
“I thought you had to be burned out to go on sabbatical and I wasn’t at all,” she says. “But as I learned more about sabbaticals and Sabbath rest, I saw I needed it a lot more than I had realized.”
For her sabbatical, Anderson spent about a month relaxing with family members and a month in the Alps, including three weeks at Schloss Mittersill, a Christian retreat center in Austria. Going from inner-city Boston to the Alps was an extraordinary experience, she says. All four members of her group found it essential to remove themselves completely from their normal environment. In her month in the Alps, she hiked and took part in the community life of the retreat center, but mostly she focused on “resting in the Lord.”
“I worked real hard at being focused on the present moment and on God’s presence in every moment,” she says. “I approached every day as a Sabbath day and did only those things that came out of a sense of resting in the Lord.”
Since returning to Boston at the end of August, Anderson has continued her Sabbath practices, approaching every day at a Sabbath pace. She’s also teaching her congregation about the practice of Sabbath, about breathing deeply, slowing down, and resting.
“I tell them that it’s not about just taking a long nap, or a super duper vacation, though that is a piece of it,” she says. “But it’s intentionally taking a walk in the Boston Commons and inviting Jesus to go on that walk with you and talk things over and letting him put his arms around your shoulders. It’s about having a prayerful imagination.”
The regular practice of Sabbath, both in small pieces and extended periods of time, is essential for pastoral ministry, says Anderson. “We all need a little bit of Sabbath every day, a day of Sabbath every week, and a good chunk of time every so many years.”
