Working One Day a Week - MONDAY

The age old joke about us pastors is that we only work one day a week - SUNDAY! I'm sure that none of you really believe that but I bet if I were to ask you what your pastor does any other day but Sunday you may not be real sure. So I thought I would take this week of blog postings and share with you a typical week in my life as the Lead Pastor at the Evangelical Free Church in Gaylord, Michigan.

If you are not part of E-Free here in Gaylord, it may help you to understand a bit more what your pastor does day by day. If you do attend E-Free, hopefully it will give you a better idea of how to pray for me as your pastor on any given day. Obviously, these postings won't include everything as schedules can change instantly and without warning in church work. But it will give you a general idea. Let me begin with my typical Monday.

I try to get in the office on Monday mornings by 7:30am so that I can have my first 90 minutes of the week for some personal time with the Lord followed by getting caught up on emails and making my ministry "to do" list for the week.

Beginning at 9am the rest of the morning through early afternoon is reserved for staff time. We begin at 9am with a staff prayer time in which all of our ministry and support staff meet together. I start by sharing a quick thought from Scripture and then we share praises from the previous week and then we share prayer requests dealing with our own personal lives, our ministry and our church family. Following that our ministry staff meet at 10:30 for our weekly staff meeting. We use this 90 minutes to work through ministry logistics and I usually use part of this time for some training and vision casting with our staff. Then, at noon each Monday our entire staff spend the first hour of the afternoon eating lunch together.

Monday afternoon is reserved solely for study. I try my nest to stay ahead in my study so Monday afternoon's time is mainly used to finalize my preaching notes; the bulletin notes; the Power Point slides for the message; and the Digging Deeper questions that we put into the bulletin each week to encourage our church family to take Sunday's message further in their own study in the Word during the week.

Monday night is always a meeting night. The first Monday evening each week is our Elder Board meeting in which we conduct our business. The third Monday of each month the Elder Board meets again but this is reserved for an extended prayer time. The second and fourth Monday evenings I am part of our church Leadership Team meetings. The Elder Board is responsible for the vision and spiritual oversight of the church. The Leadership Team is responsible for the management of the church and its many ministry teams. I am part of both of these teams.