Small Church Pastor Schedule: Where the Hours Actually Go

A small church pastor's week rarely goes where the plan says it will. The big commitments are easy to see. The hours disappear into small, unplanned pieces, like the call about the furnace or the bulletin typo. You cannot fix a week you have only estimated. Log one real week first.

Before you buy a planner or promise your spouse that next week will be different, find out what this week actually was.

How many hours do pastors actually work?

In a LifeWay Research phone survey of 1,002 Protestant pastors, taken in October 2008, 65 percent said they work 50 or more hours a week. Eight percent said 70 or more. Among full-time senior pastors, the median was 55 hours.

The same survey asked how those hours were spent. Half of the pastors said they spend five to 14 hours a week on sermon preparation. More than 70 percent spend up to five hours in meetings. Half spend two to six hours on email and other electronic correspondence, and 14 percent spend ten hours or more on it. Nearly half spend two to five hours a week visiting people.

Those are self-reported numbers from 2008, and a lot has changed since, so treat them as a rough picture. Even so, the picture was a long week split across many kinds of work.

Why does a small church pastor's week never go as planned?

The week rarely goes as planned because, in a small church, you are often the person unplanned needs come to. A larger church may have an office manager, a facilities person, a youth pastor, and someone who runs the slides. In a small church, many of those jobs land on you, or on you and two faithful volunteers.

None of those jobs is big on its own, and that is what makes them hard to plan for. A big job shows up on your calendar, so you plan around it. A small one shows up in your phone at 9:40 on a Tuesday morning, takes twenty minutes, and leaves no trace. By Thursday you may have done dozens of them. You remember the week as busy, and you cannot say with what.

Many of the small jobs are ministry. Say a widow in your church calls about the furnace. She may also be calling because she is alone. But when every small job gets done the moment it arrives, the work that needs long, quiet stretches gets whatever is left over. Often, that work is the sermon.

Where does sermon prep time go?

Sermon prep time goes to the gaps, and the gaps get smaller as the week fills. You meant to have Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. Say Tuesday morning became a funeral call and an email thread about the parking lot. Wednesday morning you studied for forty minutes before the phone rang.

If your week runs like that, the real prep happens Friday night or Saturday, after the house is quiet. The sermon gets written in the hours that were supposed to be your rest. Then Monday feels heavier than it should, and the cycle starts again. If that Monday weight sounds familiar, here is a piece on the Monday low after preaching.

You probably know this already. What you may not know is how many hours it is, or exactly which things are taking them. A log will tell you.

How do you log a week as a pastor?

You log a week by writing down what you did every half hour, for one ordinary week, as close to when it happened as you can. You are measuring, not fixing.

1. Pick an ordinary week. Not Holy Week, not the week of a big funeral. A week you would call normal.
2. Use paper or a simple note on your phone. Draw a line for every half hour you are awake.
3. Write down what you actually did in each block. "Sermon study" counts only if you studied. If you opened the commentary and then answered texts for twenty-five minutes, write "texts."
4. Mark the interruptions. A small tick next to any block where something unplanned broke in.
5. Fill in the log at least three times a day. Memory tidies up the week. The log should not.
6. On the last day, add it up by kind of work: study, people, meetings, admin, building, email and texts, travel, rest.

One week is enough to see the shape. Do it again in a few months if you want to know whether anything changed.

What should you do with what you find?

Read the log before you decide anything, and read it with one question: which hours did I mean to give to one thing and give to another? Those are the hours to look at first.

Some of what you find may be good news. You may be spending more time with people than you thought, and that may be exactly right for your church. Some of it may surprise you. One category might be much larger than you guessed, like messages, or the building.

Then make one change. If the log shows the sermon getting the leftover hours, here is the change I would argue for first: guard the sermon hours. Pick two blocks a week, put them on the calendar, and tell your leaders when they are. Turn the phone face down for those blocks. Let the minor jobs wait until the block is over, unless someone is in real need.

This is a choice, and you get to make it. You know your congregation. Some seasons call for more time with people and less with books. But the sermon is the one piece of work that reaches every person in your church on the same morning. If it is always getting the leftover hours, that is worth knowing, and worth deciding on purpose.

Is it wrong for a pastor to protect time?

No. Luke records that as word about Jesus spread, “great crowds came to hear Him and to be healed of their sicknesses” (Luke 5:15, BSB). The next line is “Yet He frequently withdrew to the wilderness to pray” (Luke 5:16, BSB). Luke does not explain the choice. He only shows that real needs did not keep Jesus from going away to pray, again and again. That is a passage about prayer, and it is worth reading for that before anything else. But it does show that stepping away while people still want you is not, by itself, a failure of love.

You will still be interrupted. Some interruptions are the work God has for you that day. A log will not tell you which ones those are. It will show you where the hours went. What you do with them is yours to decide, with God and with your leaders.