Guarding Your Time

Yesterday I had a coffee time with Dave Bruskas , pastor at City on a Hill Church here in Albuquerque, we were discussing managing our time with church ministry and family ministry. He pointed me to what Dr. John Piper does and implements in his church for the staff at Bethlelhem Church in Minnesota.

John Piper's model is great way to guard time and to help ensure that his family as his first ministry does not play second fiddle to his church ministry. This model really helped me and I hope to implement it starting today. Working at a church I have noticed 2 ditches we can fall in, 1. is the ditch of overwork, where we do not trust God and our pride takes over in thinking we have to do absolutely everything; and 2. where there is laziness and sloth in how we approach our job, where we treat ministry as a 40 hour work week and anymore is considered overtime and not acceptable. I think I fall into the sin of the first one. I hope his fence of time guarding proves to be helpful and good for my family. You can download this installment of "Ask Pastor John" here.

Here is his summary of the model he uses:

"One of the things we do at Bethlehem to try to protect our families and to nurture our wives and make them feel cared for is divide the week up into twenty-one blocks of time (modules). We get that by identifying three modules a day—morning to lunch, lunch to supper, and supper to bedtime—for the seven days of the week.

Then we tell our staff to take seven of those modules off. And three of them have to be in a row, equaling at least one full day off. So you have a day off and then four more modules to work with. It could be four evenings. And if you have to be out in the evenings, then you don't come in in the mornings."