How’s Your Rhythm?

by Robert Turner

No doubt many of you reading this are anticipating being in the thick of a seemingly endless lineup of activities and events designed to help you meet as many new students as you can as the new year begins.

I won’t debate the merits of such a work ethic. Just as is true for an accountant in April or Santa in December, the first few weeks of the new school year for a campus minister is a time of intense focus, as so much of the year depends on how those first few weeks go. It’s a foundational assumption in our ministry that if you miss out here you will be paying the price for the next nine months, for sure.

But if the 24/7 rush of the first few weeks becomes fixed as your pattern of ministry, problems are sure to arise. At the least, you can find yourself in a permanent ADD state, less “present” for your students, and at worst, flame out like a Roman candle, neither one a desirable state for effective ministry.

Last fall our campus ministry team here in Pennsylvania/South Jersey met for a 24-hour training retreat. During the retreat, I asked them to make a graph of their year, beginning with August and listing the other months through July from left to right. Then on the left they made a vertical line with 10 at the top, indicating the highest intensity, and 1 at the bottom, for the lowest intensity. A horizontal line was drawn across the year indicating the mid-point, or a “normal” pattern of work, representing equilibrium between intensity and rest. I then asked them to indicate on the graph the major events, choke points, and accompanying times of rest, vacation, and planned family experiences. They then were to connect the dots and look at what emerged.

The result, for some, was revelatory. Some saw that they had far more dots above the midpoint than below, while others saw a fairly continuous line from intensity to intensity, with few times below the line in between. For almost all, it was the first time they had taken a 40,000-foot view of their entire year in such fashion.

I would encourage you to take a few minutes and do this yourself. It doesn’t need to take a lot of time and certainly doesn’t require scientific accuracy to be of value. Just be honest with yourself in graphing your workload for the year. You might find some similar revelations.

Life is based on natural rhythms that are built into the way nature works. Day is followed by night, summer is followed by fall and winter, and work is followed by rest. God himself established this in the creation account in Genesis.

Sometimes we feel that the nature of our mission requires an exception to this rule of life. There’s just so many people who need Jesus, we tell ourselves, that we just cannot slow down until everyone is reached. Because there are always those who are not reached, we never find rest. And thus we violate the pattern that God has established in creation.

I am not arguing against working hard! Most campus ministers I know work very hard, myself included. We feel passionately called to our ministry and deeply committed to the salvation and spiritual development of our students. What I am arguing is that keeping a proper balance of work and recovery actually aids in the living out of our calling. Let me explain.

A few years ago I ran in the Philadelphia Marathon, an ambitious goal requiring intense preparation over several months. The keys to success included regular runs throughout the week, paired with a weekly long run of increasing length on the weekend. These had to be accomplished in order to keep moving forward. But a third key, and one of equal importance, was that I had to have planned days of rest interspersed in the midst of the training. Otherwise I would have certainly experienced injury due to overuse and breakdown of my body, as I was asking it to do far more than I ever had.

But in addition to avoiding injury, there was another principle at work, that of regeneration. It turns out that when we lift weights or perform intense cardiovascular exercise, we in essence tear our muscle fibers, and break our bodies down. Not so good. But it is in the times of rest and downtime that those muscle fibers rebuild themselves and do so in a stronger fashion. Every weightlifter knows that you never exercise the same muscle two days in a row, because that day of rest is absolutely necessary. The principle is that in the downtimes, we grow stronger!

For one of my campus ministers in particular, this was the “Ah-ha!” moment of our retreat. Finding the balance of downtime was not laziness or lack of commitment; it actually could make him more fit for the work God had called him to do.

When I was on the campus, I went through that same several weeks of craziness that you will go through. And guess what–now that we had gathered all of these students into our ministry, we needed to do things with them! Our work had only begun! But even with that, I knew that if I didn’t find a way to pull back for a period, I would be no good for them. That’s why Brenda and I almost always found a time in mid-October, right in the middle of the school year, when we left the kids with grandparents and got away for an extended weekend. We needed it, and my students had a refreshed and renewed campus minister as a result.

Downtime doesn’t have to mean doing nothing. You can be totally intentional in how you approach it. It certainly should involve time to listen to God’s voice and deepen your relationship with him. But it can also involve recreation, or re-creation, as I like to view it. It can take on the form of a hobby, or reading. Or loving on your spouse, or hugging your kids. Or getting away and going on a retreat. Whatever works for you. Just as long as it allows for regeneration to take place.

So I encourage you to take a moment and do that graph. And as you see the high points and intense times, be sure that you intentionally insert some times of recovery and regeneration in between. You’ll have to learn to say “no,” so get brutal and dig your heels in if you must. I guarantee you it will be worth the effort. E-mail me at robert@robertturner.net and let me know how it’s working for you.


Robert Turner is the Director of Collegiate Ministries for the Baptist Convention of Pennsylvania/South Jersey, and also serves in a contract role as the national Emerging Regions Consultant for National Collegiate Ministries at LifeWay.