Many pastors express feeling overextended, emotionally drained and are one more phone call away from burnout.
Craig Smith, our lead pastor at Mission Hills Church, wants to share his insights and practical framework for understanding margin, healthy rhythms of leadership and proactive ways to prevent burnout.
You may think that margin is a Sabbath, reserved for non-staff members who are able to rest from work on Sundays. And you may think that margin is reserved for a Sabbatical that comes for staff members once every several years, providing the opportunity to fully unplug, only to return to a pile of unread emails and issues in the community.
We’re here to offer a different perspective: Your margin is as necessary to your leadership as a shock absorber is to your car.
What Margin Really Is
In the same way a shock absorber provides extra space under your car – keeping the body of your car above the pavement when you hit a bump – the margin in your life is intentionally designed to cushion you from life’s expected and unexpected bumps.
Without a shock absorber on your car, your muffler might rip off when you hit uneven pavement.
Without margin in your life, your words, emotions and presence are negatively impacted.
“I can tell when I don’t have enough margin because of the things that are coming out of my mouth. The muffler is gone,” Craig quips.
And with this perspective, we can see that margin isn’t a nice-to-have, every-7-years, optional thing. It’s vital. It protects your integrity, relationships and your ministry when you navigate the daily pressures in your role as pastor.
“Margin is the extra space between what’s available to you and what’s required of you,” Craig says.
Why Leaders Need More Margin Than They Think
Where most pastors go wrong is assuming that because they’re in ministry with people in their care, they can’t afford to give themselves margin in the form of balancing workloads, delegating what they can and prioritizing time for rest.
The heavy weight of leadership makes margin even more essential. And this weight goes beyond the day-to-day pressures and “speed bumps” of managing people and navigating conflicts from an institutional level of leadership. A pastor is carrying the emotional and spiritual weight of their community’s crises and expectations.
“Because you carry greater weight, you have to be more intentional than they are about pushing that weight off and doing what you need to do to get margin back in your life,” Craig says.
Pastors carry this weight differently and need to be proactive and intentional about creating and protecting their margin.
The Goal is Rhythm, Not Balance
Everyone talks about work/life balance, but the reality is this never stays balanced. And trying to white-knuckle balance in this constantly evolving landscape will leave you feeling fragile and drained.
“Balance is about getting everything piled up in just the right way and then praying to God that nothing comes along and jostles it,” Craig says.
He continues, “I don’t think God calls us to balance. I do think He calls us to rhythm.”
Rhythms can flow and adjust from season to season, offering a sustainable pace and structure for life and leadership. And with the intentional flexibility, you are able to withstand seasons with bigger bumps and ride comfortably during seasons with a smooth road ahead.
How to Create More Margin
Now, this all sounds great, but do we do it? To create margin, there are two main levers to pull:
1. You can increase what’s available
Like the shock absorbers under your car, you can increase your capacity to withstand bumps. You can do this in your life by building healthy rhythms, developing emotional resiliency and deepening your spiritual reserves. When you are centered and can maintain margin within yourself, you will withstand the chaotic feelings of burnout.
2. You can decrease what’s required
The heavy weight of the car puts increased strain on the shock absorbers. Likewise, the heavy weight of your leadership increases the strain on you personally. So to create more margin, you can be selective about commitments or requests. When you feel like you’re overloaded or approaching a season that is too chaotic and your margin thins, being selective can help decrease your involvement and you can also delegate tasks that aren’t essential to you to others so you know they are still taken care of.
This decrease provides two benefits – one it literally helps take things off your plate, creating the margin you need to serve yourself and others better. And it also serves an emotional purpose: when you trust others with some of your tasks or allow other people to provide help and assistance, you are showing them (and yourself) that it doesn’t all depend on you. This can be an incredibly healthy emotional experience for pastors accustomed to handling everything.
To know what to delegate, Craig encourages you to “Find something you enjoy enough that you look up and go, how did that much time pass?”
Recognize the Warning Signs
“Every strength casts a shadow,” Craig shares. “When there’s a lack of margin, the shadow side of your strength tends to assert itself.”
It’s often difficult to recognize that you’re in a season with no margin because no one intends to be living on the edge. But you’ll know you’re there when you see your shadow side leak out.
Craig shares that when he is under stress, his strengths of introversion and analytical thinking become liabilities. He starts withdrawing from others and overthinking what was previously a relatively innocuous decision. Those are the warning signals that his margin is thinning.
“If you’re not living with margin, and you take three months off, that might start to heal you—but re-entering the life that broke you might break you again.”
Build Systems That Protect Margin
Margin doesn’t just happen. You have to intentionally place it on your calendar and guard that time. For the development and health of those around you, you also must model it for others.
It doesn’t come naturally for pastors to say “no” or to delegate. They want to serve and give and be part of their church communities. But you will burn out if you don’t schedule time to think, proactively manage your workload and develop a culture around what is mission-critical.
Leading With Margin Isn’t Selfish, It’s Leadership
Margin is for you, designed to protect you from life’s bumps – both unexpected and those you know are coming. And when you create it and protect it, you create beautiful momentum for everyone around you.
So as you consider how to apply these concepts to your life and leadership, we invite you to sit with these final thoughts:
- List things that refresh you.
- List the things that drain you and consider reducing the amount of time you spend doing those things.
- Reflect on your shadow side. What are signs it has emerged? Are there signs that your limit is approaching before your shadow side shows?
You don’t have to figure it all out today. Simply practice the small steps philosophy – take small steps in the same direction to take you places you never thought possible when you started.
If this was helpful and you’d like to connect with Craig Smith to discuss this more, you may reach him at casmith@missionhills.org
