Video for September 25th, 2025
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video.
Elon Musk once said, “no-one will change the world working 40 hours per week”. He works 80 hours per week on average and peaks at 100!” We may admire his capacity, although the relational carnage in the wake of that life isn’t pretty. But we may want to dispute his statistics. There is substantial evidence that working ridiculously long hours doesn’t actually achieve a great deal more. Research from the World Economic Forum noted that productivity peaks at around 48 hours per week, and this is likely to be less in intellectually demanding, self-directed professions. John Pencavel, an economist at Stanford University found that productivity declined sharply beyond 50 hours. After 55 hours per week the drop off is so steep that additional hours yielded no extra output. Workers logging 70 hours per week did no more work than those working 55! Not only that but working more than 55 hours a week increased stroke risk by 35% and heart disease mortality by 17%.
This week I’ve been speaking at the St.Luke’s clergy wellbeing conference in Birmingham. Clergy, like many professional people are prone to overwork. Part of this is living up to the unrealistic expectations of others. I once did an exercise with my PCC in which I invited them to list all the things they expected their vicar to do with the likely time expenditure. They were surprised when the total came to over 100 hours per week. Clearly this was beyond the capacity of even Elon Musk and I’m not sure you’d want him as your vicar! It was the starting point for a very helpful conversation about shared ministry which I think bore fruit in an expansion of ministry and fruitful growth far beyond what one person could have achieved on their own. I would encourage all the parishes and benefices in our diocese to do something similar. I hear too often of parishes using phrases like ‘not getting good service for what they pay for’, which seems to me a catastrophic missing the point about what church life is meant to be. Many of us have memories of a rosier time when there were far more clergy available. I’m afraid those times have gone.
I don’t raise these points from a place of laziness. I find the statistics quite sobering, particularly as I regularly work in excess of the recommended limit. Compared to some of my episcopal colleagues, I sometimes feel a bit of a slacker. There is a sense in which the call to ministry involves sacrifice. But clergy are disciples with family responsibilities which come first. Jesus was not afraid of hard work, but he adopted a rhythm of life that was written into the fabric of creation for our wellbeing. In the Genesis story God ‘worked’ for six days and rested on the seventh. Modern western timekeeping measures a day from midnight to midnight. In Jewish households the new day starts at 6 in the evening. It fosters a mind set where you work from rest, rather than rest from work. The idea of sabbath is to release us from a sense of our own indispensability. This, coupled with our baptismal vocation where we hear the words over Jesus to us, “you are my child, the beloved, in you I am well pleased”, gives us as Christians a deep sense of identity, security and purpose. The internal discordant voices to this are many and varied. Legalism is a nasty distortion of the Gospel of God’s unmerited grace. It says we are only loved by God if we do well. Love becomes dependent on performance. It is a feature of a moralism that masquerades as Christian faith. Perfectionism is another voice whose goal is to convince us that we are only acceptable if we gain the love of others. Taken together these can create an unhealthy drivenness where we become our own worst enemy. They are patterns that will never be satisfied because we can never do enough to please them.
One of my clients when I was an agronomist was a committed Christian. Rain or shine he and all his workforce would always take a sabbath day off. Much to the annoyance of his neighbours, he always finished his harvest first. People made less mistakes, machinery had fewer breakdowns and work in the other 6 days was more efficient. Our faith encourages us to work hard and even sacrificially, but within the rhythms of creation God has set for our own good. What might that look for all of us in the life of our churches and communities?
+Richard