Ministry Emergency or Distraction?

It’s Thursday morning.

You’re surrounded by your books, a steaming cup of coffee at the ready, and the Bible opened to the passage you’ll teach this Sunday. You are locked in, absorbed, and the meaning of the passage unfolds before you.

And good thing, too. Because tomorrow you’ve got meetings all day, and Saturday you’re having a funeral. This is the last big chunk of time you’ll have to work on the message before you deliver it on Sunday morning.

Suddenly, knock-knock.

“Pastor, do you have a minute?”

An interruption.

What do you do?

Behind that door might be someone who wants to chat your ear off about something trivial, or it might be someone in a spiritual crisis. That knock at the door is an interruption, but what kind of interruption is it? Is this a distraction or an emergency, and how can you know the difference?

Interruptions Are Part of Ministry

When we look at our Lord’s earthly ministry, we see He faced nearly constant interruptions. Like when Jesus was teaching in a house, a hole in the roof opened, and a paralytic descended from the ceiling (Luke 5:18-19). Or when He was speaking to a crowd, and someone told Him his mother and brothers were standing outside wanting to talk to Him (Matthew 12:46).

Frequently, we see Jesus pivoting on a dime to attend to ministry emergencies, as he did when He paused teaching to heal and forgive the paralytic (Luke 5:20–26). We presume that if we want to be faithful like Jesus, we, too, must acquiesce to every interruption. But we must also remember that Jesus also said no to some interruptions. For example, when His family asked for Him, He did not go along with the interruption but instead went right on teaching (Matthew 12:47–50).

Interruptions are part of ministry—often, they are the best parts! To provide counsel in spiritual crisis, comfort at a hospital bedside, or consolation after a sudden loss, that’s real, in-the-trenches ministry. But these times almost always come as interruptions to your schedule. Still, not every interruption is a ministry emergency. Some interruptions are distractions that keep you from doing the work the Lord has called you to. It takes wisdom to discern the difference.

Emergency or Distraction?

The great time-management challenge pastors face is balancing deep work with people work. Pastors need to focus on studying the Word. This is part of a minister’s duty to rightly handle the Word of Truth (2 Timothy 2:15). But they also recognize the need to be available to people. Learning to discern between emergency and distraction is a necessary skill to strike that appropriate balance of duties.

Though it might sound nice to be the pastor whose door is always open, we all know the chatty Kathy, who will talk your ear off if you let her. Or the bullheaded Bob, who seems to always come at the worst time, wanting to debate the latest theological issue du jour he saw online, even when you are clearly in the middle of something important. If we are honest with ourselves, however, sometimes we invite or indulge these distractions, whether out of fear of man or procrastination. Sometimes, we’d rather have a chat or a debate than do the hard work of sitting down and focusing on today’s priority.

It takes tact to know how to say no to a distraction, but discerning distraction from a true emergency is often easier said than done. Let me offer a framework that might help us distinguish the difference.

Priorities vs. Schedule

To create the focused time necessary to do what God has called him to do, a pastor really should keep a weekly schedule. This helps ensure he attends to his priorities. The trouble is we can be tempted to hold such a schedule too rigidly. Someone bursts in, tears rolling down their face, crying, “What must I do to be saved!?” And we point at the schedule on the wall and say, “Sorry, evangelism isn’t until 2:00.”

Okay, perhaps we wouldn’t be that extreme.

But if we become too fixated on the schedule, we can miss divine appointments. So, how do we keep a schedule but not let it blind us to true ministry emergencies? The trick is not to conflate our schedule with our priorities. They are not the same thing. An emergency is just an unplanned priority, whereas an interruption is a diversion from your priorities.

Our priorities are that invisible set of values by which we judge the relative importance of opportunities. A schedule, on the other hand, is simply the plan we’ve created for how we will invest our time. Ideally, we should be mapping our priorities to our schedule. But as we don’t know what the day will hold, we must also be ready to abandon the schedule if an urgent, higher priority interrupts us. In His providence, sometimes the Lord brings the most important things to the top of our list, whether we have scheduled for them or not.

We want to be flexible with our schedules but rigid with our priorities. Remembering this can help us more quickly and joyfully discern when to abandon the schedule and when to hold fast to it in the face of interruption.

In ministry, interruptions are inevitable. So, let’s ask God to give us the wisdom to recognize the true emergencies and the discipline to ignore distractions.

©2024 Reagan Rose. Used with permission.