The Myth of the Slow Season-Caffeinated Church

by Ashley Graham-Wilcox

My son's last day of school is coming up, and within a few hours we'll be on the road.

By the next morning, if all goes according to plan, he'll be floating in a lazy river somewhere outside of Las Vegas while I spend four hours in Zoom meetings. Then we'll point the car toward Zion. There will be a stop in Chicago that somehow manages to be both a client meeting and a family visit. There will be long stretches of interstate and roadside diners and audiobooks and the conversations that can only happen when you're in a car for hours.

At some point, I will almost certainly be livestreaming a church service from the parking lot of a Kansas City Royals game. And eventually, we'll again arrive at Camp Chickagami in northern Michigan, where we'll spend a month beside Lake Esau, settle in, and learn some new lessons.

When people hear all of that, they assume I've found a way to escape work for the summer.

The truth is the opposite: The meetings are still happening. The clients still need support. The emails still need answers. The newsletters still need writing. The projects still move forward.

What has changed isn't the amount of work. It's the assumption that life has to wait for the work to be finished. After the conference. After the website launch. After the busy season.

The reality is that church work is cyclical. Just when Easter wraps up, summer programming begins. Just when summer ends, it's time to think about the fall. Before long, stewardship season is staring at us from the horizon, followed by Advent and Christmas.

There is always another Sunday. Another event. Another campaign. Another thing that matters. If we wait until the work is finished before we start living, we may be waiting forever.

So, a few years ago, I started trying something different: Can I be fully committed to the work I care about while also building a life I don't want to escape from? Can I show up for my clients and my communities while also making memories with my son before middle school turns into high school and high school turns into college?

Forget work-life balance. How about work-life integration?

Can I meet a new client in-person because our road trip happens to take us through Chicago? Can I answer emails in the morning and explore Zion in the afternoon? Can I support a church community from a Royals parking lot and still make first pitch?

It turns out the answer is yes. Mostly. More often than I used to believe, at least.

One of the gifts of working in communications is that we spend a lot of time helping other people tell stories about what matters.

What I try to remember is that I get to have a story, too. Not just a career or a calendar, but a weird, beautiful, occasionally chaotic life filled with road trips, campfires, church livestreams, national parks, baseball games, family dinners, client meetings, and a 12-year-old who still wants to spend a month traveling with his mom.

The work matters. But so do all the reasons we're doing the work in the first place.

As church leaders, communicators, administrators, and ministry professionals head into summer, that's the question I've been carrying: What would it look like to stop treating life as the reward for finishing the work and start treating it as something worth building alongside the work?

Because the emails will keep coming. The next season will always arrive. But summer is here now. And I don't want to miss it.