Do Acts2 team members ever take vacation?
One of our college retreat favorites is the Q&A (AMA) session with our senior pastor, Pastor Ed, and his wife Kelly. They field all kinds of questions. The questions range from thoughtful to, huh??
One of the memorable ones was at a senior retreat, where someone asked, “Do staff ever take vacations?” And Pastor Ed & Kelly looked out at the group of college mentors and seniors, who were there over a holiday weekend, and said, “They can’t go on vacation because they’re here with you!”
I guess Americans take less vacation than their counterparts around the world. But it seems that vacation has become something expected and even demanded, and it’s not 2 weeks per year like it was in my day, but unlimited PTO. For people who work remotely, from home. That’s amazing. Growing up, my family took pretty nice vacations all over the world (where I was consistently sullen — you can see it in the pictures). But my husband and friends grew up with immigrant parents working in shoe repair, dry cleaners, restaurants and delis, who didn’t know the meaning of “vacation.”
So, there are a variety of reasons why people can’t or don’t take vacation. For our covocational ministers, it’s because of ministry needs. If you stop any random staff and ask, “How did you become Christian,” there’s a high chance that they will mention one of 3 things: course 101, winter retreat or passion week. What did it take to usher these people into the kingdom of God? For one, it took people taking time off work. For college winter retreat, our highest impact retreat of the year, people will take a day off to go down early to the retreat site, put up yards of carpeting and trusses, lights, a stage, sound equipment, set up snacks and registration, and get the whole place ready for college students to come and get maximally blessed. Besides that, there are weeks leading up to it where we collect stories, and film and edit them. And the retreat is usually on a holiday weekend, so they’re spending the last day of the retreat, a holiday, taking students home, cleaning up and putting away equipment, and also celebrating the people who decided to commit their lives to Jesus, or who had some huge burden lifted off their shoulders through that time of getting away from daily life to receive the word of God and prayer.
Since Passion week is the most important week in the Christian calendar, as we all get a chance to reflect on the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus, we put a lot of thought and effort into how to make this a more meaningful time for our whole church. The Passion Experience is an interactive walk through the last week of Jesus’ life on earth. It started out as an actual buildout, taking tens of thousands of man hours as people put up structures and displays to give us a chance to quietly take in what Jesus went through that week, to pray and reflect and respond. This meant hardware, tools, lighting, fabric, photoshopped pictures, big printouts, hanging things, finding props, making 100s of rocks out of butcher paper and painting them, making wooden crosses or a huge door to show what Passover was like…all in time for passion week. It couldn’t just be done over the weekend. Some people had to take time off work. For the Berkeley church, we needed this times 4 to accommodate all the people who would go through it. And in the end, we invited not just our church members but also family and friends, people from our interhigh churches, and many many people were blessed every year.
When covid-19 happened, we were forced to go virtual. And anyone who has done online work knows that this can be even more man hours; storyboarding, writing content, recording and editing videos, finding footage. Since it was online, we could translate it to different languages: Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog, Japanese. Many volunteered after work to do this very tedious work. But that wasn’t enough time; some people did take time off too. But now we have passionexperience.org, with a reach of tens of thousands, far more than we ever imagined when we started this out many years ago. Every year, we hear of salvation stories that happen after the Passion Experience.
Course 101 went virtual as well, with a team of artists and video editors from all over GP who spent countless hours making our course 101 booklet accessible and interactive online, resulting in course101.org.
We say that one soul is worth the whole world. So, what are a few vacation days if it brings people closer to God? Hearing of students and family members whose hearts are opened through some of these efforts makes the hours more than worth it. But it does take sacrifice. After volunteering to help out with a retreat, or welcome week where a few thousand freshmen descend on campus and we have one chance to share the gospel with them, or a retreat where a lot of setup and take down help is needed, or where we have to physically be there … even with unlimited PTO, it’s hard to take time off and still do your job. And doing our day jobs well is important. So it’s a little challenging to fit in extra vacation.
That being said, there are times where families do go on vacation. Over the years, my college friends (who I’ve known for over 30 years, and we’re still doing ministry together) and I have gone on family trips to Canada, the Midwest, an RV trip. We do something every year; and are hoping to do something for our 50th birthdays. And different college peer groups find time to go together on memorable trips to beautiful places. Besides, we take people on trips to breathtaking spots like Yosemite, Zion and Yellowstone National Parks, which most people have never seen in their lifetime. We have ministry homes near many beautiful sites, which are used every weekend by some group for trips and bonding. So we definitely see more nature and beauty than I think most people are able to. But maybe not in the way a person who asks, “Do you ever take vacation?” might be thinking.
But on the whole, I think we have our fill.
