Why?

It's a privilege to plan and prepare for a substantial period away from the responsibilities of full-time ministry in 2009. Clergy are recommended to take a sabbatical every so often in order to be renewed and refreshed for the demands of their role and the Diocese of Leicester generously provides for this as part of the normal pattern of clergy development and support. My Ministry Development Review with the Dean of Leicester Cathedral in December 2007 recommended that I should take a sabbatical in 2009.

The idea of a sabbatical has been on my personal agenda since 2007. In the months since I began serious planning, I've been excited about the prospect. I've also noticed how even anticipating the adventure has helped me reflect on what I do in the day-to-day. Just thinking about not being here challenges my desire to be closely involved in everything going on and makes more intentional about empowering others.

I often meet people who are exhausted by the demands of their jobs or pressures at home. I know people who dread their work and I feel rather embarrassed about taking up the generous offer of time away from a role which I love. A pastor who is as exhausted as those he seeks to serve isn't much use. I want to minister more effectively to people who are stretched by competing pressures and will focus on this during my time away.

I've not been entirely satisfied with the usual idea of 'sabbatical', nor 'study leave'. Some authors suggest 'renewal leave', which feels better but is less familiar to people. In this document, I've decided to use all three terms interchangeably!

1. Timing
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; What gain have the workers from their toil?

Ecclesiastes 3.1-2, 6, 7, 9

I plan to take study leave for three months beginning after Easter 2009. That is, from 13 April to 12 July.

This feels like the right season, for several reasons:

I'll have been in post at St Paul's for five and a half years, and for three and a half years as Warden of Readers. Both roles are now very familiar to me. Living 'in the detail' for such a long time leads me to think it's time to stand back, regain perspective and to examine the assumptions that familiarity has created.

The period from Christmas to Easter is very busy at St Paul's. We have an exciting Alpha Course to deliver and it's usually a time of significant growth for us. I wouldn't want to be absent in these months.
The summer is a period when cover for services is harder to arrange, due to holiday commitments.
I plan to be away for about fifty days, returning home when Jon and Phil are taking their exams. Jon will be preparing for university over the summer and this will be an important period of adjustment for us as a family.
Easter marks the beginning of the celebration of resurrection life. Resurrection and sabbath are related as moments of renewal, creativity and freedom. The freedom of resurrection will characterise an adventurous period of discovery for me and, I hope, for St Paul's.

2. What I will do
I'm planning two main components:

• Walking Home
• Exploring the Evangelical Spirituality of Activism

Both of these are described in a little more detail below.

Sabbaticals enforce disconnection from the familiar, routine and urgent demands of regular ministry. They work best when they involve doing "something different". It will be hard to not do what I love doing. But I sense that it's important that I break away from some of the compulsions to live and work in certain ways that ministry has led me to adopt.

Walking Home
I shall give around fifty days to a long walk from Paris back to my home in Oadby, Leicester. This may sound bizarre (it still sounds odd to me!) but there are specific reasons for planning this adventure in this particular way.

Walking demands a change of pace. Spending such a long time on the road will force me to experience less rushed, less frantic days. Walking allows time to think, to pause, to simply experience the passing of miles and hours in ways that are more 'human' than driving or being a passenger. I have never really been a walker and it already feels odd not to find the parking space closest to the supermarket door! Living this strange way will be a complete change, give me the space for solitude which I value, and help me to experience a certain powerlessness which I think will be important. I hope to meet people as I go and will enjoy the freedom to discover, explore and encounter.

Walking is physical. This won't be a heroic journey and the daily distances that I have planned are modest compared with the adventures of some people. It's tempting to turn the plans into something more epic but I want sufficient time to linger, to meet people and to pause when I want. There's no denying that walking a significant distance every day will test me physically. I need that! But I also need to find ways of integrating patterns of exercise into my daily routines for the sake of my long-term health and fitness.

Walking offers many parallels with the scriptures. I long to "to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with my God" (Micah 6.8) and sense a personal calling from God to be renewed in humble walking. He wants me to "get out more". Through the bible, and in Christian tradition, the long walk has been a metaphor for the life journey. It's often a journey in which the places of departure and destination are significant - sometimes a pilgrimage from the profane to the holy, from darkness to light, or from slavery to freedom in a promised land. But it's also sometimes less a means of 'getting somewhere' and more an experience in it's own right, exposing the walker to the testing of the wilderness.

I've chosen to Walk Home because I want my destination to be the relationships and responsibilities of family and church. It instinctively feels wrong to walk away from home. Instead of an escape, this is a journey in which the dis-location is resolved by a home-coming and the glad resumption of life again.
I've chosen a route which allows me to meet up with people who have been personally significant in the past. Full-time ministry reduces the time and energy for catching up with friends and I have been too neglectful of precious people. Conveniently, many of those who I want to re-connect with live on a walk-able route from the south coast of England, through to the West Midlands and on to home.

I chose Paris as a starting point because it's where Jennifer and I started our marriage. We honeymooned there and will enjoy a couple of nights together before I set off. Beginning abroad will make sure that I really do leave and that it feels like getting away. It also means that the total distance I walk will be around 500 miles, which is appealingly round as a number!

Fifty days for the walking corresponds to the fifty days between Easter and Pentecost. I'll wait a week or so before setting off, so my fifty days won't parallel this exactly, but I like the idea of a period which leads towards the Pentecostal promise.

Exploring the Evangelical Spirituality of Activism
During my walk I'll experience a disconnection from the work that I find fulfilling and immensely satisfying. But I've been in ministry for long enough to realise that the pleasure from what I do risks taking me into a 'compulsive doing' which isn't healthy for either me, the ministry I exercise or the people around me. I recognise traits in myself and patterns in my working from which I need liberating.

I am more confident of my evangelicalism than I have been for a long while. I rejoice in an understanding of the gospel that celebrates God's achievement and the dynamism of the life in his Kingdom. But I am also aware of the pitfalls of activism that lead some evangelicals away from grace and towards an imperative of personal achievement, productivity and success.

There have been welcome spiritual responses to our contemporary culture's obsession with these things but these have most often come from catholic tradition. I treasure these insights but I wonder, what of us evangelicals? Do we not have similar resources in our own tradition which we can use, and offer to others, in response to the same issues?

I must be careful not to set an objective for learning which is too demanding - that would defeat the purpose of the time I'm spending. But I have a hunch that during this sabbatical I will learn for myself things which I may be able to helpfully share with others. It would be good if part of the legacy of this renewal leave is a more balanced, more integrated approach to ministry and life in an evangelical context.

While I'm Walking Home, I won't be able to carry a bundle of books. But I do hope to be able to use the experience itself as the raw material for reflection during the journey and afterwards in the study. I hope to write as I go and will have to think carefully about the extent to which I keep in touch.