I’ve been thinking about sabbaticals. Not mine (though I’m grateful for the few weeks I took off before starting this role), but the idea of them – and what they reveal about how we attend to wellbeing in systems under strain.
Recently, I’ve heard stories of two clergy from different dioceses. One had offered to delay their sabbatical to help with short-term pressures. The response? A gentle but firm encouragement to take it. The other had theirs robustly declined. Strategic funding priorities, it seems, had taken precedence. Two stories. Two systems. Two very different messages about what we value.
It reminded me of something I read in the Harvard Business Review not long ago: when employees take sabbaticals, organisations benefit. Not just the individual, but the whole. Creativity rises. Teams grow. Perspective deepens. But here’s the catch: not everyone can access them. And even when they can, the system doesn’t always make it easy.
We don’t mean to make it hard. But we do.
We don’t mean to send the message that rest is conditional. That wellbeing is a reward for performance. That space to breathe is a luxury, not a necessity. But sometimes, in our rush to meet targets, secure funding, or deliver outcomes, that’s exactly the message we send.
And the consequences – though unintended – are real.
The economist Frédéric Bastiat once wrote about the “unseen” effects of our decisions. We see the grant secured, the programme launched, the metrics met. We don’t always see the priest quietly burning out, the team stretched thin, the sabbatical that never happened.
Strategic funding is not the enemy. It can be a gift. But it is not neutral. It shapes behaviour. It sets priorities. And if we’re not careful, it can crowd out the very things that sustain us.
In last week’s Church Times, the Bishop of Hereford urged the Church Commissioners to consider shrinking grants in favour of funding parish clergy. His concern? That strategic funding, while well-intentioned, may be consequential in ways not fully envisaged by planners. He’ll be joining us as a keynote speaker at the St Luke’s for Clergy Wellbeing’s national conference in September – a timely voice, I think, for this conversation about wellbeing, vocation, and the systems we build around them.
So today, I’m asking myself of my own leadership as I start out at St Luke’s: what are we building? And what are we breaking – unintentionally – as we build?
If we believe that wellbeing matters (and I think we do), then we need to design for it. Not just in policies, but in culture. Not just for individuals, but for the whole. We need to make space – for sabbaticals, for silence, for saying “I’m not okay” without fear of consequence.
Because the truth is, we’re not machines. We’re people. And people need rest. People need time. People need systems that don’t just talk about wellbeing, but make it possible.