In 2009, a husband and wife from my church, both full-time teachers, took sabbaticals to spend an entire year as substitute missionaries in Kenya. Because theirs were full-year sabbaticals, they received 50% pay. Another option would be to take six-month sabbaticals at 100% pay, which is standard for teachers. But the school in Kenya, Rift Valley Academy, really needed teachers for a whole year, so our Faith Church members got full year sabbaticals from their teaching jobs at 50% pay, and fundraised the rest. God provided amazingly. The rest of the story: a few years later, they left their teaching jobs and became full-time missionaries, and they continue to this day.
How about you? Do you get six paid months off from your job?
In our culture, time off is generally called PTO. Paid Time Off. In most jobs, you get a specified amount of paid time off each year. The typical amount that you start with is usually between one and three weeks. Then as you stay with a company over the years, your time off increases.
When I started at Faith Church I got two weeks per year. Then my denomination changed their policy, asking churches to give all pastors a starting PTO of three weeks off per year, and suddenly I got an extra week. Then once I hit the ten-year mark of employment, my vacation weeks increased from three to four weeks off per year. When I hit the twenty-year mark, I got a fifth week per year. Five weeks is the limit in my denomination, and I hit that in 2023.
How much PTO do you get? If you are a business owner, especially in the small business category, you work to get paid. Likewise, if you don’t work, you don’t get paid. For some people, there is no such thing as PTO. For those workers, if you want to take a week’s vacation, you are not only paying for the cost of the vacation, you are also not getting paid that week.
Then there are teachers. Teachers are in a unique category because their jobs are active for ten months, and then they are off most of June and July, at least here in the USA. Teachers can choose to spread their ten-month contracted payments out over twelve months, so they are getting paid consistently for all twelve months. Yet, during that two-month break in June and July, they can work another job, and earn more money. Or they can just be off the entire two months.
Teachers also have the opportunity to take sabbaticals, like my friends who went to Kenya for a year. Some districts allow sabbaticals every five years, some every seven years, some every tenth year.
So sabbaticals are a thing in our culture, mostly in the education world. But let’s be honest. Don’t sabbaticals seem like an extravagance? A luxury? Unnecessary? An indulgence? Why should teachers be off two months every year and have opportunities for six-month sabbaticals every so often as well?
Then there are pastors. We get sabbaticals too. On August 1st, this Friday, I start a three-month sabbatical. I’m super grateful for the opportunity, and yet very aware of the fact that hardly anyone gets sabbaticals during their working years. So why should I get a sabbatical? Not to mention that I took at sabbatical in 2018. Now another one? And I get five weeks’ vacation every year.
Is that fair to the rest of the workers? Are teachers’ and pastors’ jobs more difficult than other jobs? Are sabbaticals an unnecessary extravagance?
To try to answer these questions, we need to turn to Leviticus chapter 25. For the past few weeks, we have been studying the concept of sabbath in the scriptures. As you can see in the word, “sabbath,” it is where we get the word “sabbatical.” Last week I mentioned that there are three kinds of sabbaths that God asked his people Israel to observe. First, the sabbath day, which was Friday sundown to Saturday sundown. Second, last week we studied the Jubilee year, which was a special Sabbath year, after seven Sabbath years.
In verses 1 through 7, we learn about the next sabbath, the sabbath year. We’ll get started on that in the next post.
Engaging Scripture 