"The truth is the denomination probably needs to be whittled down. And ideally that means our churches start doing the work ourselves, which means our classes start doing the work themselves." —Dan De Graff, quoted from 2022
“God planted that in your heart four years ago. Little did you know where that was going to end up leading.” —Jason Ruis
“I stand by those words.” —Dan De Graff
Summary of This Episode
Dan De Graff is stepping away from the Messy Reformation, and we gave him the first half of this conversation to say why. Dan pastors in Baldwin, Wisconsin, in Classis Lake Superior, and he has been the man behind the scenes of this show for most of its six years.
He took his first sabbatical this summer, eleven weeks, and it was built around rest and his family rather than a project. He coordinated it with the end of the school year, stayed in Baldwin for the first two and a half weeks because his town's soccer tournament fell there, then spent four and a half weeks away: two and a half camping through the UP and the north shore of Lake Superior, two weeks in lower Michigan with his wife's family and his own. He planned to read nine to twelve books. He read one and three quarters, plus a lot of the Bible, plus four Tom Clancy novels at a clip of one every two days. Classis Lake Superior had supported a plant in Chanhassen, Minnesota, and because he was on sabbatical he got to sit in the launch service of Redemption CRC with zero guilt about not being in his own pulpit.
We spend real time on the mechanics because a lot of pastors listen to this show and a lot of councils still don't know what to do with the request. Dan wrote the sabbatical policy his council approved. The need came out of last year, when he turned down a call to another church after six years in Baldwin and realized that the way he was running his life was pointed at burnout—a place he had been before. He names the tiredness and the going-through-the-motions plainly. He reaches for Eugene Peterson's The Pastor and the image Peterson takes from Moby Dick: the oarsmen row, and the harpooner stands still, because if the harpooner spends himself rowing he won't be able to throw when the time comes. "I just feel like I'm not there right now. I'm in the work of the oarsmen."
What he heard from his congregation, and from beyond it, was don't leave. There is a local assumption that a sabbatical is a prelude to a departure, and he spent real effort assuring people it wasn't. He is grateful that nobody in Baldwin treated the request as an insult, and he is aware that is not every pastor's experience—he has talked to men whose churches said no. His counsel to councils is to grant leave while things are well, because the circumstances that create the need are often the same circumstances that make it impossible to go.
Then the part that explains the letter. He came back, sat down to office work, lasted two hours, and was done. His council has been working through the old elders' handbook, and when his chair asked whether he feels supported, Dan said yes, and then said the harder thing: "I'm not supporting myself." The habits he promised himself are gone, maybe worse than before. He wants to end his main workday at three when there's an evening Bible study, and he hasn't. That is the ground under his decision to step away from this show. He doesn't have the time, and he knows how that sounds: "It's easy for people to hear a pastor doesn't have time and think, well, that must be lazy."
What has the time is classis. Dan never had classis drilled into him; he got seminary money from Classis Illiana, put his name up as an alternate in Iakota because he was the new guy, and kept getting called on. In Lake Superior he has been a church visitor for two terms, served on home missions, chaired an ad hoc committee that spent a year and a half getting to the bottom of tension in the classis, and then chaired the organizational realignment committee that came out of it. Lake Superior now organizes itself around leadership development, church planting, and church revitalization. He also sits on the denominational classis restructuring task force as its reporter, building spreadsheets toward a possible new map, and he is honest that he doesn't know what will come of it. He read Synod's ten-year strategic plan off sabbatical, called Willy, and said it was the dumbest thing ever. Then he watched the deliberation, heard the humility from Thrive and from Tim Sheridan, and got behind it. He is clear this isn't ambition: "I do not want Zach King's job."
Jason stops the conversation to thank Dan publicly for the work nobody saw—lining up the pastor interviews, writing the summaries, organizing the episodes—and notes that when Dan went on sabbatical, the interviews simply stopped getting scheduled. Then he reads Dan his own words from our 2022 interview with him, before he was ever on the team: the denomination probably needs to be whittled down, and ideally that means our churches and our classes start doing the work themselves. Four years later, that is the work pulling him off this podcast. Dan: "I stand by those words."
Praise God for a man who gave six years to this work without needing anyone to see it, and for a council that granted him rest before things went sideways.
Next Sunday: part two, where Dan makes the case for what a classis is actually for.
If you are a pastor who has never asked for a sabbatical, or an elder who has never been asked for one, what is stopping the conversation? Reply to this email or leave a comment. We read them.