"What do you do the rest of the week?" I was recently asked.  I don't mind the question.  Indeed, I welcome it.  It's a frequent frustration among ministers that, regardless of how hard we work, the perception exists that we really only work on Sunday morning.  I've heard this perception myself from members, visitors, and even staff during my years of ministry.  This perception can exist when we've really had an easy time of it, or on the week when we spent all of Friday and Saturday by a bedside and then got up to give the sermon on Sunday morning.  In fact, often the weeks people think are the hardest for me are actually the easiest, and vice-versa.  For example, I find as it approaches Christmas, my job gets easier.  Nobody wants to schedule extra meetings during this time, and some meetings get cancelled.  While Christmas programs are big productions, a lot of it can be the same from year to year, which requires less research and creativity out of me.  The problem is, when I was asked on the fly what ministers do, even having done this work for over a decade, I don't think I really gave a very good answer.  So, for the record, here is an arbitrarily numbered and completely incomplete list of things a minister might be doing on other days of the week, besides the obvious (blogging!):

• Preparing for Sunday -- indeed, this may be the bulk of what we do.  In seminary, I often heard that 20 hours per week was the average amount of time a minister spends preparing for the Sunday service, mostly spent researching material and writing the sermon.  Why does it take so long after years of seminary study?  Actually, it takes longer the farther one is from seminary, I think, because you've used up the sermons on all those seminary book topics, and you have to dig further and research more to keep fresh.  If I relied only on what I learned a decade ago for my sermons, my sermons would be pretty stale.  No matter how much reading I get done in study leave, I still find myself needing to find good articles for readings and more data for sermons throughout the year.
• Board and Committee Work -- How many committees does your church have?  Your minister probably goes to about n+3 committee meetings, then.  (Okay, n+3 was pretty arbitrary, and would totally vary by church size.  In a big church, there are more committees, but a smaller percentage are attended by the minister.)  In my church, I attend most of the committee meetings on most of the months in which they meet, with the exception of building and finance, which I'm happy to attend also, but often these particular committees meet at irregular times and I don't always hear about the meeting times until afterwards.  Some of the meetings may include advance meetings with the chair.  The board meeting I will write a report for, and that will take a certain amount of time.  Other committees may also have reports or preparation work to be done.  Some ministers may engage in the work of the committee, others see themselves as being there to represent the faith or provide a spiritual presence, others see themselves like a paid consultant or expert there to give advice and ideas.
• Pastoral Care -- Perhaps the most important non-Sunday work of a minister in the eyes of a congregation, this kind of work arrives suddenly and can be very intense.  It requires of us that we drop everything sometimes and attend to what is happening with our members.  Occasionally pastoral care will also involve administrative work of rounding up resources for a member in need.
• Rites of Passage -- Funerals and weddings, for member and sometimes non-members of the church are an irregular part of the work.  In the beautiful times of the year in our region, we may find ourselves working every Saturday on weddings.  In between weddings and funerals, there's also working with the people involved to plan the events, and then writing the service.
• Religious Education -- A minister may write, plan, and lead religious education classes or programs for children, youth, and adults.
• Administration -- A minister is expected to do a lot of administration work.  There's a reason why clerical and clergy are related work.  We answer e-mails, phone messages, compile reports, do filing, etc.  Sometimes we write pamphlets or webpages or blog.  Strangely, although I did secretarial work part-time through college, grad school, and seminary, and worked full-time as an administrator and in other paper-pushing time jobs for two years between degrees, this is the area I feel poorest in during my ministry years.  Of course, for most of that time I have not had a church secretary (a different thing from the secretary of the board), and I remind myself that it's actually in the UUMA guidelines that a minister should have access to a secretary...  Depending on whether there is a church secretary or not, the minister's skill in this area, and what committees a church has and how strong they are, a minister might be asked to create any number of different documents from the order of service to the newsletter to the pledge drive brochure to the entire webpage.
• Staff Supervision -- The minister is often head of staff, which means meeting regularly with staff, supervising, handling problems or conflicts, and doing reports.
• Fundraising -- Some ministers do some direct solicitation of funds, some do grant-writing, some organize and run fundraisers.  We're expected to know, understand, and be mindful of the church finances.
• Community Service -- Some ministers see an important part of their work as being involved in the greater community and representing their faith in that role.  This might be through volunteering at agencies or serving on boards and committees, or running programs in the community, or through a number of other ways.  Some ministers volunteer to be on-call at the hospital, or for the police or fire department, certain nights per month.  Some ministers do programs in a local prison.  Getting out there into the world and representing our faith and our individual church while we do so is an important piece of ministry for some, but not all, clergy.
• Social Justice -- Some clergy, but not all clergy, see social justice as an important part of a minister's role.  This may mean going to protests, lobbying at the state or national capital, writing our elected leaders, writing for the local paper, attending conferences, doing on-line work for social justice, and attending more committees and programs in the community or at a state or national level.  Clergy have a lot of different ideas about how to most effectively or most appropriately do this work, or whether to do it at all.
• Denominational Work -- Often our work is to be the conduit, or one of the conduits, for connection to our denomination or district.  Sometimes this is work that is essentially required of us by the larger body, and sometimes it is something to which we feel a responsibility for and sign up for.  We might serve on yet more committees or task forces, or work to help in a particular area, or just maintain contact with various officials.  We might spend a fair amount of time reading e-mails, newsletters, blog posts, and websites to stay up-to-date. 
• Work with Other Ministers -- Sometimes in our region we'll have a local interfaith or ecumenical clergy group.  We also probably have groups of colleagues we meet with periodically at a regional and national level within our denomination.  Sometimes this is something required of us, sometimes it is just something which we feel obligated to participate in as part of our role.  All of these bodies also have tasks, some of which we'll occasionally be doing, and boards and committees, some of which we'll occasionally be on.  We may also get called upon to do work with other ministers one-on-one, from teaching a particular skill to being a listening ear.  This is part of the work we commit ourselves to as ministers, to help one another. 
• Study -- Not just for worship services, ministry, like all fields, requires that we keep up-to-date with information and knowledge, and this requires study and continuing education programs.  Sometimes "study" can also mean staying up with popular culture or the news--it's important for us to know what's going on out there in the world.
• Spiritual Practice -- Ministry is a high burn-out profession because of the high demands.  It is necessary that we stay spiritually grounded in order to do this work.  But more than that, because we are spiritual leaders in our community, this is something we have to do in order to practice what we preach.  

I'm sure I've skipped dozens of things, including some big ones, among what we do.  But I hope I've convinced someone somewhere that ministry is about much, much more than just being in the pulpit on Sunday.

I mentioned to some folks today that it's an old tradition to have an "election sermon," and some of the people I was speaking with had never heard of this tradition, so I thought I'd do a little research and write on it.  It turned out to be a lot more complicated than I thought.  From how I understand what I'm reading, it seems there are two sorts of "election sermons" -- one is a sermon preached just prior to election day, and the other is called an "election sermon" but is preached before government officials but on inauguration day, which was called, confusingly, "election day."  So, for example, this "election day" sermon from 1790 --
-- was preached on "the day of general election," apparently before the newly elected officials.  Likewise, this Gad Hitchcock text from 1774 was preached to the elected officials on "election day."  Similarly, in 1830 Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing preached a notable election sermon, before the Massachusetts legislature in which he said the memorable words:

I call that mind free, which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man mater, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from heaven, which, whilst consulting others, inquires still more of the oracle within itself, and uses instructions from abroad, not to supersede but to quicken and exalt its own energies.

Unitarian Universalist minister the Rev. Kirk Loadman-Copeland describes the events:

It began in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634 and continued until 1884. The tradition spread to Connecticut in 1674, to Vermont in 1778, and to New Hampshire in 1784....  It was one of the few public holidays in pre-revolutionary America. Stores and schools closed and the day was marked with parades, picnics, and an Election Day sermon delivered to the officials by a distinguished minister.

This seems to be the sense of the election sermon in Unitarian author Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter that the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale delivers:

Thus, there had come to the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale—as to most men, in their various spheres, though seldom recognized until they see it far behind them—an epoch of life more brilliant and full of triumph than any previous one, or than any which could hereafter be. He stood, at this moment, on the very proudest eminence of superiority, to which the gifts of intellect, rich lore, prevailing eloquence, and a reputation of whitest sanctity, could exalt a clergyman in New England’s earliest days, when the professional character was of itself a lofty pedestal. Such was the position which the minister occupied, as he bowed his head forward on the cushions of the pulpit, at the close of his Election Sermon.  

At some point, however, the tradition of preaching the election sermon to the politicians themselves ended, for the most part, and we began to understand the term "election sermon" differently, as one preached to the congregation shortly before the election.  Today, our understanding of the "election sermon" is definitely as a pre-election sermon given by the minister.  The modern understanding has become so pervasive, partly because of the confusion of the term "election day" that the Unitarian minister the Rev. Forrest Church wrote in an election sermon:

There’s a noble tradition in the ministry, going back to the 17th Century.

One or two Sundays before an election, almost every preacher in the land

devoted his sermon to the body politic.

It’s a great literary genre.  Often, the brimstone was so hot

that an Election Day sermon was the one sermon a minister might be remembered by....

Here’s how it went.  The world has gone, or is about to go to Hell.

The reason is simple. God is punishing you for your sins.

Whatever is wrong in this world is wrong because you are wrong-headed,

wrong-hearted, inattentive to God’s commandments,

 and God is watching and God is angry,

 and if you keep on messing up you will burn forever.

Until reading up on it, my understanding had been that the Unitarian tradition of election sermons was always, as Forrest Church suggests, as we practice it now.  But like most traditions, this one has apparently changed over time.  That doesn't mean that what we now do is meaningless, just because the tradition isn't "pure," but that we must find the meaning in it not from the sake of tradition, but because it is worthy in its own right.  For now, I think there's something important about speaking to the event at hand on the eve of an election, and am planning what I will say in my own this year.

Watching the national political conventions is a great opportunity to study the art of public speaking--the rhetoric and the oration.  There's a lot one can learn about effective public speaking, and thus preaching, by listening to these top-level politicians.  Four years ago, I remember thinking that Barack Obama, love him or hate him, was the greatest orator of our age, and, as I sit down and wait to listen to him tonight, it's a good time to reflect on some of what I've heard in the conventions so far, not from a political standpoint, but from the perspective of public speaking.  Now, I didn't watch much of the RNC.  I haven't actually watched that much of the DNC, either.  So I really only have a few to speak about, so I'll give you my thoughts on those, ranking them low, middle, and high.

The best I've heard...

Michelle Obama

I think Michelle Obama's come a long way as a public speaker in her four years as First Lady.  I remember not being terribly impressed by her four years ago--thinking she was good enough, and all that, but not blown away.  This time around, her words were so finely honed that I just got over one bout of tears when she would send me into another.  I found her words were finely crafted to make me feel compassion, and to make me feel connection with her--she spun her role as "mom-in-chief" and as wife to this man she was trying to humanize with great skill.  As to her speaking style itself, she had a verbal mannerism that did distract me: "It matters th-that you don't take short cuts..."  This little stutter-step was something she did repeatedly throughout the speech.  And I found it distracting, but charming.  Because of this, I did have to wonder if it was done deliberately--it humanized her, made you connect with her, made you see her as an ordinary person.  It gave her style a feeling not of polish, but of intimacy--she's talking to you as a friend, as another mom, about her worries and how she's now confident in her husband's role as president.

Bill Clinton

Holy cow.  His speech made me remember why this man was so successful.  It didn't tug at my heart-strings at all like Michelle's, but it was logical, organized, persuasive, and effective.  He was charming, friendly, and had a great way of drawing you in.  His style of saying, essentially, "Now listen, this part is important," worked effectively to grab attention focus the next point.  Overall, high marks for style & content.  After that speech, it was clear to me this was why we kept this man in office for eight years.  He might be a better speaker than Obama.  Certainly, his charisma is overwhelming.  Holy cow.

The mid-range...

Joe Biden

While I like what he had to say (and that he kept mentioning Michigan and the automobile industry), it didn't grab me.  There were no obvious flaws in style or content, but it didn't command my attention either emotionally or intellectually.  He was at his best talking about family members, and I liked those pieces.  The starting off with the address to his wife was funny and touching.  I believe he believes what he's said about Barack Obama, but the shouting pieces didn't fire me up they way they're intended to.  And much as I like that GM is alive, I'm getting tired of hearing, "Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive."  We've heard that already, Joe.  I liked his phrasing of "the hinge of history."  That was a nice piece of rhetoric.

The Amateurs

I'd also have to put most of the "average Joes" that have been trotted out here--they're not professional public speakers, and that certainly shows, and many aren't ready for this stage.  But they're also not put out to make a great speech, but rather to make a great point, to be an example of something, be it the point that religious people or military people can love Democrats or minorities can love Republicans or "Romney killed my job" or the opposite or whatever.  A notable exception in this category would be Zach Wahls, who I heard a lot of praise for, but whose speech I haven't listened to yet, and thus can't comment on directly.

And now for the worst...

Clint Eastwood

Oh, I understand it was funny to people who hate Obama, and I understand why.  But, try to be objective here.  The device was the most literal example of the straw man fallacy I've ever had the misfortune to see.  The only way it could be more literal is if he filled the empty chair with a scarecrow made to look like Obama.  Seriously.  I can't support a speech built entirely around a logical fallacy.  The delivery was rambling and made you feel that this was off-the-cuff in the worst sort of way.  And the jokes weren't all that funny--it was mostly funny that he pretended the president was saying things that were a bit offensive and unrepeatable. 

I wish I could balance this out more by showing you poor oration in Democrats and good rhetoric in Republicans.  I just really didn't listen to much in the RNC--I'm sure they had some good speakers.  I just didn't hear any.