Fitting Service Into a Busy Life

I gave this workshop at the 2026 OPC Diaconal Summit (Workshop #7). What follows is a written version of the talk, edited from the recording for reading. You can also download the handout as a PDF and the flannelgraph slide deck (PDF). The five actions on the back of the handout are built for your first thirty days. Don’t try to do everything you heard.

You Don’t Need More Time

I served as a deacon for thirteen years. I was ordained in 2014, single, fresh out of grad school, twenty-seven years old. I had been a student since I was five, and being a student was about all I knew how to do. A deacon has no boss standing over him. No one breathes down your neck about deadlines. Most of what we do happens only because we decide to make it happen. In those early days, I was not good at that.

Here is the frame for everything that follows: you don’t need more time. You need intentionality. And intentionality gives you freedom, including the freedom to rest.

Felt hourglass, an apple tree, and an old man leaning on a staff

When you don’t know how to handle your responsibilities, they pile up. You lie in bed worrying about them. Your Sundays turn stressful because you forgot something and now you’re scrambling before church. You walk into the deacon meeting having forgotten the one thing you promised to handle. I have been that deacon.

Unmet commitments are a kind of bondage, and they don’t stay with you alone. When you drop what your congregation needs, they carry the cost. Think about your people coming to worship on the Lord’s Day and resting in the Lord. Deacons support that rest in a hundred quiet ways. When we serve carelessly, we can hinder the very rest we exist to protect.

Hear this as encouragement, not condemnation. If you feel like you can’t get it all done, if you’re dropping things or feeling overwhelmed, you may simply need to step back, re-evaluate, and think more deliberately about your time and your priorities.

Stewardship Is the Frame, Not Productivity

This is a stewardship question before it is a productivity question. Larger Catechism 117 says we are to “prepare our hearts, and with such foresight, diligence, and moderation, to dispose and seasonably dispatch our worldly business, that we may be the more free and fit for the duties of that day.” The duty of the day is a holy resting. Maybe a better title for this talk is “Seasonably Dispatching Worldly Business.”

Remember the parable of the talents. The master gives his servants resources. Some put them to work and hear “well done.” One buries his in the ground out of fear, and the Lord condemns it. Our English word “talent” comes from that coin. You have been given talents: the time in your day, the energy in your body, responsibility over the Lord’s church. Stewarding them takes deliberateness. The natural posture is to be reactive. We can choose to be proactive instead.

Tim Challies puts it well in Do More Better: “Productivity is effectively stewarding your gifts, talents, time, energy, and enthusiasm for the good of others and the glory of God.” Walk the self-help aisle at any bookstore and you’ll find shelves of productivity books aimed at serving yourself. The Christian frame is different. We organize our lives for the good of others and the glory of God.

Felt open hands holding gold coins and a red heart

Start With Why You Serve

Scripture grounds this in Colossians 3: “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men. You are serving the Lord Christ.” Every Christian is a servant of Christ, and deacons have taken additional vows to serve him. At church it can feel like every member is your earthly master. We do serve them, but our ultimate motivation is to serve the Lord.

If you’re seeking earthly fame, being a deacon in the OPC is a poor place to find it. If you’re seeking wealth, the same. What you do get is the chance to lay up treasure in heaven and serve your Creator with joy. As you start thinking deliberately about your time, that has to be the foundation. Why am I doing this? Is my heart in it each day?

If that heart isn’t there, set the rest of this aside until it is. Don’t try to become more efficient until you can answer that you serve as unto the Lord.

A word for deacons in training: ordination does not hand you more time. The commitment goes up, not down. This is why we say to look for men who are already doing things. You want to see the heart, and you want to see a willingness to give the time. Service comes on the Lord’s terms, not your convenience. You can plan and organize all you want, and the call still comes at 9:30 at night that the widow’s basement is flooding. It doesn’t matter what else is on your plate. You either get there or you find someone who can.

“I Don’t Have Time” Usually Means “I Won’t Prioritize It”

Years ago Challies gave me a phrase I’ve tried to live by. Stop saying “I didn’t have time for that.” Most of the time it isn’t true. Say instead, “I can’t make that a priority right now.” It’s more honest with others, and it’s more honest with yourself. You probably could make the time if it were a priority. Naming that plainly changes how you decide.

Kevin DeYoung’s Crazy Busy helps here. It’s short, friendly, and written from a Christian perspective. He argues that one reason we feel busy is that we prioritize poorly. For many of us the de facto mission is “take care of the home, meet the next deadline, and keep the people in my life relatively happy.” DeYoung instead sat down and wrote out the priorities he actually wanted: to faithfully preach the Word, to love and lead his family, to be happy and holy in Jesus Christ. Whether or not you write a personal mission statement, it’s worth stepping back regularly to ask what your priorities are and whether your days reflect them.

Felt house, a family, and a wall calendar

Build Trust in the Small Things

Every commitment you keep is an act of trust with your pastor, your session, your fellow deacons, and your congregation. The first-order effect is the task getting done. The second-order effect is bigger.

I was church treasurer, asked to do it with no experience or training, learning on the job. It became clear fast that the church was trusting me to handle the Lord’s money well. One member gave generously, and he would stop me in the hall to ask how much he’d given that year. Without fail, that same day, I went home and emailed him a report. A small thing. But every time I did it, I built the trust of a man who carried part of our budget, and he knew the church’s money was in responsible hands. Our members knew that when they wrote a check, it would be counted and deposited quickly. Money is a tangible version of something that runs through all of diaconal life.

Almost two hundred years ago, John Lorimer of the Free Church of Scotland wrote The Deaconship, working through 1 Timothy 3 and the requirement that a deacon not be double-tongued. On a deacon’s duty to his pastor he warned: “Promising to the pastor, and not fulfilling. This is justly fatal to character and to usefulness. It prevents confidence and creates contempt. The deacon, then, must be sincere.”

The upside is just as large as the warning. You have countless small chances to build trust. You promise something at the joint meeting. Three months later you come back and say, “I didn’t have time.” Often that means you didn’t write it down and never thought about it again. I have been guilty of exactly that. What you need is a practical system that catches what you commit to. More on that below.

Audit What You’re Carrying

Pull out a pen. Start with a personal audit. List your diaconal commitments: local diaconate, presbytery, denominational, and anything else. For each, roughly how many hours a week does it take? Then the harder question: what commitment do you sense, even reluctantly, you should say no to right now?

Felt figure pulled in every direction by a dozen taut strings

At the summit, men named things they could hand off. Preparing the Lord’s Supper, by training a couple of members to take it over. Building and grounds, by forming a facilities committee that handles the supplies and the details and reports back to the deacons. Editing and uploading sermons. Opening the building. One deacon described monthly minutes that ran eight pages, seven-eighths of them building maintenance and a fraction about mercy. That imbalance is worth noticing.

Delegate So You’re Not Doing Everything

Even Jesus, in his earthly ministry, did not do everything. There were sick people he did not heal and crowds he did not reach in the flesh. We can’t do everything either, not in our churches, our jobs, or our homes. So we have to be deliberate about doing the right things, which usually means getting others involved.

Acts 6 is itself a delegation story, and it is where our office begins. The apostles faced a real need in the daily distribution, but they would not give up preaching the word to wait tables. So the people chose seven men of good repute to handle it, and the apostles were freed for what only they could do. The need was met, the word kept going out, and seven new servants were raised up. Delegation done well does all three at once.

At my church we spent years deliberately getting Sunday duties off the deacons’ plates: opening the building, safety, running sound, uploading sermons, overseeing the nursery. We wanted to be free simply to talk with people on Sunday, and several of us had small children, which is its own Sunday commitment. Volunteer scheduling software made this work. We moved every team, nursery, cookies, greeters, building, sound, into Planning Center Services, which sends automatic reminders and can even require a background check before someone is assigned to safety or nursery. Breeze offers similar scheduling.

The hardest part of delegating is asking. I’m introverted by nature, so my instinct is to send an email and hope someone signs up. Nobody responds. The deacons who moved the needle were the ones who walked up to a member and said, “We thought of you. We think you’d be great at this. Would you be willing?” Not arm-twisting, just appreciative and direct. That gets real mileage, and sometimes you have to ask more than once.

Delegation isn’t shirking your duty. When you give a member a meaningful way to serve, you bless them and you build up the body.

Bring Your Wife Into It

If you’re married, your wife needs to be part of this conversation. She has a clear-eyed view of what your responsibilities are doing to your family. I learned this slowly: single deacon, then married, then four children in nine years. Kids taught me I had more time than I thought, by forcing me to see what I could and couldn’t prioritize.

Two questions for the audit. If I asked your wife right now what your diaconal load is doing to your family, what would she say? And have you had a real conversation with her about it in the last three months?

My wife signed up for a lot when she married a busy deacon, and she has been gracious about it. Early on I would have done well to talk it through with her more deliberately. When I was first asked me to consider the serving on the Committee on Diaconal Ministries, we had one child, and she rightly saw it wasn’t the season to add travel. Years later, expecting our third, I assumed the answer was still no, but we discussed it and decided it was a good time.

A specific word on babies. In the newborn phase, back off as much as your circumstances allow. It’s unpredictable. It can be the easiest season with a healthy mother and a sleeping baby, and it can be a child who doesn’t sleep more than forty-five minutes for nine months, with postpartum depression you didn’t see coming. Find the minimum you can do and do only that. If you serve alongside a man who is having a baby, give him a leave of absence if you possibly can: three or six months with no meetings and no Sunday duties. It’s hard for a small diaconate, but setting off on the right foot matters. And if your church is stretched, ask your presbytery diaconal committee whether another diaconate can help. There’s a growing willingness in the OPC for diaconates to support one another across that kind of gap.

Build One System That Catches Everything

Here is my main practical takeaway: you need a deliberate system for keeping track of, at minimum, your diaconal responsibilities.

Felt funnel, inbox tray, clipboard, and speech bubble

I was shaped by a book I’ve never actually read all the way through, David Allen’s Getting Things Done. It’s long and detailed, and I absorbed its principles through years of podcasts and a lot of practice. The core idea that matters most is capture. You need to get every commitment out of your head and into one place, so you always know where it lives and you review it regularly. Not “is it in my email, or my notebook, or on a sticky note.” One inbox. Here is a concise version of the main principles.

In 2026 you have less excuse than ever. Nearly everyone has a smartphone more powerful than the computers that ran the Apollo rockets. If you’re on an iPhone, Apple Reminders is a capable task manager. On Android, Google Tasks does the job. I use OmniFocus, a behemoth of a system, and there are plenty of others: Todoist, Things, Microsoft To Do. The tool matters far less than the habit.

The move that changed things for me was simple. Someone stops me in the hall with a request. Instead of saying “email me later so I don’t forget,” which guaranteed I would forget, I pull out my phone and type it straight into my inbox right then. One funny caveat: “will you remind me?” is sometimes a useful filter for whether the thing actually needs doing.

Once it’s captured, process it. At least weekly, look at your inbox and decide what your priorities are. If you commit to something at a deacon meeting and it isn’t captured somewhere you’ll actually see, you probably won’t do it. Not on your hand, and not in a notebook you reopen at the next meeting a month later.

Then respond. Reliable response is how you build trust. If a member contacts their deacon and hears nothing for two weeks, you are not caring for the church as you could. The response can be small: “We heard your question. We’ll discuss it at our meeting in three weeks and get back to you.” Presbyterian work is often response-by-committee, and people can’t tell the difference between “the deacons are working on it” and “the deacons forgot.” Tell them which it is.

Two cautions. Don’t procrastinate, but don’t swing to the other extreme where everything has to be done this instant or it won’t happen at all. Answering every email the moment it arrives sets an expectation you can’t keep. I’ll sometimes write the reply immediately and schedule it to send the next morning.

One last habit, and it uses time you don’t think you have. The small pockets that normally go to waste add up: waiting for a kid’s practice to end, sitting in a parking lot, the ten minutes before a meeting starts. Alan Lakein called this the Swiss-cheese method: poke holes in big projects with what he called instant tasks, things that take five minutes or less, done whenever a few minutes appear. Much diaconal work happens in those five-to-fifteen-minute windows anyway. I keep a ready list, so when a window opens I’m not spending it deciding what to do. I send the follow-up text, review the agenda, jot a note about a member to check on. That is why the C.S. Lewis line below has stayed with me: the conditions you are waiting for rarely come, so you learn to work in the gaps you already have.

Do the Little Necessary Things

Two quotes to close. I’ve thought about this one from C.S. Lewis for twenty years. In a 1939 sermon, “Learning in War-Time,” collected in The Weight of Glory, with the Second World War raging, he said: “The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.” Most of us will never have an abundance of free time. If you want to do this work, now is when you’ll do it.

And John Newton, one of my favorite authors and a great help to me as a deacon: “Religion does not consist in doing great things, but in doing the little necessary things of daily occurrence with a cheerful spirit, as to the Lord.” Put “being a deacon” in place of “religion” and you have a fair description of our labors.

Do the little necessary things, more deliberately, with a cheerful spirit. You’ll bless your church, the watching world, and your family, and as 1 Timothy 3 promises, you’ll be built up yourself in the Lord as you serve him.

The sections below collect the tools, books, and citations from the talk.

Task Management on Your Phone

The best system is the one already in your pocket, the one you’ll actually open. Start there before you buy anything.

Felt letters flying toward a single mailbox

iPhone: Apple Reminders. Free, built in, syncs across your devices. Capture by voice: “Hey Siri, remind me to call the Johnsons on Thursday.” Keep one list as your inbox and process it weekly.
Android: Google Tasks. Free, built in, sits alongside Gmail and Calendar; capture with the Assistant. (Google Keep is a good companion for quick notes and checklists.)
Cross-platform, or to share a list: Todoist or Microsoft To Do. Both free, both work on iPhone, Android, and the web. Todoist’s natural-language entry (“call Bob tomorrow 3pm”) is the fastest capture short of a dedicated task app.

The principle matters more than the tool: capture everything, keep one inbox, process weekly, respond quickly. New to this way of working? Thomas Frank’s five-minute guide to Getting Things Done is the fastest free introduction to the method (David Allen’s GTD) behind all of these tools.

Email That Doesn’t Bury You

Felt mailbox ringed by colored envelopes

DURSA. Christian McShaffrey’s method (Ordained Servant, February 2026): every email gets one of five decisions: Delete, Unsubscribe, Reply, Schedule, Archive. Your inbox is a processing station, not a storage locker.
Unsubscribe aggressively. Search your inbox for “unsubscribe,” and every recurring sender shows up in one list. Ten minutes there changes your volume more than any other single move. And don’t just snooze a message back to yourself; that hides the work in the inbox. Capture the action into your task list instead.
Let filters do the first pass. Rules can sort mail before you see it: church, committee, denominational lists, personal. A service like SaneBox (paid) goes further: it learns which senders matter and quietly defers the rest into a SaneLater folder, with one daily digest so nothing is lost.

Cited in the Workshop

Christian McShaffrey, “Email Management: The DURSA Method”, Ordained Servant, February 2026.
John G. Lorimer, The Deaconship (1842). The warning that a deacon who is “double-tongued” and fails to keep his word destroys the trust his office depends on. (A free scan is on the Internet Archive.)
C.S. Lewis, “Learning in War-Time” (1939), a sermon collected in The Weight of Glory. “Favorable conditions never come.”
Alan Lakein, How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life (1973). Origin of the Swiss-cheese method for using small windows of time.
Westminster Larger Catechism, Question 117 on keeping the Lord’s Day.