When Summer Isn't a Break

A word for youth leaders heading into crazy season

One August, I sat in a church staff meeting while our lead pastor asked staff members to share about their summer vacations. I listened as they talked about the fun they’d had, the ways they’d come back refreshed and inspired, and the memories they’d made.

He didn’t ask me or the other youth ministry staff members. Not because he forgot — he knew we’d been running hard all summer. We’d been managing the chaos of summer programming, leading college interns who needed constant guidance, and executing several trips. There’d been no vacations for us. Just the most demanding season of our ministry year.

So there I sat, invisible yet in plain sight, listening to everyone else celebrate their rest while I was running on fumes.

Honestly, I wasn’t in a great place that season. I felt stretched thin. But I’ve thought about that staff meeting many times since, because it was a symptom of something I see in churches all the time: a blind spot toward youth ministry staff when it comes to rest and recovery.

Here’s the structural problem. Most churches have natural breathing room built into their calendar. Maybe there’s a few weeks at the end of each semester when programming winds down, and a slower summer when most staff and ministries can regroup, recharge, and take real vacations. Rest gets baked in.

For youth ministry leaders, summer flips that entirely. Programming ramps up. You’re leading more staff and running more trips. You might get pulled into VBS or children’s ministry initiatives on top of everything else. While your colleagues are exhaling, you’re sprinting.

Which means you need to hear a few things as you head into this season.

First, you are seen. Not necessarily by everyone around you. Well-meaning leaders can have blind spots. But you are ultimately not invisible. The work you’re doing matters.

Second, you need to protect rest during and after this season — and you need to do that before you need it, not after.

We tend to wait until we’re running on empty before we give ourselves permission to stop and rest. But that’s not how resilience works. Research on recovery — whether we’re talking about short breaks during the workday, healthy work-life boundaries, or actual vacation — consistently shows that rest is most effective when it’s proactive, not reactive. You recover better when you rest before exhaustion sets in.

The theological case runs deep, too. God designed us to need sleep. He built a weekly Sabbath into his people’s lives. And the Old Testament calendar was punctuated with feasts that served as regular, mandated celebrations. Regular rest was obedience, baked into the calendar.

So as you head into your crazy season, serve well. And start planning now for when and how you’ll recover. Put it on the calendar and guard it. If you don’t already have other places in your annual ministry rhythm that allow for significant breathing room, start some conversations about how you might build some in. You won’t regret it.