How Can a Church Support Its Pastor During Advent and Christmas?

Advent starts Sunday, November 29. For most pastors, the four weeks after that are the fullest of the year: extra services, extra events, extra visits, and the families for whom the holidays are hard.

This post is for anyone who leads alongside a pastor: board members, elders, deacons, executive pastors, ministry staff leads, and the denominational and network leaders who care for pastors across many churches.

Your people take care of everyone else. Who takes care of them? In a church, the first person that question points to is usually the pastor.

Supporting your pastor through Advent and Christmas doesn't take a new program. It takes a few people who see what's coming and move first. Below are four things your church can take off the pastor's plate before the first Sunday of Advent, and what each one gives back.

Why Is Advent So Full for Pastors?

Because the biggest services of the year arrive at the same time as the heaviest care needs.

According to Lifeway Research, 81% of Protestant pastors say Christmas is one of their three highest-attendance worship services, and 28% say it draws the most people of the whole year (Lifeway Research, 2024). Pastors also plan an average of four extra events or activities to help their church celebrate. The most common is a Christmas Eve service, which 81% of pastors plan in addition to regular worship (Lifeway Research, 2023).

Now add everything that doesn't show up on the church calendar. The Advent sermon series. Hospital visits. Funerals that don't wait for January. The family celebrating their first Christmas after a loss. The couple who asked to talk "after the holidays" but really needs to talk now.

Your pastor plans Christmas for everyone else. Someone needs to plan for the pastor.

You Want to Help Without Overstepping

We know you care, but you can't sit beside every one of your people. Some things never get said at work, and for a pastor, church is work.

You also don't want to rearrange your pastor's calendar without asking. That tension is healthy. But waiting for your pastor to ask for help usually means waiting until January. Most pastors won't ask during Advent. Caring for others is the job, and it's the season when people need them most.

So the question isn't whether to step in. It's where. Here are four places that can belong to someone other than the pastor.

1. Cancel One Meeting That's Yours to Cancel

There's something on the December calendar that your pastor didn't put there. A committee check-in. A year-end review. A planning session that could be an email, or could wait until January.

Whoever owns that meeting, a board chair, a committee lead or a staff director, can find it and cancel it or move it. If it's yours to move, move it, and then tell your pastor you did:

Every hour your pastor isn't in a room they didn't need to be in is an hour for a grieving family, the Christmas Eve message, or their own kitchen table.

One meeting. Before November 29.

2. Share the Visit List

Every church has people who won't make it to a Christmas service. Homebound members. Hospital rooms. Assisted living. Your pastor knows every name on that list and carries it.

Ask your pastor for the list, and offer to cover the visits that don't need the pastor. Many churches already have the people to do it: deacons, a care team, other staff, trained volunteers.

A member who wants company and a carol, or a family that just needs to know someone from church came by, can be visited by someone else who loves them. Leave the hardest pastoral conversations with your pastor. Share the rest.

3. Decide Who Takes the Calls

Advent brings calls and texts that can't wait until Monday, and many that can. Right now, most of them go to one phone.

Before December, decide who handles what:

Write it down and tell the congregation once, kindly, in the bulletin or an email. The plan doesn't have to be perfect. It has to exist, so your pastor isn't the only one ready when something unexpected comes up.

4. Give Your Pastor Two Sunday Afternoons

Christmas falls on a Friday this year, which makes Sunday, December 13, and Sunday, December 20, two of the fullest days of the season. Big attendance, big emotions, and families who bring their grief with them. After the last service, many pastors are back at their desks by early afternoon.

Tell your pastor not to come back. And mean it:

Then actually cover it, using the plan from move 3. Two Sunday afternoons isn't comp time. It's a message: we see you, and you're a person here, not just a role.

What's Behind These Four Moves?

Each move protects something your pastor needs to reach Christmas Eve with something left.

At Forte, our Coaches use Mental Fitness training built on four domains. You don't need the vocabulary to make these moves, but here's how they line up:

The goal isn't a pastor who survives December. It's a pastor who stands up on Christmas Eve, with their own family somewhere in the room, and means every word because they weren't emptied out before they got there.

What Your Pastor Needs That a Calendar Can't Give

A canceled meeting and two quiet Sunday afternoons help. They don't reach the part of your pastor that rarely gets to be a person, the part that has no one to talk to about the hard conversations they carry.

Barna found that only one in three pastors has anyone outside their church they can truly confide in about personal matters, and two in five feel lonely (Barna, 2026). That matters for the long run. Pastors with stronger relational support are significantly less likely to consider leaving ministry (Barna, 2026). For more on that, see why most exhausted pastors stay.

That's why Forte gives every one of your people their own Forte Coach, a real person outside work who's with them for all of it, the hard weeks and the good ones. For a pastor, that means someone with no stake in the budget, the board or the sermon series. For your ministry staff, it means the same.

Everything lives in one app. They pick a time, their Coach calls them, and exercises keep them growing between calls. Members can connect with their Coach as early as the next day, and Forte Coaches come from backgrounds that include pastoral care, counseling and certified coaching (Forte Coaches). Sessions are confidential, and your church sees only anonymized trends.

Here's how one lead pastor described it on Forte's website: "I appreciate Forte and its ability to allow me to process various aspects of my life and ministry."

You become a place where everyone has someone in their corner. So your people feel as cared for as the people they care for.