Reflections of a Preacher’s Kid

You hear a lot of criticism these days about how preachers’ kids turn out. The refrain is often heard that the preacher was so busy delivering mimeographed sheets to Sunday school teachers that he had no time for his family. We, of course, deplore that phenomenon. But few talk about the bright side of the picture. There are a lot of PKs kicking around who feel their dads contributed quite a bit to their .lives. While many readers of LEADERSHIP represent various aspects of ministry, they share common ground in their struggle with the demands of family while bearing the heavy weight of church leadership. How can they balance these? Is there an inevitable guilt trip?

Tim Stafford is one of those PKs who is not grumbling in his beard about the failures of his father. We’ve known Tim for almost a decade as a Campus Life editor, and in the last few years as a frequent contributor to Christianity Today. Tim has always expressed special affection and appreciation for his dad. Most recently, Tim has been developing a Christian youth magazine in Kenya which will be turned over to nationals (an interesting story in itself). We asked Tim if he’d be willing to tell us what he believes his dad did right! It turns out that there were several things. . ‘. .

I have been asked to write about what my father, a pastor, did right. Let me make clear from the beginning that I am not creating a clergical version of the Waltons. My father is brilliant, moody, eccen- trie, nervous, frighteningly perceptive, and occasionally, flamboyantly wrong. He would never make it on TV as the wise, slow-talking Father Knows Best. He grew up without a father in the poor streets of San Francisco, moving frequently to escape rent. Most of his models of family life were bad. Yet somehow, through God’s goodness, he has been a good pastor and a wonderful father. I am one of four children who like and love him, our mother, each other, and God.

I don’t want to export the eccentricities of my family to yours. Nor do I want to rehash common Christian wisdom about raising kids. Most of it, which applies to pastors just as to everyone else, can be found in bookstores. I merely hope to point out some of the special difficulties pastors and their kids face, and suggest how my father succeeded, or partly succeeded, in dealing with them.

Certain difficulties come with the job?like money. It’s a small problem, really, because American pastors generally live quite well. But it is a problem that can seem very great to a child. Pastors’ kids often feel poor. Sometimes they pick up those feelings from their parents, who tend to be well-educated, ambitious, verbal people who might make more money in other jobs. Some parents, conscious of their sacrifice, mention it. Their children, who may not recall a word of the good spiritual counsel they are getting, remember the remarks about money.

Living in the neighborhood which the congregation also inhabits doesn’t help. Since it is usual for a pastor to be paid on the low side of the bell curve, a pastor’s kids grow up surrounded by people who have slightly nicer cars and bigger houses than they do. Money to a kid, in case you’ve forgotten, conveys status. When you are 14, status is virtually all there is.

As a child, I was reasonably normal, and I felt our lack of status. But, remarkably enough, I never felt that we were truly poor, although sometimes we were. Looking back, I can see that. One time we searched the house for hours to find pennies that had rolled under furniture and into corners so we could buy a bag of flour. I remember amusing stories, often told, about those times when we wondered what to do about the dozen or so meals left before the end of the month. There were stories like the one about arriving at seminary after a 2,000 mile drive with a sick child, five dollars, and no rich uncle to cable for money. I can remember the many times I had to get out to push the old car out of the parking space?it didn’t go into reverse, and we had no money to pay a mechanic. But I cannot remember ever feeling poor.

When I reflect on my childhood, I realize that my parents must have sometimes felt miserably poor at times and perhaps even afraid. But I didn’t catch a hint of that, mainly, I suppose, because they kept their mouths closed. They made money a game and a joke, and we laughed rather than cried.

More than that, they took an aggressive posture. We enjoyed, we believed, the finest things of life:

books, music, camping, listening to baseball games. We thought we were better off than people who had to buy big cars and steaks to enjoy life. Giving helped too. An early, vivid memory of mine is of my mother late one night writing out checks to various charitable and Christian organizations. “Tithing makes me feel so rich,” she said to me as she looked up. “We have all this money to give away.”

Time is another pastoral pitfall. Pastors don’t have much of it to spend with their families. Often it’s their fault?they insist that the church needs them, as it needs God, to sustain its every breath. Still, there are special problems, perhaps best symbolized by “night meetings.”

If kids understand money all too well, they understand time all too little. I remember my father complaining that he had a meeting every night of the week. I don’t remember understanding what he was complaining about.

All the books say that parents must spend time with their children, and I believe that is true. There is no substitute for setting your priorities straight and saying no to things that interfere with them. But I would like to add one small note. From these books I have gotten the impression that fathers should eliminate all the important and interesting activities they enjoy and bore themselves silly by watching every Little League game that Johnny plays in. Father should descend to the level of a child in order to relate to his own child as a buddy and close friend.

That may be what the books say, but that wasn’t the way it was with me. My father did take my brother and me out a time or two to throw the old pigskin around, but he didn’t do it very often. He didn’t join the neighborhood football games; we probably would have been embarrassed if he had. He never played Monopoly with us. He encouraged us in our chosen vocation of fishing, but he never bought a rod and reel himself. I always had the impression that we were kids, allowed the kiddish dignity of going about our kiddish affairs in all seriousness, without adult interference.

I am not certain I can recommend my father’s lack of involvement in our interests, but I strongly recommend his alternative?involving us in his. He allowed us to enter his world when we were interested in doing so; he would even talk theology with us. He and I trekked hundreds of miles in the back country of the Sierra Nevada together, not so much (I believe) because he was being a good father but because he wanted to go. We talked about the baseball standings because he was avidly interested. He also liked taking us to meetings with him. I remember particularly one Sunday night when after the evening service, I went with my father to a hotel restaurant to join a small circle of pastors chatting with Addison Leitch, one of my father’s most admired seminary professors. I didn’t know what they were talking about, but to this day my memory can bring back the rich pleasure of being allowed in adult male company as a sort of equal.

I should point out that my father had interests broad enough to involve a small boy or girl. He was not consumed by committee meetings. He preferred baseball. He found time for many things? things his children could enjoy.

My father’s practice of letting us into his world betrays a much deeper attitude that pervaded my upbringing: my parents respected us. We were never their equals in authority, but we were their equals in our humanness. We were not expected to agree with everything they thought or said politically, theologically, or any other way. In fact, I think they would have been disappointed if we had. We obeyed family rules, but we didn’t have to like them. It was, I think, a token of his respect that my father did not bore himself in order to spend time with me. He sought common ground. He would do the same with any friend.

A difficulty only preachers’ kids encounter is professional holiness. It is the duty of every pastor to convert the heathen, particularly those living within his doors, to live an exemplary life, and make sure that his family does the same. The kids are well aware that their father is watching them, coaxing them to goodness. They also know that the rest of the world, while coaxing in a different direction, is watching.

Preachers’ kids can’t win. If we are good, it is no virtue. Whatever we do right, we have been trained or forced to do; whatever we believe, we were taught to believe. (“All right,” my brother once exploded in college, “I don’t drink just because that’s what my parents taught me. And you do drink just because that’s what your parents taught you. Now can .we talk about it intelligently?”) I remember trying to convince an incredulous friend that I went to church because I liked to, not because my father would beat me if I didn’t. The only way to get any credit for individuality, in fact, is to be bad, and even that is tainted. Everybody knows that preachers’ kids don’t have to work at sin. They come by it naturally.

Then there is the shame of being tainted with holiness. This may be only another proof of the depravity of man, but I am inclined to think it has more to do with blending. When you are 14 years old you don’t want to stand out. It is bad to be too smart, and worse to be. too good. Preachers’ kids long to have fathers whose professions are unmarked by any signs of distinction. They dream of a parent in real estate. If they are to have any distinction, please God, let it be something they have earned themselves. Let them never be Somebody’s son . . . especially a Holy Somebody’s son.

Yet despite the pressure of professional holiness none of the four kids in my family went through a significant period of rebellion. For that I must give a small share of credit to covenant theology. Inherent in Presbyterian belief is the idea that a child, if raised in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, is not a small representative of Satan in urgent need of reclaiming, but a beginning Christian. Though it is necessary for the child, as for all Christians, to grow in grace and the knowledge of the Lord, to continue to renounce sin, and to throw himself on the mercy of God, a proper Presbyterian parent does not look on his child as an outsider to God’s grace. He believes that the Holy Spirit can be as unobstructed in a child’s life as in his own.

This does a lot to reduce tension in the home. It unifies the family in the sphere of God’s grace, and it reduces the pressure on the child to make a radical reversal in order to avoid falling into hell. It merely calls on the child to continue in the direction he was taught as a child and to make it his own as an adult.

The theological merits of these ideas are arguable, as students of church history can assure us, but on practical grounds I appreciate them very much. 1 never felt pressure from my parents to be holy. (My dad hated the holy image of a pastor himself.) They didn’t see every misdeed as proof that we were ir dramatic need of conversion. Outside I got pressure about being a preacher’s kid, but never in my own home.

I know that people respond to different thing’ and that what is helpful spiritual guidance for on< person is not helpful to another; some people neec gentle prodding toward godliness, and others neec to be hit on the head. Still, I think it is reasonable t< say that a child raised in a pastor’s home is likely to know the gospel and to be aware of his need for Savior. He rarely needs to have the lesson bangei home. In fact, since nearly every teenage kid would do anything to avoid being an exact replica of hi parents, pressuring him may make the decision

much more difficult for him; to say no is the onl way he can prove that he is an individual. In my own life, at any rate, it was a great bonus that I was given spiritual freedom. We were never expected to be any better than anyone else’s kids. We were never threatened with what the neighbors would think. This gave us freedom to make God our God, not the God of our father, and to find our own path to personal holiness.

I have mentioned three difficulties unique to a pastor’s job. Now I want to discuss a thornier difficulty: the pastor himself. I know it is impossible to typecast pastors; yet, I believe that the ministry draws certain kinds of people and shapes them in particular ways. Pastors are, for the most part, competitive, intelligent, idealistic, lonely, and in need of reassurance. They are public people who both love and hate the limelight.

The demand to’ be a star, which American churches make and many pastors give in to very easily, is the hardest part of being a pastor or a pastor’s child. Think about it a little from the child’s point of view.

How many children actually watch their father perform? Only the children of actors, politicians, and preachers. For most kids, their father, when he is home, is a father only. He disappears to perform.

Imagine yourself at the time of adolescence. You are unimaginably proud of your father and yet have come to suspect that he is vincible. Imagine that you have to go with your friends to a movie theater to see a film in which your father is acting. Imagine listening to them discuss his performance afterwards.

Or imagine that you, as a child, are asked to sit in the office while the boss gives your father a job review. You watch him politely exposed, praised, scolded. Then you ride home in the car with him and wonder what to say.

That’s only part of the problem. If your father is the public’s person, then it is difficult to have him for your own. He can become more of a symbol, a totem, than a person. You are never quite sure what is real and what is not. He becomes an idealized version of a father. Or he becomes a hypocrite in your eyes, unable to make his private and public lives match.

Some pastors I know can handle the problems, and their children idolize them. Yet if asked to tell what place they fill in their father’s life, I doubt they could name one. These children are usually “good” children, but they have a very difficult time finding a niche of their own. To grow up in the shadow of this kind of a great man is as hard as sculpting in the same room with Michelangelo. Other fathers can’t handle it, and their children reject them outright. The kids cannot cope with the discrepancy between the public figure and the figure at home. They run away, live blatantly sinful lives, and in some cases, do what they can to punish themselves for the guilt they feel in the shadow of hypocrisy.

The vast majority of pastors and pastors’ kids are somewhere in the middle, trying to live with the demands of public life and the secrets that must stay hidden.

What can the father do to help? I doubt there is any full solution; this problem comes with the profession. But I think the burden is eased to the extent that a father lets his children understand how he feels.

My own father had to learn to do this. I suppose he still is learning. Perhaps the gradualness of his learning was an advantage. I doubt any child can take sudden, compulsive candidness from his own father.

When I was growing up, my father was not, as they say, “in touch with his feelings.” But I think he was enough in touch that we all had a sense of pity mixed in with our pride; we knew his job was not easy for him, though I doubt he ever exactly told us so. Then, when we were all nearly grown, he went through a series of crises. He learned how to express how he felt to us. It was a wonderful release, for me as well as for him. I began to be able to freely enjoy his abilities without worrying so much about his weaknesses. I understood better that he was only human, a fellow man. It opened the way for a peer closeness with my father, which is, I think, the joy of very few sons.

I don’t suggest compulsive candidness. But I do suggest that there is a time and a place for confessing doubt, even to your own family, and I am afraid there are many pastors who have never confessed it to anyone. The only way my father, as a public person, can also be specially mine is if he shares the true feelings of being a public person with me.

My father is not an old man, and this article is not a memorial. Our relationship is still growing, but not because our personalities match. He is a man of almost boundless and restless interest in life, particularly the behavior of human beings, and he loves to share that. I pay him, in return, the greatest compliment I have to offer by asking his advice. We are friends, and I think we feel the fellowship of the kingdom of God.

I don’t believe he set out thinking that raising children was his most important task. Like a lot of pastors, he was preoccupied with church buildings and good sermons. But lately, as a fairly successful pastor, he has been reviewing his career. He says what I doubt would have occurred to him years earlier: that the most significant accomplishment of his life has been the raising of four Christian children. If so, his success was due not so much to the quality of books read or seminars attended on good parenting as much as to the fact that he was, and is, intensely honest, essentially humble, and fundamentally respectful in all his dealings with all kinds of people?even his own children. He is also, I might add, a very interesting person to live with.