The New Family Trump Card. That’s what one pastor calls it. “I can’t be at the meeting tonight, Pastor. My kid has a thing.” The “thing” might be a ball game, flute practice, play date, or weariness from last night’s sleepover—anything trumps a church obligation.
The increased emphasis on “family time,” even at the expense of meaningful involvement in church life, is a sign of the times. It’s one way Generations X and Y are making up for the hands-off, latch-key childrearing styles that characterized their Boomer parents: heavy investment in the kids, and everything else takes a back seat—including church.
This shift in values is a common theme in the Leadership study on church life and family. We asked 490 pastors to share their insights on the changing relationship between the local congregation and its constituent families, to examine the larger question of church as “family,” and to crack open the door to the parsonage and tell us about their own marriage and family.
In summary, we can say the ties that bind people together as church family seem looser these days; but at home, many pastors are feeling the cinch.
Overprogrammed Kids and Churches
The phenomenon of overprogrammed kids in the last decade or so is well documented—to the point of satire. (A recent sitcom showed an alien begging off an invasion of Earth because his kid had “a thing.”) What isn’t so well documented is the effect this legion of extracurricular activities has on church life.
The pastors we surveyed report the overall busyness of families is keeping families away from church. Asked whether people are spending more discretionary time on family activities or church commitments, 76 percent said the scale tipped toward family activities. This contrasts with the perception of 62 percent of respondents that a generation ago, free time was more likely spent on church commitments. The balance has shifted.
Carol Welker, children’s ministry pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Orlando, Florida, says the impact has been felt especially in weekday programs.
“We stopped doing Wednesday night programs a couple of years ago after they just fell apart,” she said. “We did a survey to find out why families stopped coming, and several said, ‘That’s the one and only night we have together as a family.'”
The rest of the week, often including Sunday morning, is booked with music lessons and sports events. We even hear of pastors who must choose between preaching the Sunday morning sermon and attending Junior’s Little League playoff game. Lay people are more regularly opting for non-church activities.
In our survey 83 percent of pastors said they are aware of situations where people routinely choose family events over church commitments. The list of reasons people give for missing church events: kids’ activities and weekend trips are cited as most common reasons told to pastors (9 in 10 hear this frequently); grown-up sports such as fishing, football, and NASCAR are next, followed by extended family gatherings (7 in 10 hear these frequently), and a child’s illness (almost 6 in 10 hear this reason on a regular basis).
Are these valid reasons or just excuses? “Mostly excuses” said 22 percent of pastors. “Mostly valid” said 13 percent. “Some of both” said 65 percent.
Asked if family time trumping church time is the bigger problem, 61 percent of pastors said yes; only 3 percent said church time was encroaching on family life for their church members. About a third (36%) thought most church members have a good balance.
Welker says the church isn’t helping by segregating families once they arrive on campus. “Shouldn’t we as a church try to bring families together?” Welker asks. “Instead what we do is bring them to church and then put mom and dad in this room, the high school kids in that room, and the elementary kids down the hall. It’s no wonder families are spending more time doing family things than they are spending at church.”
Holly Allen agrees. She is an intergenerational studies specialist at John Brown University. Despite recent interest in intergenerational church ministries, the trend of the past two or three decades has been toward age-graded ministries and the further stratification of generations. “In the past, spending family time and going to church were the same thing,” Allen said. “Now, family time and church time are not compatible ideas, because families are rarely together when they are at church.”
Allen gives higher marks to smaller congregations that (often of necessity) include children and youth in worship and other church activities, but even mid-size churches often segregate the family. “We have generational worship in many churches where the parents are not with their children at all anywhere or anytime on Sunday morning.”
Welker’s solution is to accommodate the sports schedule and try to keep families together while they’re at church. “I try to meet families and parents where they are. If I know that Tuesdays and Thursdays are big soccer or baseball practice nights, then I won’t try to pull off an event on one of those nights,” Welker said. “When I plan a season of programs, I get the school calendars and try to plan around school openings, closings, and holidays.
“We try not to create situations where a family is forced to choose between a church event and a school event. That’s where I think some churches get in trouble; they don’t take into account what’s going on in the community.”
And when her church restarted a mid-week program, they cut some of the segregation. “We wanted to make sure we kept families together for at least half the evening,” Welker said. “So we made it a family-focused dinner. It has worked phenomenally. I don’t want families to feel like they have to give up something else to come to church.”
All in the Church Family
Keeping a “family focus” is a goal in many congregations, but “family ministry” can work against the church when 43 percent of the U.S. adult population—95.7 million people ages 15 and above—is single. A generation ago, the family was hailed as the building block of society and central to the health and well-being of the local congregation, but today the definition of “family” is changing—half of all family units are non-traditional, non-nuclear—and the church is straining to adjust.
Our survey shows that pastors believe their churches are mostly likely to embrace married couples with children (70% “extremely well” or “very well”) and least likely to include singles up to age 40 (about 45% “not very well” or “not well at all”).
Vicki Scheib is director of single adult ministry at Living Word Community Church in York, Pennsylvania: “Churches struggle to make singles feel welcome because they tend to focus on family units in their programming and in their communication. One of the things I appreciate in our church is that the pastors use testimonies and illustrations from across the broad spectrum, whether it is the individual, family unit, the single parent, or someone going through a divorce.”
Churches are also weak in reaching special needs families (36% doing “not very well” or “not well at all”), multi-ethnic families (27%), and single-parent families (23%). The only exceptions are among large churches (over 500 in worship attendance) that have ministries targeted to these groups. Their pastors were more likely to say they are doing “moderately well” in efforts to include these non-traditional households.
Mark Holmen, pastor of Ventura (Calif.) Missionary Church, says the church should be careful about crowing over success with nuclear families: “I don’t think we’re necessarily doing a great job (with married couples). Families are turning elsewhere and the church is seen less as a resource for them.
“When they come into church, they quickly ask whether the church will show them how to be a better family. They look back three or four generations, remember their great-grandparents and say, ‘They stayed together, and they were really involved in church. Maybe this church thing has something to it.'”
For many congregations, the answer is not a multiplicity of programs targeted at narrower, ever-fragmenting demographics. It is intentionally including non-traditional families and people in the conversation. For example, Sheib says, “If a single parent comes in, even if it’s a church of 100, if the pastor talks about divorce or single parenting, they’re going to say, ‘Wow, I can be here and belong.'”
Role-ing with the Punches
Here’s the part of church family life that hasn’t changed much over the years: the pastor’s family. Life at the parsonage is still stressful and fraught with expectations.
In our survey 82 percent of pastors feel the pressure for their family to serve as role models for their congregation, and 73 percent believe they should serve as examples. “People today want to see a different example for how to ‘do family,'” says Holmen, author of Faith Begins at Home (Regal, 2005). “And they’re hoping their pastor does it a little bit differently.
“They’re also watching how pastors handle dysfunction in their families. If pastors try to present the image of a perfect family and act like they don’t have any problems, they’re so far removed from where everybody else is. Your struggles can endear you to your congregation, that is, how you battle through the tough times together.”
Approaching the call to ministry together is a problem in some pastoral households. The role of the pastor’s spouse and children in church life is most likely to be debated. Four in ten pastors say their spouses are active in church life, but not in a leadership role. That is where congregations seem to have the greatest expectations. Beyond the usual “free pianist” and “unpaid staff member,” many churches still assume the pastor’s spouse should be similarly gifted as the pastor. “Some ladies would like for my wife to be another Beth Moore, but she is not,” one respondent wrote. Pastors of smaller churches were most likely to experience tensions of the spouse’s role (26%) as compared to pastors in multiple-staff churches (11%).
Holmen is surprised the numbers are so low. “I think it shows that there is not as high an expectation on pastors’ spouses today—there is more freedom for the spouse to find their own way. But I don’t think the church has done a very good job of learning how to support pastors’ wives in whatever role they take.”
And in many parsonages, the strain most felt involves the kids. Two-thirds of pastors (65%) feel their personal lives are under scrutiny, including children’s behavior (44%), children’s lifestyle choices (32%), disciplining children (26%), schooling choices (25%), car/clothes/vacations (25%). Our respondents offered specific examples of times they felt pressure: “When my kids got tattoos,” “When my daughter joined the dance/drill team at school.” One pastor replied, “I got hateful e-mail for buying my wife a diamond ring for our 25th anniversary a few months after a stewardship campaign.”
“As I entered into my senior pastorate, I didn’t realize how tough it was going to be,” Holmen said. “I had no idea the amount of criticism that senior pastors continually get. It just never ends. No matter what decision you make, you’ll always have somebody on the other side. That’s really hard for spouses, just to see the person that they love continually under criticism.”
Finally, a survey finding that proves the adage: “Asked in heaven what they wish they had done differently, no one says they wish they had spent more time at the office.”
We asked pastors to place a value on four segments of their lives. The distribution of 100 points is not based on hours alone, but also interest, value, and fulfillment. Yes, it’s a very subjective question, but we wanted to get at how pastors feel about all the things they give their lives to. Church life took up half the points (51), and family about a quarter (28). Alone time, including personal development and devotional life, netted 12 points, and interests beyond church and family garnered 11 points.
When asked how they would like to change their lives to redistribute the points, one-third of pastors said they would assign more value to family and another third would want more time alone.
Apparently, it’s true. No one wants to spend more time at the office.
Abram Book contributed to this report. The full results of the Leadership Survey may be ordered at www.christianitytoday.com/go/LeadershipReport
Eric Reed is managing editor of Leadership.
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