The Difficulties

All happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy

A number of ministry families can identify with the pastor’s teenage son who frequently wears a t-shirt imprinted, Property of First Church.

“It’s the only way I can express the way I feel,” he says.

Yes, we must admit that for all the advantages of raising a family in a ministry home, there are also a number of difficulties. When asked about the disadvantages of raising a family in a minister’s home, those surveyed offered wide-ranging responses:

“The telephone rings all the time, interrupting our family time.”

“My husband is never able to sit with us in worship.”

“The uncertainty of your tenure at a church.”

“There’s exposure to a spiritual atmosphere, but there can also be overexposure to failures of Christians.”

“We see the warts of everyone. Everyone sees ours. I strongly identify with the problems of being so close to God’s work and close to sin as well.”

“Always having to ‘be there’ — not able to do anything spontaneous on weekends.”

“Any trouble I get into with the congregation is magnified because I’m the pastor. My kids see their dad being attacked, or more likely, they hear from their classmates, ‘My parents think your dad really blew it — he got the Smiths really mad at him.’ Some pastors’ kids have been told, ‘Your dad ought to get out of here,’ which can be devastating.”

“Time pressure limits our opportunities for family events.”

“Sunday is never a relaxing day.”

Tolstoy said each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, referring to the tendency of a family to feel its problems are unique. These quotations do show a variety of difficulties, but the bulk of the surveys point to concerns that most ministry families have in common.

Scrutiny by the Saints

Leaders in any field are subject to closer attention and stricter demands. Why do reporters follow the British royal family so closely? Because most Britons (and all tabloid readers) think they own the royal couple. Some people vicariously live out the fairy tale. Others feel it’s their right to know every move they make since they’re supported with public money.

Pastors and their families face some of the same dynamics.

When I asked about the drawbacks of being a pastoral family, one response I often heard was “the sense of continually being watched.”

“I usually stand with Mike as he greets people after the service,” said a pastor’s wife from Milwaukee. “One Sunday we had a guest speaker, and I figured three at the door would be a crowd, so I didn’t stand there. One lady rushed up to ask, ‘Are you having a fight with your husband?’ I never imagined I’d be giving that impression. People really watch!”

Another pastor’s wife said, “I didn’t realize how closely I was being watched until one lady told me the Sunday after Christmas, ‘We can hardly wait till this Sunday each year because we always like to see what your husband gives you for Christmas.’ They’d learned my husband enjoys giving clothes.”

The effect of this scrutiny varies from family to family. Some enjoy it; others find it tiring. Some see it as a positive influence — a challenge to live up to. Others, however, see it as a temptation: “We’re tempted to overemphasize performing the Christian life. Because people are looking at us, we sometimes feel we have to be something in public that we may not be in private.”

The scrutiny of the saints isn’t the only area that pastoral families see as the downside of ministry.

The Holy Family

Not only is the ministry family watched, but many pastoral families feel the observers are looking for something they can’t produce. Again and again, those surveyed indicated people expect their family life to be perfect.

“Our children are expected to be model children, to never have any attitude problems. We’re supposed to have it all together. But we don’t qualify for the holy family.”

When it comes to moral behavior, however, pastors’ kids can’t win: they get less credit for their virtues and more attention for their vices. Whatever they do right, it’s “because of the way you were raised.” If they do something wrong, the response is, “You, of all people, should know better.”

One pastor’s son was at a party with his high school friends. When the liquor and drugs came out and the atmosphere started to deteriorate, he decided it was time to leave. As he was thanking the host and saying his farewells, he overheard someone say, “He’s leaving because his dad’s a preacher.”

“That really irritated me,” the son said later. “It was my decision to leave, but they don’t believe that. Anything I do that’s right is explained away because of my upbringing.”

Another pastor’s son, angered at a college classmate, exploded, “All right. I don’t drink just because that’s what my parents taught me, and you do drink just because that’s what your parents allowed. Now can we talk about it intelligently?”

Even involvement in the church is somehow tainted. Some people refuse to believe a pastor’s kid would go to church because he actually wants to; surely his parents are forcing him.

Jim Conway remembers that during his pastorate in Illinois, “one of our daughters was in a time of rapid spiritual growth, and she would stand almost every Sunday evening to share something God had been teaching her.”

One night after the service, a woman came up to her and said, “We can always count on you to have something to say in the sharing time. Your dad must put you up to it.” The daughter did a slow burn.

On the other hand, when the minister’s kids are not shining examples of sainthood, that, too, can bring undue attention.

The Conway’s daughter Becki remembers an argument in school when a classmate challenged her to back up a particular point of view with Scripture. Becki couldn’t.

“You’re a preacher’s daughter, and you can’t even quote the Bible?” the antagonist sneered.

“Well, your dad’s a plumber,” Becki retorted, “and you don’t know how to sweat pipes.”

It’s a tough situation. When you’re 15, you don’t want to stand out. It’s bad to be too smart and worse to be too good. And when the courageous stands you do take are explained away as the result of parental pressure, there’s scant incentive to remain upright.

At Home in Church, Uneasy in the World

One benefit of the pastor’s home is familiarity with church life, but the flip side is that the family may feel alienated from the unchurched world. For many in the church, and even more in the outside world, the pastor’s family is a peculiar people, more holy than normal, and thus assumed to be uninterested in ordinary human life.

“Our girls sometimes found they weren’t invited to friends’ parties because ‘we know you’re a minister’s daughter and can’t come,'” said Sally Conway. “One woman apologized to me years later for not including me at Tupperware or Avon parties ‘because we thought you wouldn’t be interested in what we talk about.'”

A number of pastoral families said they deeply appreciated the significance of ministry, but the image of the minister, at least to those outside the church, was something they had to endure. Many preachers’ kids said they wanted to live up to the example of their dad’s moral character, but they had to live down what other people thought about his profession.

“I admired my dad and my granddad. Many times I thought, I want to be like them,” said a third-generation pastor. “But I sure had questions about the ministerial image: the schedule, the way people looked at you, the way they thought of you. I didn’t want to be holy all the time. I didn’t want to cough in a deeper voice.”

Another said, “I was fortunate in that Dad was very athletic. He was an all-star football player, and even now he’s very active in tennis and water skiing. So I didn’t have that image of the pastorate. My resistance was slightly different. I told myself, I’m gonna be secular. Not profane, but secular. With Christ living in me, I want to be comfortable with non-Christians. I didn’t want to be a minister who was uncomfortable in secular surroundings.”

An interesting ambivalence. So many grown children of pastors have deep appreciation for the way they were raised, yet they confess that in school, the pressure from their peers was so great that none was ready to stand up and say, “I am a pastor’s kid!” Most of the time they hoped people didn’t talk about their dad’s vocation. There was profound respect for the man, but embarrassment over the role.

“It’s a matter of cultural dissonance,” said one pastor’s son, now grown and pastoring himself in Southern California. “My comfort zone was inside the subculture of the church. From birth, I’ve been trained how to act in this environment. But the outside culture, at least in my upbringing, was presented as so bad, so evil, that I couldn’t help but be uncomfortable when I was outside church settings. Any time I heard profanity at school, I’d find myself asking the Lord to forgive me for hearing it. With this overactivated guilt mechanism, I lived a dual life, trying to straddle two cultures.

“I wish I’d understood then that some differences are largely cultural. I’ve been trying to sensitize our high school Christians to that fact, and it takes some of the stress off. I tell them, ‘You don’t have to act in a secular culture the way you act in a Christian culture. It’s okay not to use Christian vocabulary in a secular culture. What you’re doing is almost missionary work. You have to learn cross-cultural communication.’ Had I know that in high school, I think I could have existed better with a sense of cultural relevance instead of seeing everything as necessarily a spiritual compromise.”

“The term now is nerd. I don’t know what it was then, maybe clod or square, but whatever it was, I didn’t want to be one,” said H. B. London, another pastor who was raised in a pastor’s home. “I would do anything not to be square or nerdish — to the point of rejecting many of the things I knew better. As an only child, I didn’t have anybody at home who was facing these things with me. So my peer acceptance was not at home; not even at church, because those people didn’t matter to me that much. It was at school where it seemed so important that I was accepted. I did not want to be a nerd.” And to be the son or daughter of a pastor is, unfortunately, still seen by some as being culturally out of touch.

Perhaps this ambivalence goes back to society’s sliding evaluation of the office of pastor. At one time, the ministry was one of the most respected professions. These days, when they rank the prestigious professions, ministers don’t even make the list. So family members move from the church, where their relationship with the pastor brings a measure of respect, to the outside culture, where if people find out they’re related to a pastor, they tend to be put off.

The Concentration Trap

A person with rigid work hours looks at the pastor’s freedom and says, “Boy, I wish I had that flexibility.” But the blessing also has its down side. A pastor is never really off duty. A minister can’t punch a timecard at 5 p.m. and say, “Well, that’s all for today.” He’s never free of responsibility. The issues of ministry — the next sermon, an upcoming confrontation, a counseling situation — stick in the back of his mind, even when trying to enjoy time with the family.

This can lead to a condition of “physically present but mentally absent.” Pastors aren’t the only ones afflicted by this condition, of course, but it does seem to be an occupational hazard of ministry.

One pastor’s son recalls: “There were several times when Dad and I would be playing catch, enjoying one another’s company, and suddenly the phone would ring. Dad would answer, and I’d wait for him to come back out. Sometimes he wouldn’t, and the game was over. Other times he’d come back out, and we’d throw the ball some more, but something was different. He was there, but his mind wasn’t. I figured it had something to do with the phone call. I came to hate the sound of a telephone ringing. More often than not, it seemed, it cost me my dad.”

Feeling Used

Yet another reality of being a pastoral family: being in demand. While that can be affirming, it also has its difficulties.

One pastor said, “My wife struggles with loneliness. The worst part is that whenever someone in the congregation befriends her, she’s never sure if it’s genuine friendship or if, after a while, the person will say, ‘Don’t you think we really need to renovate the nursery’ (or start a program for the handicapped, or paint the sanctuary, or hire a youth director, or …).”

For the pastor’s family, it’s sometimes hard to know if people genuinely like you or if you’re being set up. Even if people aren’t actually trying to get something, often members of the pastor’s family wonder if they’re liked for who they are or for what they represent.

“My wife and I were taken out for a nice dinner and play by a couple in the church,” said one pastor. “We thoroughly enjoyed the evening, but within a week, we heard from five different families, ‘How was My Fair Lady?’ or ‘I hear you got together with the Lindquists. Aren’t they nice folks?’ It was obvious the Lindquists had managed to let the word out that they had done something special for the pastor’s family.”

The pastor concluded, “We felt used. We talked it over and decided that as soon as it becomes apparent that someone is publicizing his ‘special relationship’ with our family, we won’t accept any more invitations from that person.”

Some might view that as an oversensitive reaction, but to one degree or another, most pastoral families can easily relate to the feeling of being used.

Making the Most of the Ministry

Randy Pope grew up as the son of a dentist, and as he reflects on his upbringing, he lends some perspective to the experience of ministry families.

“When I was growing up, my father was a dentist. And dentistry, I learned later, is one of the professions with the highest rates of suicide. I don’t know all the reasons why, but I can imagine some: you have to take out large loans to get started, you’re forced to do precise work in a very confined area (a mouth), you inflict pain and discomfort, people dread seeing you, you’re rarely paid promptly.

“But I never heard my dad say anything negative about his profession. I only heard him talk about the benefits: ‘Isn’t it great that I don’t get called in the middle of the night like surgeons do?’ ‘I’m sure thankful people don’t die from dental problems.’ ‘Dentistry is a great way to help people.’ ‘I’m really fortunate to be a dentist.'”

Randy says, “As a result of my dad’s outlook, there was a time in my adolescence when I wanted to be a dentist, not because I knew anything about it but because my dad had convinced me it was a privilege.”

Randy Pope did not become a dentist, however. He’s a pastor — at Perimeter Church in Atlanta. But he’s trying to do for his children what his father did for him —to show them that the work he does is not a problem but a privilege.