The rite of ordination does not override the rite of marriage. Both are noble callings, and one is not the “higher calling.” Both were instituted by God for the sanctification of his people. By some curious act of his grace, this sanctification includes the clergy.
Gregory P. Elder
Eventually, every minister’s wife runs into some element of church life that makes her life difficult. Sometimes the experience is jarring. Consider the following true story:
“We arrived at our first pastorate at the end of September, having been delayed by an accident on the way in which my tailbone was broken. Since I was nearly eight months pregnant at the time, it did not heal until after the delivery. I had to do my work alternating between periods of standing up and lying down. I carried an inflated rubber ring everywhere I went, since sitting on it helped to ease the pain a bit.
“Somehow, I managed to get some boxes unpacked, and even started toilet training my toddler. The ordination service, at which my husband was to be officially installed as pastor, was set for the end of October. I played the organ for the service while perched on my rubber ring. Afterward I served sandwiches, dessert, and coffee to about thirty people in the parsonage. Everyone seemed to think it was my job, and I never questioned it.
“Our second baby was born on November 14. This released pressure from my tailbone, so it started healing. I was nursing the baby, and all was going well. The basement still contained boxes needing to be unpacked, many windows were waiting for curtains to be sewn, the toilet training of our toddler had hit an impasse, and I remember brief moments when I doubted that, should I live to be eighty, I would ever get my dishes and ironing all done at once, but all was well. My husband was enjoying his work, and the people were generous. We were showered with everything from eggs and chickens to cookies, honey, and cream.
“Then, about the middle of December, it happened. One of the Sunday school teachers asked me what I was doing about ‘the Christmas concert,’ referring to the Sunday school program. I had no idea what she meant. I repeated her words back to her, stalling for time: ‘The Christmas concert?’ Then she explained, as one might to a not-very-bright child, that the minister’s wife always took care of the Christmas concert. This meant she produced and directed it and usually wrote the script as well.
“The previous minister’s wife was an older woman with no children. She loved to do this sort of thing and had lots of experience. I, on the other hand, was a very young, very busy mother of two babies, one only a few weeks old, and I had never even taught a Sunday school class.
“The incredible part of this episode is that I did it. I really did, on two weeks’ notice, throw together some sort of a program. I still remember standing up there directing with perspiration streaming down my face. Immediately afterward I went home, nursed the baby, and collapsed in bed.
“They never should have asked, I never should have even considered the request, and my husband should not have allowed me to accept. But at that time none of us knew any better.”
An extreme case, perhaps, but this type of experience is not uncommon. Not many years ago, the accepted model of the minister’s wife was that of an active partner in ministry, and this was accompanied by certain expectations about how she would dress and tend the home, and what she would and wouldn’t do in congregational life. One wife said, “If I do too much, I’m ‘running things.’ If I’m quiet and reserved, I’m ‘not doing my share and fulfilling my role as the pastor’s wife.'”
Though most pastors’ wives I contacted said that changing times were easing some of the traditional expectations, some irritating assumptions remain. For instance, when the church can’t find anyone else for a particular job, “of course” the minister’s wife will do it, or “we can always get the minister’s wife” to give the devotions at the women’s gathering.
“It’s interesting that I’m the only woman in the church who is never thanked for doing a job,” observed one wife. “I like sharing my talents, but it’s hard to be taken for granted as if I’ve been hired to work here.”
Most wives find they are expected to fill in for their husbands as a listener and counselor. Many find that having people trust them with personal concerns is gratifying. Others, however, feel uncomfortable and ineffective in this role.
Some pastors’ wives take naturally to the challenges of the role. For most, however, there are at least moments when they feel lonely or out of place. According to the Leadership survey, it may be a greater problem than their pastor/husbands are aware of. When asked, “Has your spouse ever felt lonely or out of place in the congregation?” 68 percent of the pastors said yes. But when we asked the pastors’ spouses, “Have you ever felt lonely or out of place in the congregation?” fully 76 percent said yes.
One pastor who did recognize his wife’s feelings described the situation this way: “I have the greatest wife in the world, so any victory in ministry is a shared victory. But sadly, for her, the victory is always vicarious. But the loneliness is personal.”
The first step in addressing an issue is understanding the factors that contribute to the problem. What factors lead to this sense of loneliness?
Alone in a Church Crowd
Some of the factors can simply be peculiarities of a given church. For instance, sometimes the age of the pastor and spouse inhibits close friendships within the congregation.
“The leaders in our congregation, the people with whom we spend the most time, tend to be older than my wife and me. As a result, we feel a bit left out of relationships with people our age,” wrote a pastor on the survey. “Plus, we have no social life apart from the church.”
Neither are younger pastoral couples immune from the fact that mothers of preschoolers will naturally tend to feel isolated. “My wife’s most difficult times were when our children were very small and she was tied to home duties, while I was seldom at home during the day and sometimes not in the early evening,” confessed a pastor. “Her complaints struck sympathetic chords in me, but sympathy was not what she wanted!”
Another pastoral couple felt the same problem from the opposite side. “As we got older, the people who were coming onto our staff seemed younger and younger. We were mentors to them, but not exactly friends. We were old enough to be their parents. In the past, we’d been close with others on the pastoral team, but now they find their own web of relationships. And I think my wife feels the loneliness even more than I do.”
A more common reality that can increase the loneliness factor is that church members often see pastors and their spouses as different from ordinary folk. Some wives have mentioned that in Bible studies or small groups, people turn to them, expecting answers to troubling questions simply because they are married to a minister. These spouses feel awkward sharing their own honest doubts and unnamed terrors for fear of shaking the faith of younger, more fragile believers. Thus, instead of being a source of relief from loneliness, these groups only reinforce it.
“We pastored in a small town in the Midwest,” said one pastor’s wife. “The people were warm and friendly in church, but no one seemed to want to be close friends. I figured maybe they thought pastoral families wouldn’t be around long enough to form lasting friendships. But then I met a woman who seemed friendly and tenderhearted. She always asked how I was doing and how I felt about things. She would tell me she missed me if I was not at a service, but she never invited me to her home. After a Wednesday night prayer meeting, I invited her over for tea while our husbands had a meeting. She appeared hesitant, but she came. During the conversation, she told me she couldn’t be close friends with the pastor’s wife because it might offend other people. I was hurt, to say the least, and it made me hesitant to try to be close to any other woman in the church.”
Fortunately, not all churches share that attitude, But in any church, a bright spotlight seems to focus on the clergy marriage. The feeling of being watched can increase the feelings of loneliness.
David and Vera Mace, in their 1980 study of clergy couples, found that 85 percent felt their marriage was expected to be a model of perfection. They wrote, “Clergy couples are almost obsessed with the feeling that they are expected to be superhuman and to provide models for the congregation and community.” Another study notes that “Protestants consider their minister’s personal and family life as ‘tools for ministry.’ Unfortunately, family modeling is often measured by moralistic ‘thou shalt nots’ of public behavior rather than by how families handle deeper issues.”
The problem is not so much the high expectations but how the pastoral couple responds to them. If clergy couples are trying to live out other people’s expectations of a perfect marriage, it can be hard for them to deal with their own real marriage, which leads to a game of “let’s pretend.” As one minister said, “Congregations desperately need clergy marriages to work. They think that if their ministers can’t make it work, how can they? That’s an awful burden!” Even more stressful is when the couple knows they are falling short of these expectations, but they don’t feel able to ask for help.
Other contributors to loneliness emerge not from the congregation but from the natural tendencies of ministers themselves.
The education and emotional gap. A few years ago, I met Mary LaGrand Bouma, a pastor’s wife who has written Divorce in the Parsonage, and asked her, “What makes for meaningful communication in a ministry marriage?”
She said, “If I had to pick one thing, it would be commensurate education. That may surprise you — I know it certainly did me when I was doing research for a book on pastors’ wives. I interviewed two hundred ministry wives, and when I read through my notes, I said, ‘I can’t believe this.’ Healthy marriages in the ministry were those in which the wife’s education had not been cut short.
“Many wives work hard and long to put their husbands through seminary, and what do they get? A silent husband who assumes she cannot function on the intellectual level at which he has now arrived. I thought I had found an exception to this rule when I interviewed a pastor’s wife in Seattle whose marriage I knew was strong. I asked if she had studied beyond high school — and was suddenly embarrassed: she had not even finished high school. But as it turned out, neither had her husband. They were part of a group that didn’t require seminary or even college, and they had done a lot of informal learning together. As a result, they got along extremely well.
“The marriages in trouble were the marriages with big educational gaps. Why is that? You think differently once you’re college trained. That’s why I counsel ministry wives to get their college education, even belatedly if necessary.”
Another idea: “My husband and I would never have developed our common interest in evangelism if we had not gone to several seminars together. We would discuss the material and new ideas we had heard. After this refreshing time together, we would be inspired again for our ministry. We would set goals together to try some of the new ideas.”
The education gap can be narrowed, but often a major chasm, an emotional gap, remains.
David and Helen Seamands point out that this emotional distance often begins during ministerial training. “A communication problem often arises because the man is oriented to books and theology, and shows little interest in the practical things of the home,” says Helen. “He is attracted to the ministry because he loves studying the Word and digging into ideas; he conceptualizes everything. The kind of woman most attracted to the life of a minister’s wife is a warm, loving, people-person, who sees everything in terms of relationships. When these two get together, they have little common ground for communication.”
As a result, the wife can feel starved emotionally, because the husband is unable to express emotions well. “Often, instead of saying what he’s really feeling, he preaches at her a principle of marriage from Ephesians 5,” says David. “We’ve found that ministers who come to marriage enrichment retreats are tough to handle because they cannot identify or express feelings. Instead of sharing themselves, they preach.”
The secret is to work on staying in touch with one another on both intellectual and emotional levels.
The preoccupied pastor. Ministry demands concentrated energy and attention. Unlike an hour spent chatting about sports, an hour spent counseling a couple considering divorce can leave a minister emotionally exhausted. One pastoral couple described it as the difference between a bucketful of feathers and a bucketful of rocks — the measured amount is the same, but the scales tell a different story.
Many ministers struggle not to lose touch with their spouses in the midst of touching everyone else. If the ministry becomes a “mistress,” many times the children can adjust — they may not know any other lifestyle — but the wife is more likely to take it personally. She finds herself losing out to the other love in her husband’s life — his work. The irony is that part of the job of a pastor is to encourage marriage. As a pastor’s wife put it, “I know my husband is committed to marriage, but I’m not sure he’s committed to me.“
“At the church I’m a man on a mission,” confessed a pastor. “But at home my wife is asking, ‘But what about me?'” Even church successes can be misinterpreted. “I’m glad the ministry is going well,” wrote a pastor’s wife. “But when that’s the main thing he talks about, I feel that’s more important to him than I am.”
These factors, then, contribute to the all-too-common feeling among ministry spouses that they don’t quite fit. How can those of us in ministry help our spouses have a healthy church experience?
Helping the One Closest to Us
One ministry couple, Dennis and Barbara Rainey, discovered that the key to ministering to one another was shoring up one another’s self-esteem. Here’s how they described it in an article titled “What You See Is NOT All You Get” in the February 1988 issue of Christian Herald:
She was as smart as she was pretty. In fact, she was chosen as one of the university’s “Top Twenty Freshmen Women.”
As a child, this young lady received love and encouragement from her parents — and the example of a stable marriage. There was little stress for her. Life seemed perfect … until junior high.
While her other friends reached puberty quickly and began to develop physically, she did not. Her chest remained flat and her legs skinny, and her hips developed no contours. Throughout the first six years of school, she had felt confident, sure of herself, popular. But as she was slow to develop, she began to question her worth. This self-doubt was further fueled by her best friend, who one day asked, “Are you sure you’re a girl?”
Those words hit like a lightning bolt from a dark cloud. Fear that she would never develop began to whisper in her inner spirit. Her personality changed. She became quiet, reserved, shy. Comparing herself with others, she always came up short in her own eyes. She felt unpopular, unattractive, awkward, and alone. And no one knew of her fears.
Eventually, she began to blossom. In fact, she became very pretty, yet inwardly she continued to see herself as inferior, and she thought everyone else saw her that way, too.
Determined to forge a new identity, the young woman decided to go to an out-of-state college where she could start fresh. She succeeded. Honor after honor came her way. She pledged one of the top sororities on campus. She earned good grades, participated in numerous campus activities, and became very popular.
Yet no one, not even she, realized that at the heart of her performance was a little girl who was afraid to be known. The accomplishments gave her confidence a boost, but she still needed someone who really knew her to accept her for who she was apart from her achievements.
One year after her college graduation, she fell in love with a young man who appeared to have it all together. He was the extroverted, confident person she was not. Their whirlwind romance found them married after only four months of dating.
She later found out that, although he was secure, he had needs, too. He was impulsive, brash, and overzealous. And behind his air of bravado and pride, he was hiding some insecurities of his own.
After nearly a month of marriage, both began to realize much more was going on inside each other than they had bargained for. One night, after an evening out with some friends, they stayed up talking about how inferior she felt in public settings. Her questions about her worth stunned him. He couldn’t believe that this beautiful woman, his wife, could possibly feel that way about herself. He had confidence in her. But her withdrawn behavior at social gatherings began to irritate him. He silently questioned, Why does she retreat into her protective shell of silence, when I feel so comfortable with people? Why can’t she be like me?
After several of these late evening “chats,” he finally realized his wife really did have some serious self-doubt.
That young couple was us more than fifteen years ago. At that time, we had critical choices to make. Would Dennis accept Barbara fully and love her during her periods of self-doubt? And would Dennis be vulnerable and risk being known by a young woman who might reject him? The choices were real. The decisions were tough. In retrospect, we believe those days were among the most crucial in our marriage. In those initial months, the foundations of acceptance and the patterns of response were laid.
As our fears and insecurities surfaced, we also discovered the critical importance of a healthy, positive self-concept to a marriage. We began to recognize the magnitude of the responsibility we each carried in building up or tearing down the other’s self-esteem. And we both began to see that our own self-image either crippled or completed our marriage relationship.
This couple learned the importance of building up each other, which not only strengthened their marriage but also benefited their children and those to whom they minister. Because when people see how Dad treats Mom in everyday life, they also, without realizing it, develop an understanding of how Christ relates to us, his church.
What are some specific ways to shore up self-esteem in your spouse? Any good marriage book would suggest: showing warmth and acceptance, sowing positive words, seeing the past in perspective, offering freedom to fail, and so on. But in ministry families, the ministry to a spouse takes on some added dimensions.
Show her you enjoy your time together. You may not have twenty hours a week of private time together, or even ten, but carving out some relaxed, enjoyable time with your spouse is one of the most significant ways of telling her she’s important to you.
Robert Crosby, a youth pastor in New York, revealed the dawning of this realization upon him: “Twenty-five youth workers were, for the first time, cooperating to reach thousands of high schoolers for Christ. Definitely the biggest citywide outreach I had ever worked on was only two weeks away. Over the past six months, I’d spent countless hours of planning, promotion and perspiration. We were about to make history. I was ecstatic. My comrades were thrilled. My wife was disgusted. And I didn’t even realize it until I pulled out my personal calendar one day to look at the harried upcoming week only to find Thursday penciled in, please keep this day open for pam and kristi (my wife and daughter).
“We hadn’t had any heated debates or snide comments, but this action cut me to the heart. I had been having so much fun with the youth event that I had been perfunctory in my prior covenant of Christian service — spousing and parenting. Instead of a haven of rest and relationship, my home had digressed into a fast-food restaurant and a place to sleep at night.”
How do pastors find enjoyable time with their wives? Here were three of the more unusual ideas I came across:
1. “After the kids are off to school, my wife and I have a long, leisurely breakfast every Friday. We each take our calendar, and we talk about the schedule for the upcoming week and develop our ‘to do’ list. But we also talk about what’s happening in the family and make sure we’re looking ahead and asking, ‘When are we all going to be together this week, next week, and so on.'”
2. “My wife, Karen, helped me understand that staying away from home ‘to do the Lord’s work’ was oftentimes just veiled selfishness on my part. So we’ve divided each of our days into trimesters: morning, afternoon, and evening. We’ve agreed to give outside pursuits (including my church work) eleven segments, and no more than two are allowed each day. So, if I work in the morning, and I have an evening meeting, I do not work in the afternoon. Unless an emergency arises — and it rarely does — after eleven segments, I’m done for the week. It was difficult, but in time, I worked five days a week. At the same time, Karen enjoyed two sacrosanct segments per week to be away from the children (and me, if she desired).”
3. “Between the kids and church activities, we have virtually no uninterrupted hours in the evenings. At night we’re both emotionally exhausted, and I realized if that was the only time we were spending together, that was poor planning. So we look forward to a regular midmorning rendezvous. The kids are off to school, and I’ll come home from the church for a couple of hours. It’s quality time to get reacquainted emotionally and sexually.”
Protect her from the system. At times, “the system” — the expectations of a church — can become overwhelming. One way to build self-esteem is to help confront those unrealistic expectations. Sometimes it’s easier for the pastor to say “enough is enough” for his wife than it is for her to do it herself, and this support is a powerful affirmation. Here are a few ways this has been done by pastors surveyed:
“I recognized that I’d encouraged my wife to be involved in church ministries — Sunday school, children’s church, etc. — which is good, but in our case it had been overdone. She was missing valuable contact with people our age. She didn’t have any fellowship. We worked together to be sure she had a chance for social times.”
Another pastor on the survey wrote: “My wife has sometimes felt out of place, usually as a result of unfair criticism or gossip suggesting she does too much or not enough, says too much or not enough, etc. We talk it out, and then, at times, I’ve stepped in with a loving confrontation with the critics over the phone or in person. In most cases, this has resolved the issue — and it’s certainly brought my wife and me closer together.”
A pastor’s wife wrote: “Recently a group in our congregation asked my husband to volunteer me for a certain job that he knew would have been an emotional trauma for me. He told them he wasn’t even going to ask me, because he knew it was not something I should be doing. I was grateful he protected me that way. Knowing he’ll back me up is a big morale booster.”
Encourage her search for friendship. Most pastors recognize they cannot be everything their spouse needs: confidant, companion, counselor, pastor, closest friend. As one wife said, “When my husband is my pastor, I keenly feel the lack of having someone else to turn to in times of personal or spiritual need. If I’m ‘spiritually dry,’ for instance, or if I’m having difficulties with my husband, I wish I had another pastor to go to.”
In addition, because of their position, pastors’ spouses may find it harder to talk to a counselor — sometimes because of their own reluctance to admit difficulties, other times because of the attitudes of would-be counselors.
One wife told of being at a large hospital during the time her son was dying. She desperately needed someone to talk to besides her husband. A social worker came to see her, but as soon as she learned this grieving mother was married to a minister, the social worker said, “Then you won’t be needing me.”
The answer, of course, is to find a friend. For some, this has been someone in the congregation; for others, someone from the community; for still others, another minister’s spouse has become a close friend. But for both the spouse and the pastor, these friendships have proved a treasured gift. As one pastor wrote, “The greatest help for me in dealing with the pressures of ministry was when my wife found some other ministers’ spouses who shared her outlook on life and ministry.”
To Serve and to Protect
One of the most sensitive issues in the husband-wife relationship is whether or not to have secrets. Are there things that should not be shared with a spouse? This is a particularly complex area for ministry couples.
The task of a spouse is to both serve and protect his partner. Serving includes self-disclosure — discussing what’s going on, especially things that affect your emotional condition, job performance, or future in the church. On the other hand, pastors must maintain varying degrees of confidentiality, which may preclude telling everything they know. In addition, a number of pastors feel that “to protect” their spouses includes not revealing information that would only cause unhealthy emotional distress.
Here’s how some pastors have sorted the times to share and not to share.
What to share. Michael E. Phillips, who pastors at Lake Windermere Alliance Church in Invermere, British Columbia, discussed in a 1988 Leadership article some of the things he makes sure to tell his wife: “Almost everything that goes on in my life. From the seedling thoughts of a sermon series to the interesting details of a half dozen home visits, my wife shares my day. She relishes the high points, looks appropriately concerned over the troubled moments, and adds her observations whenever she feels it’s proper.”
That scenario holds true in most pastors’ homes. But to be a bit more specific, Phillips identifies two subjects that he’s always prepared to discuss with his wife:
1. Difficult decisions. “Every so often, my wife and I celebrate ‘Want Ads Day.’ It’s an event that is cherished by neither of us but demands dual participation. At regular intervals, the pressure of pastoral responsibilities convinces me there must be a softer wall to beat my head against. Therefore, I tell my wife that we are going to look through the classified ads to see what other job I could pursue. Kathy’s role is to convince me I really don’t want to do anything else. But she has to be subtle; I feel I’m facing a tough decision.
“At the end of this madness, we fold the paper, and then my wife asks me what’s getting under my skin. Usually, I’m trying to decide if God is calling me to adjust my ministry, or even to change the location. It’s always a difficult decision, so I share it with the one who would be directly affected by it. Life throws up difficult decisions the way a plow digs up rocks. They seem to be always there, always annoying, and always tricky to handle by yourself.
“Several months ago, I became concerned that most of the elders were not attending prayer meeting. I decided to confront the issue at the next board meeting by proposing changes in the format of the prayer time, lecturing the board, and soliciting their attendance on Wednesday nights. With glee, I described my plan to Kathy. Her face soured, and she came right to the point: ‘Do you really want a prayer meeting full of guilty, shamed elders? Maybe they all have good reasons for not being there.’ She then left the room, leaving me to my decision. I knew instantly that she was right. The beauty of her intimate counsel is that it combined objective integrity with conjugal caring. She knew me and she knew my board. And because she wasn’t directly involved, she saw the problem with greater discernment than I did.”
2. Points of growth. “In my ministry, I take great pains to be transparently honest, showing the congregation that I’m flesh and blood, failing and burdened. I believe it has been effective in that people accept the Word of God from their sinner-pastor with a belief that if I can live it, so can they. Over the years, I have found it progressively easier to discuss intimate failures and personal points of growth.
“Yet it is so hard to do the same with my wife. She even remarked to me a few years ago that if she wanted to find out what God is teaching me, she would have to pay closer attention to my sermons. I was properly corrected. It’s part of human nature to fear pain from our most intimate relationships. But it’s part of good mental health to overcome that part of human nature.
“A caution: it’s essential to understand our problems prior to laying them out before anyone else. We need to be sure we can describe things accurately before we alarm our loved ones. Can you imagine a company’s telling its stockholders every conceivable problem in the firm? The stock would be worth zero, even if the company had very little the matter with it.”
Other pastors have added a third category of subjects that should be shared with spouses.
3. Problem resolutions. A pastor in Kansas told this story: “My temptation is to tell my wife about church problems, but when the problem is resolved, I’ll forget to tell her how it has worked out. As a result, she can get a picture of the church that’s skewed toward the negative.
“I had a problem with our former pastor talking with members of our congregation and second guessing my initiatives. I shared my frustration with my wife, and she joined in my feelings. Later, when I was able to sit with the former pastor and clear the air, I discovered he had not been trying to sabotage my ministry; the people in the congregation had misrepresented what he’d said.
“My mistake was in not talking about that with my wife. Oh, sure, I told her I’d patched things up with Mel, but I’d spent hours talking about the frustrations and a minute or so describing the resolution. It wasn’t fair to my wife. I notice she’s still defensive when we’re around Mel. I did her a disservice by poisoning her attitude.”
What not to Share. Marriage counselors talk about open, honest communication between husbands and wives. But there are dangers in openness, depending upon the spouse’s interests and capacity to handle stressful information. As one Canadian pastor said, “God lays upon each person a different yoke. There are aspects of my calling that my wife is not called to bear.”
One pastor who responded to the survey was concerned about raising his wife’s frustration level with a troubling situation when she couldn’t do anything about the situation: “When I return from a difficult meeting, usually I can work through the personalities and pressures that cause people to criticize me, but if I give too detailed an account to my wife, she carries it around for several days, and it affects the way she sees these people. So there are some things, especially conflicts, I don’t share with her because I’ve learned she doesn’t take it well.”
Other pastors want their spouses to be unbiased toward certain people, so they don’t share negative things that might prejudice them. Others want their spouses to be free of intra-church controversies as much as possible. “My wife finds that some people will test her to see how much she knows,” says one minister. “They’ll say things like, ‘It’s a shame about MaryLou, isn’t it?’ And my wife is glad she can honestly say, ‘I don’t know. What happened?’ It allows her to be free, spontaneous, and affectionate toward people.”
Michael Phillips identifies a few other categories of unwise topics of conversation.
1. Others’ attacking me. “I once asked my wife to describe the one thing I had told her that was harder to handle than any other. Without hesitation she said, ‘The letters you showed me last fall.’ The previous autumn, I had received a series of nasty notes from a former member of our congregation. Clothed as prophetic words, they were vindictive slanders and generally throw-away advice. After a while, they were laughable. Without thinking, I showed them to Kathy one night. It took her a long time to go to sleep that evening. All she could think about was the dirt this person had thrown my way.
“She was much more upset than I was. Her protective feelings were creating a whirlwind of emotions, alternating between bitterness and anger. Thus I learned that it’s a major mistake for us to unload second-hand attacks on our wives.
“What I do now with a situation like that is simple. If I have to tell someone, I tell my prayer partner. He’s a good friend, has broad shoulders, and never gets upset at attacks on me. He thought the letters were funny; he even got me laughing over them. Kathy still doesn’t laugh when she sees the letter writer and his wife downtown. She has, however, worked her facial muscles up to a smile, bless her protective heart!”
2. My attacks on others. “Inevitably, I will have opinions on various members of the flock I pastor, some of them negative at times. This doesn’t mean I don’t love them and desire the best for them, and God is able to adjust my opinions in the course of time, too. But when one person in a family lets off steam, pressure begins to build up in those who are listening. If I voice my personal misgivings about others to my wife or children, I no longer have any control over what those careless words will produce. Understand that my wife is not a gossip and is certainly not vindictive. My comments will taint her viewpoint, however, even if only slightly.
“Several years ago, we had a young Sunday school superintendent who I felt was not getting the job done. I told my wife about his mistakes, and I told her on numerous occasions how upset I was with him. Finally, God convicted me of being the one in the wrong, for I had not spent any time praying for and training the man. As I rectified this, he showed smooth progress in his ministry. My wife was not aware of this turnaround, however, and I noticed over a year later that she still had a critical attitude toward the man. The blame lay firmly on my shoulders. I apologized to her and asked her to forgive me for tainting this young man in her eyes. I also vowed inwardly to keep my most vindictive vents of steam to myself.”
3. Ultra-sensitive issues. “With one of my college professors, it was common knowledge that if you asked him a question about black holes, even if it were only remotely connected to the topic at hand, he would wax eloquent on the subject, and the rest of the class would be history. We used to call him ‘Black Hole Rollie.’ We knew the topic that set him going. In the same way, I know the kinds of discussions that set my wife’s mind buzzing. Each person, and each pastorate, has a different set of these terrible topics. For some of us, it may be learning of a church member’s financial irresponsibility or doctrinal deviation. For others, hearing about even long-past sexual misconduct may create only unhealthy agitation. For still others, talking about how other people discipline their children gets the blood boiling.
“So Kathy and I have discovered that there are some issues too sensitive to discuss — unless we’ve got a long, uninterrupted time together to fully process the topic. Ours are so sensitive I’m not even going to tell you what they are.”
Phillips offers some help in discovering what those ultra-sensitive issues might be. You’ve probably found one when you uncover a topic that:
1. Contributes to obvious feelings of uneasiness in your spouse;
2. The two of you cannot constructively deal with;
3. You yourself feel uncomfortable discussing;
4. Leads to conversations whose long-term effect is only negative.
It takes time and mistakes to discover what these “don’t tell me” issues are — for yourself and for your spouse.
These elements help a spouse have a healthy church experience. But perhaps the most critical element is developing a vital and authentic spiritual life as a family, the subject to which we now turn.
Copyright ©1988 Christianity Today
