Fitting Ministry into the Family

Long before God called me to be a pastor, God has called me to be a responsible and loving human being.
— Steven McKinley

I was a young pastor, recently called to serve as solo pastor of a medium-sized congregation that had grown “stale.” I threw myself wholeheartedly into the challenge, using all my skills and energy to lead the congregation into a lively commitment.

I was also a young father. Our first-born daughter was about 2 years old at the time. I do not remember the exact circumstances. I only remember that it was a typically busy time in the life of the congregation. I attended meetings late into the night and returned to the office early in the morning.

The parsonage was only a sidewalk’s width away from the church, so most days I came home for lunch. One day at lunch, my wife reported to me a question our daughter had asked that morning.

“Does Daddy ever come home and sleep with you any more?”

By the time I would get home evenings, our 2 year old was asleep. When she awoke the next morning, I was already back to the office. In her beautiful innocence, she wondered if I ever came home for the night.

In recent years, “family values” have become a major political topic. Though we might not agree on the definition of family values or on which political program bests supports them, we pastors tend to agree that the American family today is in crisis. We see it in the people we serve: in marriages breaking up, in children rebelling, in teenage suicide, in families torn apart by busyness.

I have decided that if I’m going to decry the sorry state of the modern family, I had better first start with myself. Though I’ve been tempted to think otherwise, workaholism is no more commendable in the parish pastor than it is in a rising junior executive. This is one thing my daughter’s innocent question helped me realize.

Long before God called me to be a pastor, God called me to be a responsible and loving human being. And he graced me by giving me a wonderful family with which to live out that calling. While God’s grace can certainly cover the sin of neglecting that call, I still long to live up to it and to my call to minister to a congregation.

How Do We Do It?

Over the years, I’ve found several patterns that work for me, assuring I carry out my family and church responsibilities.

1. Creative family time. Responsible pastors work long and hard hours. But our schedules still offer us the great advantage of flexibility. Pastors do not punch time clocks. We do not report to supervisors who want to make sure we are on duty from 8:00 a.m to 5:00 p.m. every day. We can take advantage of that flexibility to do things with our families that other people are not able to do.

Early in my ministry I came to terms with the fact that I would be attending meetings or making calls three or four nights every week — and sometimes five or six. Usually I am out the door soon after supper. And it is not unusual for me to leave the rest of the family still at the table.

So I decided to begin coming home around 4:00 each afternoon. When our children were young and in school, that meant I arrived home about the same time they did. That’s when we had our family time — before supper, not after. I routinely head to the office by 8:00 a.m. at the latest. If my work load is particularly heavy, I will get there by 7:00 a.m. This does not disrupt our family life. Everyone is getting up and going. Our youngest daughter catches her school bus at 6:45 every morning, so there is no reason for me not to be ready to go when she is.

With my wife back in the work force and two of our children grown, I use this late afternoon block of time to visit with our youngest and to prepare dinner for the family. When my wife gets home, we eat together, and I can dash out the door in time for my evening commitments.

I’ve come to look forward to this late afternoon routine, especially to making dinner. Everybody has bad days, and sometimes making dinner is my most concrete accomplishment.

When our children were still in school, I always made a point to schedule in parent conferences and special school events. If they were in a program at 2:00 p.m., they could count on my being there. Our children appreciated that. Many other parents could not be there. I can honestly say I never missed a school program or a parent conference.

At the beginning of every school year, I got into the habit of going through the school calendar and putting the one- or two-day school breaks into my calendar. I then kept those days as free as possible.

And before my wife returned to the work force, we used my flexibility to make time to be together. Many times we played a round of afternoon golf or ate lunch at our favorite restaurant or went shopping. Particularly in the summer, we made use of my flexibility, when the church calendar was less crammed.

2. The board is not an ogre. Invariably the church’s schedule runs head-on into the family’s schedule. I have found assertiveness — letting people know my family comes first — is sometimes worth the trouble.

When our oldest daughter was a junior in high school, she was elected to the National Honor Society. What a thrill for her and us! But the induction of new honor society members was scheduled for the same night as the monthly meeting of our governing board.

I stewed over that one for some time. Finally I went to our board president, explained to her our circumstances, and informed her I would miss that month’s meeting. The resistance I had expected did not materialize. She sent me off with her best wishes and congratulations. The board met. Productive business was transacted. But I, the pastor, was not there. I was sitting in a high school auditorium, rejoicing with our daughter.

My own willingness to be assertive about my family responsibilities gives everyone else in the church the same freedom. As a matter of fact, we encourage our people to be protective about their family time. I accept the fact that I as pastor will be involved in church work three or four nights each week. That comes with the territory. But when I see the same people showing up for choir, adult classes, and committees, until they are spending three or four nights a week at church, I begin to worry. The church may be doing more to tear families apart than enabling them to be together. So we let our people know up front that missing meetings, when it allows them to be with their families, is perfectly acceptable to us.

3. The accessible pastor. Fred is an engineer, designing complex machinery to manufacture the products his company specializes in. Norma develops computer software. Todd is comptroller of his company. Jean assembles medical devices. They all do difficult and specialized work. Their spouses and children have only the vaguest understanding of what it is they do during their work days. Their families seldom see their workplaces. The people they work with are known to family members only by names. Their work worlds are totally separate from their home worlds.

My family belongs to the church I serve. They sometimes see me doing my work. The church building is familiar to them. They know the people with whom I work. They have a basic understanding of what Dad does. They’ve heard my sermons, attended weddings and funerals, sat in classes I’ve taught.

They understand that sometimes Dad will get an emergency call to help someone in the congregation. They know that Dad talks with people to help them find solutions for their most pressing problems. While I respect confidentiality and do not reveal details of my counseling, they do know what counseling is, and that their Dad does it.

My work is accessible to my family. They share in it with me. They understand why I am sometimes sad, sometimes frustrated, sometimes elated. That they do brings us all closer together.

4. Enough is enough even when it’s not enough. I drove into the familiar driveway of the congregational president. I walked up to the door, rang the bell, talked for a few minutes, handed him the keys to the church and the parsonage, exchanged hugs and handshakes, got back into the car, and drove away. Some weeks earlier I had announced my resignation, having accepted a call to another church. By the time I presented my church keys to the church president, the moving van was already bound for our new home.

That was ten years ago. I still remember the unique feeling that everything was done. The baton was passed to a new pastor. I had completed everything I was going to do as pastor of that church. My work in that place was finished.

That was the last time I had that feeling. A few days later, I started work in a new congregation, picked up a new baton, and since then have never ended the day with everything done. There is always another visit, another telephone call, another sermon or class to work up. I do have days when everything on my to-do list is checked off. But even then, I’m still aware of the things I should have put on my list, but did not.

That can drive me crazy — and make me compulsive. Through the years I’ve had to discipline myself to quit before I’m finished, to recognize there will always be more to do than I can get done in a day. For my own health and the health of my family, I’ve forced myself to walk away from the church at an appropriate time.

Of course, in the event of a scheduled appointment or emergency, I stay longer. But at the beginning of most days, I know when I will leave at day’s end. When that time comes, I leave, whether I have done everything I wanted to that day or not. And besides, there is a good chance I’ll be back in the evening.

5. We don’t have to do much. It is easy for me to be less than honest with myself and with other people. I am dishonest when I excuse my lateness or my neglect of the family by saying, “I had to call on Mrs. Miller,” “I had to finish the chapter I was reading,” or “I had to finish the newsletter.”

Did I really have to? Probably not. As a human being, I have to eat, sleep, and take care of bodily functions. As a pastor, I have to preach and lead worship at a specified time, attend the meetings of the governing board, and do a few other essentials. Beyond that, I do the things I do because I have decided to do them.

If I call on Mrs. Miller, it is because I have decided to call on Mrs. Miller. My decision may have been right; Mrs. Miller may have needed a call. But I decide when I am going to do it. The world would not have ended if I had skipped the call to Mrs. Miller. The cause of Christ would have endured, even if I had stopped in the middle of the chapter. There really aren’t many things I have to do at any specified moment.

The schedule of my day is not something forced upon me. It is something I decide for myself. Therefore, my position as a pastor does not force me to neglect my family. I have the freedom to decide what portion of my time will go to my family and what portion of my time will go to my work.

I once visited a widow of a pastor soon after her husband’s death. She expressed great sympathy for me as a father:

“You have to work such long hours that you never have time for your family. When our grown children came to their father’s funeral, it was the first time in years they were inside a church. They always thought of the church as the enemy, something that took their father away from them. Now they’ll have nothing to do with the church.”

I felt sorry for her, for her children, for her late husband. But the hard truth was and is that the fault was not the church’s. It was the fault of her husband, who would never be honest with himself.

6. To each her own. When I arrived to be pastor of one congregation, I was pursued by a ghost. My predecessor’s wife had been the “perfect pastor’s wife.” When my predecessor made pastoral calls, she tagged along. She attended most church meetings, just to play hostess. She sang in the choir, attended all circle meetings, and filled in at the church office.

Her ghost chased me around for months. When I would show up to make a pastoral call or attend a meeting, a few questions on my wife’s whereabouts arose. Every circle expected her to participate. When my wife did not show up at their meetings with me, the church’s organizations were surprised. There were thinly veiled hints that these were the things a pastor’s wife was supposed to do.

These are not the things my wife does — never has, never will. She is a dedicated Christian, committed to the local church, but she prefers to minister in her own ways, believing her best contribution to the church is to be a good partner in life with me. And that’s all right with me.

As I manage my own time, I also try to manage the pressures put on my family to live up to someone’s stereotype of a pastor’s family. If I don’t buy into that stereotype, my family doesn’t have to shoulder that heavy burden.

In this case, I dealt with this ghost, first, by ignoring it. I brushed aside the pointed questions and overlooked the thinly veiled hints. I took every opportunity to praise my wife, to build her up in public, to let everyone know that I was absolutely delighted with the way she supported me and the ministry of the congregation.

Second, I trusted that people would eventually appreciate the ways my wife would contribute. For instance, she did a marvelous job of helping our altar guild get better organized and worked with a number of creative people in creating a beautiful set of banners for the congregation.

I knew the ghost was finally gone one afternoon when I stopped by a women’s circle meeting. When I stepped into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, the bearer of power of the group followed me. In our brief conversation, she made it a point to say, “I always resented the way our former pastor’s wife followed him around, as though he couldn’t be trusted to do things on his own.”

The Best Reason Why

I’ve set down some actions I have taken to fit ministry into my family and my family into the ministry. But as I reread what I have written, something is missing.

Call it joy.

Balancing ministry with family life is not a burden to me. I don’t do it because it is the right thing to do. I do it because nothing in life gives me more joy, more sense of fulfillment, than the time I spend with my family. After twenty-five years of marriage, my wife still quickens my pulse with a smile or the touch of her hand — as much as she did when she was a blushing bride.

These thoughtful, sensitive, intelligent young adults our children have grown into are among my favorite people. Whether hashing over our work days with the older daughter, talking baseball with the middle son, or bowling with the younger daughter, I thoroughly enjoy spending time with them. Nothing is more fun than those times, which are now all too rare, when the entire family is home, sitting around the dinner table, playing a board game, watching a TV movie, piling into the car to go somewhere, or simply enjoying being together.

We do not live in Disneyland. We have our squabbles now and then, just like anyone else. But the good times are much more common.

I do not wedge my family into my schedule because it is my duty, my responsibility — even though it is. I do it because nothing in life makes me happier than the hours I spend with them.

“I Was a Fool”

Several years ago I wrote an article on pastors and their families for a denominational clergy journal. Soon after that article appeared, I received a letter from a respected pastor who had retired not long before.

He was widely known and admired for being the powerful pastor of a large church. He had led his congregation through a period of incredible growth. Loved by his people, he was a recognized leader in denominational circles. He retired in a blaze of glory.

But his letter shocked me: “I was the model pastor. I was a slave to the church. I served the people. I neglected my family. I was a fool.”

I think of his words now and then. I remember my young daughter’s question: “Did Daddy come home and sleep with you last night?” I think of the alienated, embittered spouses and children of pastors I have known over the years, those who knew the church only as a rival, an enemy.

Such incidents speak to me the way Scrooge’s ghosts spoke to him in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. They remind me that time is fleeting, that I still have a chance, but that chance will not be forever. They remind me of how precious my family is, of the responsibility I have to my family, of the delight I have enjoyed and have yet to enjoy.