Tension in the ministerial family is as old as Moses and Zipporah on the way to Egypt. Those who speak for God have never been immune to the stresses that plague husbands and wives, parents and children. In fact, their work makes their home life more vulnerable than most, while the stakes run higher. The nightmare of every church leader is that his high calling may be discredited by family meltdown.
In the following forum, three pastors and a pastor’s wife consider the hazards. Their discussion centers around a troubling but insightful book, Man of Vision, Woman of Prayer (Nelson, 1980) by Marilee Pierce Dunker, daughter of the famous Bob Pierce, who founded World Vision, one of the largest Christian relief and development agencies. “We are used to frank biographies, especially of film stars and entertainers,” wrote Eternity magazine’s reviewer, “but this book sets a new record for the evangelical world. It is amazing that the daughter who chronicles this heartbreaking story clearly loves-yes adores-her father.”
Bob Pierce’s ministry began in southern California in the late 1930s, and by the end of World War II, he was a fast-rising comet in the Youth for Christ movement. His wife, Lorraine, held faithfully to her husband through times of both exhilaration and disappointment; life with Bob was a breathtaking crusade to reach the most for Christ in the least amount of time. His vision took him to China twice before the Bamboo Curtain dropped; two 1950 trips to Korea broke his heart. He founded World Vision that year to try to help the thousands of war orphans and others who were literally freezing and starving to death.
The emergencies of a desperate world never let up after that, and neither did Bob Pierce. His accomplishments were prodigious; the number of children receiving care went from 2,200 in 1954 to 20,000 ten years later. Meanwhile, the needs of a wife and three daughters back home paled by comparison with the agonies overseas. The book chronicles the gradual breakup of a gifted, driven man. His emotional circuitry begins to malfunction around 1963, his temper becomes harder to control, and leaves of absence do not suffice. A 1967 face-off with the World Vision board results in his leaving the organization he founded; the next year his eldest daughter, then twenty-seven, commits suicide; and in 1970, Pierce is legally separated from his wife.
The final eight years, until his death of leukemia in 1978, are a gauntlet of alienation, harsh words, and suffering for everyone. Only in the last week of his life comes one shining evening of reconciliation.
The Pierce tragedy, though lived at the pinnacle of a worldwide organization, harbors many of the same forces that pressure local church leaders. In that, it is a warning to everyone involved in ministry. The four participants who delineate that warning are: Gordon MacDonald, pastor of Grace Chapel, Lexington, Massachusetts, and a current board member of World Vision; C. B. Hogue, now pastor of Eastwood Baptist Church in Tulsa after a long pastoral career and ten years of denominational work that required much traveling; Mary LaGrand Bouma, wife of the pastor of the Christian Reformed Church, Hammond, Indiana, and author of two books, including Divorce in the Parsonage; Kent Hughes, pastor of College Church, Wheaton, Illinois. Among the four, they are the parents of sixteen children altogether.
Leadership: Each of you has now read the story of a Christian leader who was publicly revered but personally chaotic. What feelings did this book arouse?
Kent Hughes: I would have to say it made me angry. At times I almost doubted the man’s faith. When, near the end, he refused to forgive, I kept thinking, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”
I felt that here was a man who did not try very hard at home. He fell into some easy rationalizations, the most flagrant being that if he took care of others, God would somehow take care of the Pierce family.
Mary Bouma: My feelings of anger seemed to build the longer I read, even though the daughter has given us a loving portrait. I was struck by the fact that spiritual gifts in a person’s life do not necessarily mean spiritual maturity. Bob Pierce was obviously very gifted, but also very self-centered. Where were the counselors who should have stood up to him and exhorted him?
Gordon MacDonald: My feeling for him is deep pity. I don’t mean to excuse him, but he was a product of his age. The late 1940s and early 1950s were made for high-octane people like him. He came along from childhood with great insecurities-and started a movement. He assumed the Lord would somehow take care of his family; a whole generation was brought up to believe that. Thousands of post-World War II missionaries did the same thing.
Down through the centuries of the church, it has often been the unbalanced, highly emotional person who has awakened the masses to a new reality. The Pierce model can be seen time and again.
Bill Hogue: I didn’t feel anger, mainly because I too have done a lot of traveling in the ministry-and every so often I think about what could have happened to me. I was rather swept by a feeling of pathos for both Bob and Lorraine Pierce, because of the missing ingredients that each of them never quite found.
He carried a tremendous need for fulfillment, an insatiable drive to accomplish, that never seemed to be met. There was also a lack of stability; they never really managed to put their roots down and establish a true mooring to come home to.
But we must not forget the fact that in addition to psychological explanations, there is another force in the world who delights in capturing spiritual leaders. In this case, the Evil One succeeded.
Leadership: Juan Peron, the Argentine dictator, once said, “Only the fanatics accomplish.” Do you agree?
Kent: I don’t like to concede that, even though I admit Gordon’s point about many great founders being imbalanced. I remember hearing Bob Pierce preach, and it was always a string of emotional stories, mingled with tears . . . then the handkerchief would come out . . . it was the outpouring of a deeply agitated soul.
Gordon: I don’t care for the word fanatic, but I know what you mean. Leaders like this are never listeners. They speak; you give ear. You don’t advise them, and you certainly don’t disagree with them. If you do, they simply go on to the next person. That’s almost an inevitable mark of strong founders of organizations.
Kent: Does it have to be that way?
Gordon: The ideal scenario would be that all of us, in our compassion and sensitivity, would see the needs of the world as Bob Pierce did, propose action, and others would witness to the validity of our vision-but that’s not the way we are. We live in a fallen world. So every once in a while, a driven personality comes along to shake us and get us going. God seems to use the somewhat dark dimensions of humanity to launch beautiful things.
But for every Bob Pierce who succeeds, of course, ninety-nine others fail. Their weakness catches up with them.
Bill: Leaders like this, at some point along the way, make a commitment to a cause, and after that they are unstoppable. Frequently that commitment arises from a catalytic experience-in Pierce’s case, the 1947-48 trips to China. Something snaps in their minds, and they say, “This is what I can do, and I’m going to do it no matter what.” Their commitment is settled; from that point on, don’t confuse them with the facts.
Gordon: Bob Pierce came from a childhood of poverty, and when he saw the poverty in Korea, he instantly identified with it. Here were needy children like he used to be.
Leadership: On page 115 Marilee Dunker quotes one of his letters home: “I feel ‘sovereignly sent’ toward whatever it is that is just ahead.” Was he?
Bill: He believed he was. In his mind there was no doubt that God had laid a hand on his shoulder and told him to rescue as many Korean children as possible.
Sometimes, however, we make decisions in the name of God because they fit our personality and interests. I have people in my church who come with open Bibles claiming, “I just got a word from God,” and you can’t shake them until they hit bankruptcy. One man plunged into a business because “God told me to do it,” and his family has suffered terribly.
There are times when you really do get a word from the Lord through the Scriptures. But there are other times when you only assume so because of personal wish.
Leadership: What other early problems do you see that should warn us?
Gordon: I would have been disturbed over something that, oddly enough, impressed people in those days: his proneness to tears, his abnormal intensity, his inability to respond with balance. He could weep over individuals and masses alike. Why?
I remember as a small child when a couple came to my father, and the fellow said, “Pastor MacDonald, we’d like you to marry us, and on our wedding night I’d like to preach.” What was he trying to prove?!
My father wisely told him he belonged elsewhere on his wedding night.
Mary: There’s the point where Bob Pierce was away from the church and, apparently, the Lord for more than a year. He comes back, falls at the altar, rededicates his life to God-and the next Sunday his father-in-law reinstates him as the youth pastor of the church. This only encouraged his pattern of instability.
Kent: I do reflect that in those years, nothing much was happening among evangelicals before highly energized men like Pierce and other Youth for Christ leaders came along. We owe them a great deal for getting things moving, creating excitement and visibility. But in the rush, they got by with things that should not have been overlooked.
Bill: When a young man or woman made a commitment to Christian service in those days, everybody got excited. The person showed a little bit of gift-and people exaggerated it, poured coal to the fire, pushed the person toward prominence as quickly as possible.
Gordon: Do you remember that key moment in 1947 when Lorraine was just emerging from an emotional collapse, and Torrey Johnson, the president of YFC, came to her bedside to plead that Bob be released to go to China for youth campaigns? What could she do? She desperately needed him . . . but those were the days of war heroes, and the man who would give up family and go to dangerous places was highly revered. Two weeks later, Bob Pierce got on an airplane and was gone for the next four months.
Bill: I’m old enough to remember those years. The GIs had given themselves in total, unselfish service . . . we were soldiers of the Cross. We would do the same.
Gordon: By contrast, Lorraine Pierce had prayed as a teenager, “You know I love you, Lord. But don’t ever ask me to marry a traveling evangelist!” A sense of place was extremely important to her, whereas Bob was the opposite. My wife, Gail, and I are somewhat the same, and we’ve had to compromise on this. A house was never that important to me growing up as a preacher’s kid, but Gail considers a place to call one’s own extremely important.
Mary: Throughout these early years, Lorraine doesn’t seem to share her own spiritual insights with her husband. She is obviously a woman of prayer and the Word, but she keeps it to herself. She doesn’t give him the benefit of her wisdom.
Leadership: Why was Bob Pierce’s public ministry so compelling?
Kent: For one thing, his cause was so valid. He brought American audiences face to face with human need. Most of the evangelical church hadn’t awakened to that before.
Gordon: He had a charisma like no one you’ve ever heard. Someone told me, “When you went to hear Bob Pierce, you made sure you had nothing in your pocket but a bus token to get home,” because he had a way of almost literally putting a vacuum cleaner over the audience and extracting every dime.
Kent: I heard him in the later years, after he had been to Switzerland for his physical breakdown, after his daughter had committed suicide. And still he preached for nearly two hours, appealing for support of his latest relief project. It was amazing.
Leadership: What did you make of his private expressions of love and devotion? Marilee Dunker includes scores of letters in her book. What does “I love you more than life” mean when you’re gone six months at a time?
Kent: Well, I suppose I wouldn’t want most of my private letters published, either. But in his case, there seemed to be an affected piety throughout.
Leadership: Don’t words lose their meaning when you use them so often? Do ministers turn into professional wordmongers, putting holy phrases into microphones so much that verbal Christianity gets divorced from flesh Christianity?
Gordon: Yes, that’s a problem. The flesh part of living is denied, and the energy is put into romantic statements instead. C. T. Studd wrote the same kind of letters from Africa and didn’t see his wife from 1916 to 1929, when she died in Spain.
Leadership: Then what does love mean in the mouth of a professional?
Gordon: To some of these people, you could love your wife . . . and then explain away the separation as the ultimate sacrifice. It was a living martyrdom.
Mary: Now we understand better what commitment means. We’re more in touch with our feelings, but we understand that love is not basically feelings; it’s action.
Gordon: The thing that frightens me is that thirty years from now, our children will sit down and have a conversation like this about us! We think we’ve got it all together-but my kids will look back and say, “Dad was a good guy and tried hard, but boy, was he stupid!”
Bill: Mine are already doing it! (Laughter.)
Leadership: What makes for meaningful communication in a ministry marriage?
Mary: If I had to pick one thing, it would be commensurate education. That may surprise you-I know it certainly did me at the end of my research for my book. I had interviewed two hundred ministry wives, and when I went back and read through all my notes again, I said, “I can’t believe this.” Healthy, communicative marriages in the ministry were those in which the wife’s education had not been cut short.
Many wives, of course, 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 was strong, I knew. 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 with each other.
The marriages in trouble were the marriages with big educational gaps.
Leadership: Why is that?
Mary: You think differently once you’re college-trained. A liberal-arts education prepares you to discuss things conceptually. And even if the wife is somehow innately gifted in this area, her husband is all too likely to dismiss her gift because she doesn’t have the academic proof. That’s why I counsel ministry wives everywhere to get their college education, even belatedly if necessary.
Gordon: This problem is compounded if a wife becomes a mother too soon after marriage. It’s very easy for her to go on “intellectual hold” for eight to ten years, unless her husband is sensitive to her need to grow.
Leadership: You spoke earlier of Bob Pierce’s insecurities. Is that common in ministerial ranks?
Gordon: I believe it is fairly safe to say that most leaders are insecure. In fact, insecurity is one of the greatest urges to leadership. It works like this: insecure persons approach a mass of people and do one of two things. They either climb on top of the group in order to control it and make life predictable, or else they crawl under the group and become invisible.
There are outstanding exceptions to what I’ve just said, but I believe it describes the majority of leaders, including pastors. That’s why when I speak to pastors’ wives, I say, “Begin with the assumption, until proven false, that your husband is an insecure man.”
Leadership: Are you insecure, Gordon?
Gordon: Yes, I am. God has helped me to face it and then build scaffolding around myself to deal with it, but it’s true. For example: I rarely get into trouble politically in the church, because if you disagree with me, I’ll instinctively assume you’re right and I’m wrong. Five seconds later, I may come back and say no, I’m right after all-but in those five seconds, I have avoided a lot of bad words!
In my marriage, it’s the same way. My first instinct is always that Gail’s right and I’m wrong.
Mary: Then what percentage of the people in the world are insecure? It seems like that’s one of the big excuses these days-everybody’s “insecure.” My daughter said one day after I’d told her for the fifteenth time that our foster daughter was insecure and needed special consideration, “I am so sick of insecure people that I have to go around protecting all the time! What about us secure people-don’t we have rights, too?”
Gordon: Secure people are great, average folks. They are the middle managers, the schoolteachers, the muscle of society. But they rarely create great movements or generate great ideas.
Bill: So up with insecurity!
I admit I’m insecure. It hurts me deeply when somebody doesn’t like me. Why don’t they like me? There’s got to be a reason. Is it my tie? Was it something I said? Did I handle them wrong?
Gordon: That’s what makes you a people person, Bill. Your insecurity drives you to major on decoding people, reading every little snatch of body language, facial expression, and so forth. You’ve become an expert at reading the silences and noises of people, and so they say, “He’s a fine pastor-he loves us.”
Kent: I’m an insecure person, too, but I married a woman of superior ability. She has almost a legal mind; she reads a lot and thinks very clearly. She’s so confrontive that she can nail me when I need it.
Mary: Then you’re not as insecure as you might think, if you can benefit from her alertness.
Leadership: But all too often, it’s easier to be out with people who don’t confront. Marilee Dunker writes about her father and overseas missionaries: “Daddy loved these people; in many ways he felt more at home with them than he did with us.” Can this happen in a local church?
Bill: Certainly. Betty and I had four children, three of them in diapers at the same time. (In those days, I didn’t have any sense, and neither did she!) And then we adopted a girl who was not of our race. I had been the youngest of eight sons and no daughters, and Betty decided we weren’t going to have eight sons trying to get a daughter. So we got one in another manner. What was I doing all this time? Running all over creation. I was totally insensitive to what she was going through day by day.
She now knows my deep feelings of regret about that.
Gordon: The greatest trap for a pastor is to love people where there are natural boundary lines. In the church, you can reach out to people as much as you want-and then withdraw. When you’ve had enough, you ask for your coat.
You can’t do that with your family; you have to go home to them. You have to love unconditionally. If that’s hard for you, then you travel like Bob Pierce did.
I sense myself doing the same thing with my congregation. “I love you, I want to meet your needs,” I say-but then when they come and want to be close to me, well, my calendar is full for the next five weeks.
Leadership: How much can a married person travel without damaging the family?
Gordon: I don’t think people should take on apostolic ministries until their parenting responsibilities are largely finished. Gail and I are now in our twenty-third year of marriage, with one child in college and the other in high school, and we find that we appreciate the spaces. When I’m gone for three days, she gets an amazing pile of things done, and we find it works to empower the relationship. When I get home, she has all kinds of things to share with me-books she’s been reading, experiences, things God has been putting into her heart-and we have hours of tremendous conversation.
Leadership: But don’t you have to deal with quantity somewhere along the line? How many nights a year can you be gone?
Bill: I’ve probably traveled more than anyone here, and I don’t think you can state a figure. The key is to have an understanding of why you are gone and to spend quality time together when you’re home.
Leadership: Wouldn’t Bob Pierce say, “I did all that. There was a reason why I was gone: I was doing God’s work. We had an understanding”? And as his daughter says, he was away an average of ten months a year for fifteen years straight.
Kent: One problem was the assumption that God could not work if he was not on the scene. He was ubiquitous; wherever the action was, Bob Pierce was there. Pastors can slip into the same pattern, even in small churches. That’s why they’re out every night of the week.
You have to believe deep inside that you are expendable. God doesn’t need you.
A friend of mine was once called to fill a pulpit while the pastor went on a four-week vacation. On the second Sunday, my friend was shocked when he stood up to preach-there was the pastor sitting in the congregation. The man simply couldn’t bear the thought of having the service go on without him.
Leadership: Mary, how much travel is too much?
Mary: It depends on the relationship, but the wife should definitely be consulted. I’m an independent person who can be happy with my husband gone a few days-I don’t have to cook big meals! But some women feel differently, and whatever their feelings, they should not be ignored.
Bill: We’re back to the subject of insecurity, aren’t we? Some women have no personal fulfillments apart from their husbands. They think of themselves as objects to be used, and if the “user” is not present, then they are at loose ends.
Mary: There aren’t many of those left, at least not in the younger generation.
Gordon: I have a new question: how much travel is too much for the person doing the traveling?
I think traveling can become a narcotic. The minute you fly 700 miles from home, you become a novelty. The crowd eats you up; you’re treated like a superstar, taken to the nicest restaurants, put in the best hotels. You become larger than life. And if you are not broken before God regularly, the travel will do a job on you very quickly.
You come home high as a kite, raving about how the power of God was upon your ministry, and your wife says, “Yeah, well, back here there were dirty diapers and a leaky faucet and the car needs antifreeze.”
In the book Marriage to a Difficult Man, Elizabeth Dodds tells how every time Jonathan Edwards went on a trip, Sarah Edwards went into depression. She felt pressured by the responsibility of the congregation he was leaving behind, and by the time he would come home, she would be filled with resentment.
Leadership: Most pastors don’t get the chance to fly 700 miles away-but they do get to travel to church for the Tuesday night board meeting, the Wednesday night prayer meeting, the Thursday night committee session . . . can the same things happen in miniature?
Bill: Absolutely. It’s only a matter of various levels. When you’re a pastor of 200, you get asked to speak to the Lions’ Club. The same process is in effect: you come home telling how great you were, and she’s unimpressed.
Gordon: And it’s exacerbated if there’s any duplicity in the pastor’s lifestyle. If she sits on the front row on Sunday morning watching him preach, smile, and pray but keeps remembering the Thursday morning blow-up, the integrity gap widens. And when the congregation pours out love and affection in his direction, it only makes her angry.
Kent: If, on the other hand, he is living authentically, and she is developing her ministry as well, whether it be speaking or writing or something else, the two can rise together. There’s a great potential for both to grow in ministry.
When my wife says to me, “What you said this morning didn’t ring true,” I have a choice. I can either reject what she has to say, or I can own up to it. Or maybe she has stated only a partial truth, and I need to ascertain my degree of authenticity.
Gordon: In our home, we have always encouraged disagreement. When the children expressed the slightest difference of opinion with me, I always tried to say, “Let’s roll with that-tell me why you think that way.” It’s all right for a father to say, “I was wrong. I made a mistake.” I determined early on that I was not going to carry the burden of always being right.
As far as I’m concerned, my only responsibility at home is to make sure somebody is in charge at each moment. It may be me, it may be Gail, it may be one of the kids. When Mark learned to drive, I would say to the rest, “OK, as long as Mark is behind the wheel, he’s in charge.” We have learned as a family always to find out who’s in charge at a given moment, and it has taken a great burden off me.
Leadership: Did any of your wives read the book? What were the reactions?
Gordon: For Gail and me, it was yet another warning. We feel like we are walking on cut glass every day. We have been surrounded, it seems, by failure-moral, marital, emotional-and we don’t entertain the idea for one moment that we are immune. We’re all only a step and a half from trouble, and if we don’t listen, if we don’t surround ourselves with the counsel of wise people, we too will end up taking ourselves too seriously.
The older I get, and the larger my perimeters of ministry, the more frightened I become. I am doing things now that in my twenties I fantasized about-and I’ve never wanted to run so hard in my life. I’m doing it out of obedience to my call, but I see how dangerous it is, and I’m afraid of what it might cost in my marriage, my spiritual life, my emotional health-but I don’t see any way to go back.
Kent: My wife was very angry, not so much at Bob Pierce as at the kind of Christianity that allowed such a thing to exist. I feel the same way about the current teachings on prosperity. Christians are so stampeded and intimidated by people who seem successful. Nobody stands up and takes exception.
Leadership: Earlier we were saying that Bob Pierce was a product of the postwar era. But are you also saying that here in 1983, “there but for the grace of God go we”?
Gordon: It’s worse today than ever. Satan is more seductive than he ever was.
Leadership: How so?
Gordon: Television is showcasing Christian leaders who live incredible lives. The money that is flowing to speakers and musicians-it’s frightening.
Leadership: What about ministerial families? Are they in greater danger now than the Pierces were?
Bill: Yes, because the age is far more materialistic as well as humanistic.
Mary: And divorce is being sanctioned as never before . . . even promoted. Lorraine Pierce hung tough to the end and refused to give in to her husband’s attempts at divorce. How many women would stand like that in the 1980s?
Leadership: Why don’t alert Christians resist these negative trends in leaders?
Gordon: For the same reason they didn’t stop Bob Pierce. I’ve talked to some of the World Vision board members from the past, and they have said with tears in their eyes, “We were only laymen. Every place we looked, we saw effectiveness; we saw God’s blessing upon that man. He asked us to join his board. Who were we to tell him he couldn’t do what he was doing? He had started the movement. We saw his poor business methods, but he always came out smelling like a rose, and we said, ‘The man has a gift of faith-we can’t stand in his way.’ “
Kent: There was no way to call him to accountability.
Leadership: What are the red flags for the non-celebrity today, the pastor of the average-sized church?
Mary: Questions to ask: Are you taking advice from anyone? When were you last challenged, and how did you handle it?
Gordon: I will thank Gail to my dying day for teaching me to be a listener. In our early days we’d be driving home from a get-together, and she’d say, “Did you hear what so-and-so was trying to tell you?”
And I’d say, “What do you mean?”
And she’d tell me, and I’d get mad-until I called the person the next day and found out Gail was dead right. I hadn’t heard what the person wanted to say.
A pastor has to learn to ask good questions, to draw people out.
Kent: Another crucial understanding is that God doesn’t need us to do his work. It is our privilege to serve him. So while I take my work seriously, I must not take myself too seriously.
Leadership: Gordon, if you had been on the World Vision board in the 1950s, do you think you would have had the courage to speak up?
Gordon: Well, I don’t know-it would have been very tough. I have made some strong speeches in more recent times, and as one result, I’m now chairman of the personnel committee, whose main duty is to look out for the spiritual welfare of the key executives. I’m very committed to World Vision and pray for its leaders every day, and we are not going to let this happen again.
At my church, I have ten associates. When I sit down with each of them, I don’t ask how their particular program is coming. I leave that to our administrative pastor. What I am most concerned to ask is “Where are you with God today? Tell me about your marriage. How much time have you spent with your kids lately? What are you reading? How would you say your spiritual disciplines are coming along?”
Mary: What about senior pastors? Who pastors them? Who asks them the hard questions?
Bill: We senior pastors have to remind ourselves constantly of two things:
1. Not every good thing that happens to us is a “Praise the Lord.” A flow of money or accolades or recognition is not necessarily proof that we have entered into a special relationship with God.
2. Authority does not equal infallibility. People in our congregations, out of respect for the pastoral role, often assume, “He’s my pastor; he can do no wrong.” But we can-and if we do, they are horribly disenchanted.
Leadership: How are ministry families affected, for good or bad, by transience?
Gordon: My father-pastor made three moves while I was growing up, with the result that geography has never been significant to me-only relationships. I learned to be adaptable, and I’m glad. We’ve raised our children to do the same, to consider all of the pastoral lifestyle a privilege.
On the other hand, it hit me with force a few years ago that if my lights went out in an airplane crash someday, Gail and the children would also lose their home, their church, their community, their school, and their intimate friendships. That’s when we decided to buy a place up in New Hampshire.
Bill: When my youngest son was applying for a university scholarship, he of course had to list all his various awards and positions throughout his schooling up to that point. On his application, he closed with this classic statement: “I would have enjoyed fulfilling all of these responsibilities had it not been for my nomadic father.”
Moving is tough on children, to be sure. But it can be tragic for the minister himself if it occurs because he has lost the desire to grow. He has a set of sermons that he keeps recycling, saying, “Well, I’ll be moving in a couple or three years anyway.” When that happens, he has become a robot in ministry.
Mary: One day in a new parsonage I found my twelve-year-old daughter arranging her bedroom precisely as it had been in the previous place. When I asked her why, she replied with a sudden grown-up air, “I read in a magazine that one way to minimize the trauma of a move is to arrange your bedroom the same way as before!” Later on she announced, “Nobody should ever move a child at this age-it just shouldn’t be done.”
Gordon: When I was a kid, I was brought up to believe that the Lord sometimes said “Move,” and you moved-right now, no questions asked. If you were in the middle of the school year, it didn’t matter.
It’s much different today.
Mary: The PKs I’ve interviewed have generally been positive about their situation. The only exceptions have been where the father was under fire. Some PKs have been told, “Your dad ought to get out of here”-that’s devastating.
Gordon: About four years ago I had to make a terrible decision about whether to move into another form of leadership outside the pastorate. The key moment was one Thursday night when Gail and I said, “Let’s see what the kids think.” We outlined the new position with all its benefits but then added that I would not be a pastor anymore.
Kristi looked at me and said, “You mean you wouldn’t be preaching every Sunday?”
“No.”
“You mean we wouldn’t go to a church where you’re leading?”
“No.”
The tears started. Mark said, “We wouldn’t be PKs anymore?”
Such a prospect was beyond their imagination. My decision was clear from that night on.
Kent: The same thing happened to me. I was having a hard time in a small church, and I began talking about alternatives. My kids all began to cry and said, “But Dad-you’re a minister.”
Bill: When I was asked to become director of evangelism for a state convention of churches, I was pastor of a fine church. One Sunday morning after worship, as I was coming down the aisle, a couple of elderly women stopped me. One grabbed me by the arm and said, “Now Brother Bill, tell us again what you’re going to be doing.”
I decided to impress them with the official title of my new job. “I am going to be the secretary of evangelism for the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma,” I announced.
She looked at me for a moment, completely puzzled. Then she asked, “Well, do you take shorthand?” (Laughter.)
Before I could explain, the other lady said, “Oh, what hurts me the most is that you’re leaving the ministry.”
Gordon: Bill, when you made that move out of the pastorate, what effect did it have on your family?
Bill: Some of them were already in college or soon headed there. But for my wife, it was traumatic. We talked many, many hours about that. I took her with me on the road as much as possible, and she also got involved in teaching at a church. But it wasn’t easy.
Mary: I talked to one woman who got a divorce at such a point. Her husband moved into a campus ministry without consulting her; she was not college-educated, didn’t feel comfortable in that setting-and that was the end of the marriage.
Gordon: In other cases, pastoral marriages are cracking because men and women are viewing their work more and more as a career, not a calling. Gail and I have come to believe that the greatest coming crisis in pastoral ministry is the growing number of pastors’ spouses who want their own careers. They would be horrified, Mary, that you walked in here this morning and introduced yourself as a pastor’s wife. That’s totally out of bounds.
Mary: Yes, I know-they tell me so! They say, “You’re an author; you’re not a pastor’s wife or a homemaker.” It’s odd: a chemist can write something and still be called a chemist, but when I write something as a pastor’s wife, people right away want to change my label.
Gordon: When the pastorate becomes a career, it is only a job. It sounds good to say, “OK, one person in this marriage will do a pastor’s job while the other does a social worker’s job or a lawyer’s job”-but it doesn’t work that way. I fear for the quality of pastoral ministry in the 1990s as this mentality proliferates.
Leadership: Isn’t this in some sense a reaction against the Lorraine Pierce experience? Contemporary wives are saying, “I’m not going to submerge my life for the sake of his ministry; I’m not going to be taken for granted. I’m going to be totally separate.”
Gordon: Yes. No one defends what happened to Lorraine Pierce. But the ditch on the opposite side of the road has problems, too.
Mary: Sometimes pastors’ wives tell me, “I didn’t know he was going into the ministry. That all came up after the wedding.” I feel for them, because often they haven’t even been consulted.
But once they are there, I say, “Do you believe in the sovereignty of God, or don’t you? God has put you into this marriage, you’re both Christians-now you rely on 1 Corinthians 10:13 and go on.”
Bill: I’ve been in a lot of churches and a lot of parsonages over the years, and I can see how the modeling of some pastors’ wives aggravates this misunderstanding. When young women see a pastor’s wife who always sits meekly on the second row and never says anything because of her subservience, no wonder they think I don’t want to be like that. On the other hand, if they observe the opposite-the aggressive pastor’s wife who essentially runs the church-they may assume that they, too, can do anything they like in such a role. Both are distortions.
Leadership: What are some of the things that have worked for you in maintaining family health?
Gordon: When we entertain Christian leaders in our home, it’s amazing how many of them will totally ignore my wife. All their comments and questions are directed to me. So I’ve learned to play a little game. When dinner is ended, I spring to my feet and begin clearing the table. I take my sweet time loading the dishwasher and cleaning up the kitchen, thereby forcing this man to sit and interact with Gail for twenty or thirty minutes.
By the time I come back, he’s found himself in the presence of a woman who can ask very good questions and is often better-read than he is.
Most men have few good conversations with women. They rarely get into anything beyond problematic or programmatic subjects.
Mary: Bill, how did you and your wife wind up with three sons in the ministry and the fourth one a doctor? What did you do to encourage their spiritual potential?
Bill: I’m not sure I know. I do remember the greatest compliment I ever got, when one of them said, “Dad is the same at home as he is at church.” Apparently the ministry was not something foreign. It was in harmony with the rest of our lives.
Betty instilled in each of them a strong sense of their worth. I tried to show my esteem for them by making quality time to be with them. Whenever they played basketball or football, I was there. Many times I remember being reprimanded by a church member for not running to the hospital or agreeing to a committee meeting at a certain time, but I held firm.
The other thing was quality vacation time. We did the two things you couldn’t do where we lived in west Texas. We’d either go to enjoy the water or else the mountains. I didn’t try to study or do a lot of reading on vacation; I was there simply to spend time with the kids.
Mary: But how did they get pointed toward the ministry?
Bill: We laid our hands on them and committed them to Christ while they were still in their cribs. After that, we didn’t push one vocation over another, so long as they would be faithful to God and the church. The central question was “What does God want you to do? What is he saying to you about your life?”
One of my boys-the big football player-had more fun in university than I would have liked, and he always brushed me off by replying, “Dad, I think God’s calling me to be a millionaire.” (That would have been fine with me.) But gradually he got involved with the Baptist Student Union on campus, and then became a director of student ministries. Finally one day he called me and said, “Dad, I want you to come over and see me.”
“Well, what do you want, Rod?” I asked. “I can’t come right this minute.”
“Dad, it’s very important to me that you come,” he answered. “I want you to come and lay hands on me in a different way than you used to. I really think God has called me to preach.”
Leadership: How does the pastor’s wife influence this kind of process in the children?
Gordon: The wife is the emotional pendulum of the family. Everyone else catches her moods and, to some degree, responds similarly. If she is joyful about the ministry, the children will be too. If she’s a martyr, the kids will hate their lot in life.
Gail has always made sure, to the best of her ability, that the mood is up and even when I come home for dinner. I’ve often heard her say to groups, “My husband works in a disordered world. The people who seek him out generally have disordered lives. He has to have a place of order to which he can retreat.”
So the supper hour is sacred for us. She’s given standing orders to the kids to be home then, no matter what. We take the phone off the hook and enjoy sixty to ninety minutes together. The memories of those times are precious. Sometimes we’ll have a little period of prayer; sometimes somebody will burp and we’ll never make it through the prayer for all the hysterics. When I was a kid, you had to stifle the laughter, but not at our house. You just go ahead and roar.
Bill: Now that all five of our children are married, Betty and I are continually amazed at how they plan to come home at the same time. The entire clan gets together once or twice a year, even though they range from New Orleans to Canada. They work their schedules so they can be home together and play like a bunch of kids again. The spouses don’t know quite what to think, but it’s beautiful.
Kent: From the time our four have been little, Barbara has said again and again, “Aren’t we lucky your dad is in the ministry?” And the kids say, “Yeah, he could be a salesman or a truck driver and be gone lots of nights-this is so much better.”
Another little thing: she always says, “Dad’s at work,” not “Dad’s at church.” Everybody else’s dad goes to work, and so does theirs. We think that’s an important point to make.
We try to let them see the privileges that go along with the pastorate. For example, they get the run of the church building-gymnasium and all. They get to go along on trips where I’m speaking.
Gordon: I made a commitment years ago that when each of my kids turned sixteen, I would take them on a trip they would never forget. In Mark’s case, that forged a relationship between us that is the basis of discussion to this day. Next year will be Kristi’s turn.
The other thing that binds us together is that from the very beginning, I’ve always sat on the front row with my family during worship services, not up on the platform. I go to the pulpit only when I have a specific task to perform. Otherwise I’ve always been sitting there stroking my children’s hair, scratching the back of their necks, kneading their shoulders and they never wiggled a muscle for fear I would stop. We never had a behavior problem in church with either of them.
Now that they’re older, they simply would not miss a church service-and I’ve pondered whether their faithfulness is not built to some extent on a subconscious association with good feelings of warmth and intimacy.
A side benefit has been that most of the families at Grace Chapel sit together. We’ve never said they should-they just do it from watching us. They don’t know any differently.
Kent: I got to thinking one day about the pastoral image as viewed by my sons. In some ways, pastors are not totally masculine-they’re always dressed up, always neat, always in a shirt and tie. That’s when I decided to do more outdoors things with them, to teach them to hunt and fish. I enjoy those things myself, but a second reason was so the ministry would not come off entirely prissy in their eyes.
Bill: Have you ever noticed how preachers are portrayed on television and in the movies? They’re almost never strong, masculine types. I took some of the same steps, Kent, to make sure my three boys knew their dad was a man like anybody else’s dad.
Leadership: One way to summarize Man of Vision, Woman of Prayer is to say, “Here is the result of a philosophy that says, ‘Ministry first, family second.’ ” What’s your philosophy? Is it so simple as to say, “Family first, ministry second”?
Kent: I don’t believe in splitting the two. As Gail MacDonald says in her book to pastors’ wives, “Your family is the Lord’s work.” When my children were young, I wrote them into my schedule just like other people. I’d come and take them out of school early just to go get an ice-cream cone or fly a kite; I didn’t care what the school authorities thought.
Now that all four are teenagers, they remember those times. Instead of feeling deprived as children of the parsonage, they feel honored.
Bill: If the wife has the same sense of calling to ministry that the husband does, there is unity. A wife is not just baggage brought along. Together they model a relationship to the whole church. People come to know Christ in a personal way because they see Christ in her as well as in him.
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