“I read recently that 80 percent of seminarians come from large churches, and yet 80 percent of the churches are small,” says Alban Institute consultant Roy Oswald. He calls that “a cross-cultural barrier as tough as any foreign mission field.”
In fact, he goes so far as to say “the difference between seminary religion and parish religion is greater than the difference between denominations.”1 In other words, it is easier to grow up Baptist and switch to Methodism than to move from a seminary to the pastorate of one of its supporting churches.
Most pastoral couples know exactly what he is talking about. They remember the heady intellectualism of seminary life, the animated conversations with classmates about how to reform Christendom, the dreams of future honor and achievement in the parish. Then came reality.
The transition is softened somewhat when a couple starts on a large-church staff. Expectations often run lower and are less focused. To become the one and only pastor of a small church, on the other hand, is to face major adjustment.
Thankfully, most young pastoral couples have a secret defense: flexibility. They can stand anything for a while. There’s always tomorrow. Don’t all professionals have to start at the bottom and work their way up? This too shall pass.
One couple remembers serving a congregation so nasty that “it wasn’t actually a church; it was a group of mean people who got together on Sunday mornings,” says the husband. “I finally ran an experiment: I preached on hell and judgment three Sundays in a row, just to see what would happen. At the door an elder commented, ‘Finally learnin’ how to preach, son.'”
What made this whole ordeal bearable was that this was a student pastorate—simply a way to pay the bills during seminary. “We had great family life during those years. Our favorite time of the week was Friday night, when we’d sprawl on the floor with our three little kids and watch ‘Planet of the Apes.'”
Such memories make for lively reminiscing at ministerial coffee breaks now. The hard times of early days are tossed off with a chuckle.
But for others, the first-church experience is no laughing matter.
They came expecting to make allowances, of course. They knew they would have to get along with a board. They were prepared to be watched. They had some notion that there would be cherished traditions in this congregation. What they were, of course, remained to be discovered.
But the pressure turned out to be far greater than imagined. More than one wife has found her behavior suddenly subjected to a new and unfamiliar grid: How will this reflect on the ministry? She has not been accustomed to evaluating every move, every word, for its public relations impact. Her husband, however, may have unconsciously posted a dictum over the home straight from 1 Corinthians 10:32-33: “Give none offence, neither to the Jews, nor to the Gentiles, nor to the church of God: Even as I please all men in all things.”
In other cases, both husband and wife find themselves in culture shock. They can hardly think of doing anything as leaders in the ministry; they are too consumed with their new state of being. Yet ministers are supposed to be pro-active. How?
The following case studies show couples who have survived these threats to pastoral marriage. The “Reflections” sections are provided by Dr. Gary Collins, psychologist, author, and professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.
Jeff and Linda Francisco brought more than fourteen years of higher education to the shady streets and quiet sidewalks of Hooper, Nebraska, a farm town fifty miles northwest of Omaha. Jeff, a native of Boston, had begun working with Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship while in seminary, helping dorm Bible studies get going at Harvard and M.I.T. and guiding students toward an adult-level faith. Linda was a well-trained minister of music at a Cambridge church who was continuing her studies at a conservatory. They were both twenty-six years old when they married.
Campus ministry with a parachurch organization was exciting but hectic, and there was always the pressure to keep one eye on fund raising. Linda taught high school to help make ends meet, but after Jennifer was born, she could only substitute. Jeff began to think about how he actually enjoyed preaching, and when his denomination invited parachurch workers such as himself to prepare for ordination via a fast-track seminary program, he signed up. Within six months, the Franciscos were on their way to Hooper—”a good, solid church,” said the bishop.
They moved in the dead of winter. The first Sunday went well enough, although as Jeff looked around at the eighty worshipers, he realized young faces were few and far between, and he would have to learn to communicate more with grandpas and grandmas.
Following his natural instincts, however, he issued an invitation for the confirmation class (all four of them) to come for dinner the next Friday evening.
That Tuesday morning, Linda had her first caller. Boxes were still piled high in the parsonage dining room, and the new pastor’s wife was in jeans preparing to tackle the mountain. Jennifer had just gone down for her nap when the doorbell rang.
It was the wife of the church chairman.
She was the kind of person who gave you the distinct impression she wanted you to know her life was all put together very well.
She sat down and wanted to know if I would have tea and cookies with her.
I said, “Well, I can find some tea; I don’t know about the cookies!” Her son was one of the confirmation kids who’d be coming three days later. I said, “I’m glad you’re here; do you mind wandering around with me while I try to find my way through this confusion here? I need to get some things unpacked.”
And she said, well yes, she did mind. She would rather sit down, and could we have tea together at the table?
Linda gulped and began clearing off a space. The woman soon made it clear that she didn’t think much of mugs, and so the search began for legitimate cups.
I sat down thinking, Oh—so much to do! We talked for a little while. And then she looked me right in the eye and said in a breathy tone, “Linda—how are you doing?”
I gasped. I felt suddenly just a little naked in front of her. I don’t remember what I finally said, but I must have made light of her comment; I didn’t know what she was expecting from me.
That was a fatal mistake. It was soon followed by another, when Linda finished her tea and then said, “I’ve really enjoyed talking with you, but if you don’t mind—I have so much to do. The baby will be waking up soon, and you’re welcome to stay and chat here while I just sort of wander back and forth.…” The woman quickly excused herself.
By the next weekend, Jeff was hearing through the congregation about how ungracious his haughty wife had been. He came home to demand, “What in the world did you say to her?!” Linda was doubly shattered—not only that the woman had slandered her but that Jeff had not immediately trusted and defended her.
She told herself she would need to be far more careful from now on. Was this really what every pastor’s wife went through?
By the next month, Linda was again pregnant. She began to be homesick for Boston. A blizzard raged across the prairie, and then another one; people darted from their homes to the post office to the grocery store and back inside again, hardly speaking. Linda felt depression and anxiety beginning to set in.
She mentioned it to Jeff one night. He brushed it aside by saying, “I’m sure you’ll be better when spring comes and after the baby’s born.”
Linda met one woman in the church about her age who became a prayer partner. A measure of trust developed. One week as they met, Linda pulled back the curtain of her life just a bit. “I’m having a hard time these days. I really feel kind of … well, it’s hard to describe. Some nights I’m not sleeping. I think I need to get some help. Would you pray for me? What do you think I should do?”
The woman visibly recoiled, as if to say, You didn’t really want to tell me this, did you? She could not make her exit fast enough. Her own marriage, in fact, was disintegrating, but she could only allude to the problem, not discuss it.
This reinforced Linda’s aloneness.
I was always put on a pedestal at church. In a superficial sense I was very much loved and doted upon—my birthday was over-celebrated, for example. It was almost like a compensation going on.
Meanwhile, people were aching and bleeding all over that church. But nobody would deal with it.
The loneliness deepened, the crying, the headaches. Linda began to think about all the Inter-Varsity friends she missed. She kept brooding all that summer, facing each day with a tight lip.
A quiet desperation was brewing inside, part of it aimed at Jeff: Why doesn’t he hurt the way I do? She wanted him to understand her feelings. But at the same time, she didn’t want him to fall under the weight; she wanted him to remain strong so she could lean on him.
Jeremy was born in November, and she was temporarily happy about giving her husband a son. But within weeks, the roiling clouds of depression returned. She had no hint of the voltage building up in their gray masses.
A pastors’ conference came to Omaha in February. Jeff registered to attend, and when he realized a number of old friends would be there as well, he urged Linda to find a baby sitter for one day.
It was a marvelous splurge of renewing old acquaintances. After every session, another familiar face would materialize in the corridors to exclaim, “Hi! How are you?” Conversation would fly at breakneck speed for the next ten minutes, trying to cover years of absence. Then there would be someone else—another session—someone else—someone else, from morning to night.
It was exciting. Jeff and Linda drove back to Hooper that night exhilarated. They thanked the woman who had cared for their two children all day and then fell into bed exhausted.
Sometime after midnight, the nightmares began. Faces … old friends, fading in and out of Linda’s view … young associates from Boston … members of the church … coming toward her, moving off to the right, the left … leaving her alone.
All of a sudden, I started hallucinating. I can’t quite describe what happened. There were lights and visions, and I started crying and screaming. I sat bolt upright in bed, and Jeff did too. I was trembling and sobbing. I tried to tell him, “Everybody’s leaving me! No one’s staying around.” Even Jeff had been so busy with the church. I remember thinking, The only people in the world who don’t fade in and out of my life are my two kids.… There’s no permanence to any relationship I know.
Jeff clung to his wife and tried to calm her. The trembling and sobbing subsided after a while. Then she grew more agitated again, as a new thought struck her brain: I bet I’m so bad they’re going to take me away from my children because I’m an unfit mother! The two little people who in some ways oppressed Linda with their many needs, yet were so dependent upon her and were at least reliable to be there—what if I lose them, too? She became hysterical, pleading with Jeff, “Don’t let them take the children away!”
Jeff pulled her close and simply said, “I will stay right here and hold you until morning.”
Linda says now, “That was probably something I had needed for months—just to be held. Not as a prelude to anything else, but just because.…”
When the sun came up across the frozen fields, Jeff quickly got on the phone to a doctor. Linda was given a physical examination that day and then a 100-question test to measure stress build-up. When the nurse brought in the results, the doctor’s eyes grew large as he tried to hold his composure. Finally he said, “We assume that anyone who accumulates 350 points will have trouble making it through the day.… You have 720 points.” He began asking if Linda had contemplated suicide. She confessed she had but said the children kept her from it.
Linda was sent home with an antidepressant, some tranquilizers, and an appointment to begin seeing a psychiatrist. Every day for the next week, the medical doctor called to see how she was doing. The drugs began to take effect, and she calmed down.
Her only new worry was what if the church found out what had happened. That embarrassment was dealt with, however.
Jeff and I decided we wouldn’t make major announcements, but in the course of being who we were, we’d let people know what was happening with us. Even if some looked askance, we needed to do this, because I couldn’t go on living a facade anymore.
Several people responded sympathetically to that, while others were very frightened by it, and others pretended they didn’t know. But for me, it was very good.
Linda went through two series of therapy, the first to get her through the immediate crisis and teach her how to care for her own mental health. Jeff went along to the appointments, to learn what he could as well. The psychiatrist held them accountable for things like dates together and even getting to bed on time so they would not be irritable the next day. Jeff came to understand more about his wife’s emotional disposition and how insensitive he had been to her needs. He says:
As you can tell, Linda is more forceful, one who deals with a situation. I’m more laid back and think most things will resolve themselves without my effort. She’s more dominant in pushing for resolution, wanting to see how the pieces will fit together.
I guess I keep referring to a confidence in God, that he’s going to give us wisdom and help us put things together, and I don’t have to see everything in black and white. Maybe I do that too much.
They learned that Jeff’s natural desire to be a pacifier had been short-circuiting some needed confrontations. The counselor explained that when a basic commitment exists between a husband and wife, it gives the latitude to slug it out, to wrestle with the issues. “You have a greater freedom to confront and resolve things because you are secure; you know the other person is not going to turn on his heel and walk out the door. This is a great asset; use it,” he said.
One issue to be aired was leisure time. Jeff, while working hard in a difficult church, could always stop by the YMCA in the next town for a workout while doing business there or making hospital calls. It was a healthy outlet for his body and mind. Linda resented that—and then scorned herself for objecting; after all, her husband needed the exercise. But when was her turn?
Jeff would say, “Well, I’ll come home from the church early one afternoon a week, and you go run.” The idea of running at four-thirty in the afternoon left her cold.
Time for more talk, more accommodation, more understanding.
By the time Linda had been in therapy for a year, she was feeling much better about herself. She could cope with mothering, with the pace of life in Hooper, with the requirements of her role.
It was still very difficult for me to write; it was probably three years before I wrote a letter. An emotional paralysis would come over me whenever I sat down to write to someone who knew the real me. There was so much I wanted to say I didn’t know where to start. I’d just dissolve in tears right over the paper.
But in time, Linda began to reach out to her world once again. A women’s Bible study in the church developed more authenticity under her guidance. Although many women were threatened by its openness and dropped out, some remained—not only young mothers but one woman in her seventies as well, who became Linda’s surrogate mother.
Near the end of their four years at this church, another daughter was born, and Linda remembers this as a happy time. She calls these years “a significant growing time for us. We learned to notice the signals of trouble. We learned to communicate about our needs before reaching a crisis point. We learned to hear one another.”
Reflections
by Gary CollinsThe early crisis in this ministry marriage is created in part by the education gap. The Franciscos are like many seminarians who graduate, go into a little community, and get immediately frustrated. Even students who say they’re glad to get away from the books find this happening. It’s a form of sensory deprivation.
Instead of books, they find people like this chairman’s wife, who come bounding by the parsonage for visits at inopportune moments. Or the pastor goes to his study, and the sight of his car outside the church becomes an invitation for drop-ins. (We seminary professors didn’t talk much about these kinds of problems.)
It seems that whenever I talk to pastors, no matter how well prepared they are for the ministry, I hear about situations in which somebody in the church is unhappy. You simply can’t please all the people all the time. That presents problems if you’re not expecting it, or if you’ve got nobody to talk to. Obviously, the best person to talk to is your spouse or another friend. For Linda Francisco, neither of these worked. Jeff said he thought things would be all right once the baby came, and the church chairman’s wife showed her insensitivity right away. So Linda talked to another woman in the church, and as soon as the conversation began to open up, the friend got threatened and backed off.
Then came the pastors’ conference. Everybody opened up there. They saw old friends and were reminded of all they’d been missing. As soon as they drove back to their small community, Linda was hit with a middle-of-the-night anxiety attack.
This raises the point of how we deal with frustrations. Men frequently cope by jumping into their work. Jeff, like most pastors, was a young dynamo, ready to go, enthusiastic. A former student of mine recently said, “One characteristic of many Yuppies is that they are very good at managing their careers but not the other parts of their lives.” I think pastors are like that sometimes. They are better at managing the church than managing their families, their bodies, their time, or their spiritual lives. And we didn’t prepare them in seminary. The only thing we taught them to manage was the Hebrew text.
I realize you cannot fully teach life management, but you can model it. You can also discuss it. You can alert people to the dangers. If the only models students see are academicians who read books, they will go out and try to be academicians who read books.
When a pastor, a pastor’s spouse, or for that matter anyone else is frustrated, the standard psychological theory says this frustration almost always leads to aggression. So what do you do? Lash out at people? That’s not very safe in the pastorate, because you’ll be criticized. You learn to keep your mouth shut.
Sometimes we lash out with kind of a passive aggression—lack of cooperation, for example, or gossip. Church members do that. Pastoral people do, too.
More often we hold the anger inside. It sometimes comes out in psychosomatic illnesses, and sometimes it explodes, as in Linda’s case. Sometimes it comes out in depression. Very often, depression is the result of anger held inside.
A veteran pastor said to me one day, “My wife has always been depressed.” I suspect that is because she’s always been angry. She apparently can’t talk to anybody about her anger—her husband, a church member, or even another pastor’s wife, because it would look like complaining. So she keeps it inside and wonders why she’s depressed.
When Linda Francisco’s crisis came, her husband did exactly the right thing. He reached out and said, “I’ll hold you until the morning.” There couldn’t have been a better therapy.
Of course, she went to a professional counselor, but the real breakthrough was this: She got her husband’s attention. I don’t think she was deliberately trying to do that, but that was the result.
(Some of Linda’s problem, it must be said, may simply have been postpartum depression. The birth of a child brings physical and hormonal changes that can contribute to depression and anxiety.)
Many men (me included) tend to withdraw into our work when we start seeing things shake a little at home. The kids start acting up, there’s dissension, or somebody starts getting depressed—and we retreat. We go where it’s safe, where we know what we’re doing. We can be in control. It’s fun. It’s exciting. The worse the problems get, the more we deny them. We are busy “serving the Lord with gladness” while our families are falling apart.
Then suddenly the crisis breaks, and we have to face it.
It’s tough for a wife to get angry at a husband who’s serving the Lord. If he were working for IBM, it would be different. But to get mad at a pastor means you’re indirectly getting mad at God. That puts guilt on you and more discouragement, so you keep it inside.
Gordon Allport, past president of the American Psychological Association and a professor at Harvard, once said the biggest problem with pastors in this country is that they have no interpersonal skills. That’s a harsh statement, I realize, but he’s not completely wrong. Pastors, if they are not careful, can relate to books and theological ideas far better than they relate to people. And the hardest place to relate to people is at home.
Jeff Francisco, besides being insensitive in the beginning, was also insecure. After all, this was his first church, and the chairman’s wife was already unhappy. All rookie pastors feel a certain amount of insecurity. When we get older, we already know we can succeed; if we fail, we pick up and go on. But you certainly don’t want to fail in the first round. So you’re very alert to criticism. All that keeps you from seeing what’s going on at home.
Today, the Franciscos remember that “people were aching and bleeding all over that church. But nobody would deal with it.” It’s hard to admit personal struggle, because many people think it goes against Christian theology. We’re supposed to have it all together, rejoice, be bubbling over and victorious.
It is especially hard to admit the pastor or the pastor’s wife isn’t victorious. The more common alternative is denial, quiet desperation, hiding in busyness.
Regarding the doctor who gave her a hundred-question test: Perhaps it should be said that psychological tests are often not as accurate as this implies. They give us clues, but many people seem to handle large numbers of “stress points” very well. Others have minimal stress and fall apart.
It was extremely important, however, that the doctor got her to admit thoughts of suicide. We have a suicide epidemic in this country, especially among young people. Many consider it the only way out. I can see how Linda came to this stage, feeling as she did that she had no husband to talk to, no friends to talk to, no way to get out of the environment, no place of freedom. She couldn’t even exercise. At least her husband could do that.
The two little children further boxed her in. She began thinking, I can’t take this much longer. At this point, counseling became crucial for her.
The Franciscos’ decision about how to handle the news of psychotherapy was well done. They didn’t make a major announcement, but neither did they try to hide it. In this they modeled something to the people in the congregation who were growing: A Christian doesn’t have to have it all together, and it’s OK to go for counseling.
The response is interesting: Some were sympathetic, some were scared, and some pretended they didn’t know what was going on. That’s about average for this kind of event! The sympathetic ones respond as they would to a death or other concern in the congregation. But others are threatened, and others don’t know what to do so they don’t do anything.
As I went through this narrative, I kept thinking about systems theory, which is a popular approach right now. It says the family is a system, and whenever one member is dysfunctional, he or she is not the only one with the problem. The whole family has the problem. (An example: Let’s say a husband and wife don’t get along. Their teenage son gets into drinking. Who’s got the problem? They can send the kid for counseling, but he will have to go back to that same family situation that helped create the problem in the first place.) So we have to work with the entire family.
In the present case, Linda was the one having hallucinations and shaking in the night. But she was not the only one with a problem. A lot of times, one person will be crying for help, but the whole family is dysfunctional.
The fact that Jeff and Linda together tackled their problem was good. He went along to the counseling sessions. He found out what he was doing inadvertently to contribute to the problem. She could have gone to counseling for years with no change if he hadn’t changed.
I have discovered in my own life that I often have wonderful ways to solve my wife’s problems. My solutions are nice and concise—except that she doesn’t own them. Therefore, they don’t necessarily work for her. I’m just like Jeff suggesting his wife go jogging at four-thirty in the afternoon. I have to learn to work with her on finding solutions.
Finally, it is interesting that it took Linda awhile to get over her paralysis about writing letters. When you get depressed, when you get really down, you don’t snap out of it. Sometimes people come for counseling with the attitude “I’ll go a couple of times and get things fixed.” These problems took years to develop, and they’re not going to evaporate in two sessions.
The beginning decade of adulthood may be one of the hardest times in life. It is a time to learn to be on your own, to set your values and lifestyle, to learn interpersonal skills, money management skills, time management skills. All this can be very difficult.
Once this couple mastered some of these skills and developed more self-confidence, they discovered they could be more open. The people in Linda’s Bible study who were threatened dropped out, but others found it great. They could identify with her and, therefore, she began having a ministry.
Her final sentence says it all: “We learned to communicate about our needs before reaching a crisis point. We learned to hear one another.” The sooner we face into a matter of tension, the easier it is to deal with it. The longer we let things go, the bigger the problem becomes. That is why many couples don’t arrive at the happy ending this couple found.
Roy Oswald, “The Pastor’s Passages,” Leadership, Fall 1983, pp. 18-19.
Copyright © 1985 by Christianity Today
