A serious problem is planted in the pastoral home when the children living there do not actually embrace the faith for themselves but simply fulfill a role. Their quiet conformity is mistaken for genuine commitment. But the pretending will not last forever.
Chuck and Marge1, who served at an Evangelical Covenant Church, have finished raising their five children. Chuck is an articulate, ambitious man, the kind of person you’d expect to find in an advertising agency, which is where he started out after journalism school. Later on, he gave up his agnosticism at a Billy Graham crusade and, in 1963, entered seminary. His oldest child was thirteen, his youngest four when he became student pastor of a church in Illinois.
His wife is much quieter, the daughter of Finnish immigrants, who tends to think a long time before speaking. She is a good ballast for her energetic husband.
Both of them, however, plunged into the work of their parish with dedication and swept their children along in the tide. Sunday school, youth groups, and other church events were standard fixtures in the weekly schedule.
Jason*, the second-born, left for college in 1970. Four years later, he had his degree but no plan of action; he spent a year drifting around the country. He finally landed back home with Mom and Dad, who had since moved to teach at a Christian college.
Chuck writes about the night everything came unraveled:
We were having supper on Christmas Eve. My wife and I were seated with four of our five children and my wife’s father round the table. The table was decorated with festive candles. Red, blue, yellow, and green lights beamed on the family Christmas tree and piles of presents lay underneath.… The spicy smell of baked ham filled the house; all was in order for a Christmas both holy and merry.
After dinner I took my Bible and opened to the Christmas story in Luke. Reading this familiar passage on Christmas Eve was an established part of our family tradition. As I opened the Bible, Jason … suddenly got up from the table and left the dining room. His abrupt departure created a sense of shock and a cloud descended over our Christmas Eve. The scowl on Jason’s face had made it plain that he was annoyed about something.
“I guess he doesn’t feel well,” I said lamely. After an awkward pause I began to read, “And it came to pass in those days …” We lingered at the table, talking about other things. But the cloud was still there and so was Jason’s empty chair. I wondered, What on earth is the matter with him?
Later that evening when he and I were alone together in the living room, I could see in his eyes that something was smoldering.
“Jason,” I finally asked, “what is wrong?”
What followed was an hour of the most honest conversation I had ever had with my son.…
“You always just assumed that I believed everything,” he said bitterly. “I was a part of the family’s religion. I don’t want to go along with that charade any more! Tonight I decided to be honest. So I got up and left the table before you read from the Bible. I didn’t want to sit there and pretend that I believe all that stuff.”
In line with her quiet nature, Marge was not present for all this. She had, in fact, gone on to bed after the long day. “I didn’t understand what had happened,” she says, “and I’m not a person who reacts quickly. I guess I’m more of a Finn than I realize. I tend to think, ‘Well, let’s wait and see what happens.'”
Meanwhile, Chuck laid himself open by asking such things as “What’s really happening to us? What did your leaving the table represent?” Inwardly he prayed for the strength not to lecture. He writes:
Our conversation was like peeling back the layers of an onion. Tears came to my eyes as layer after layer of my son’s frustration and suppressed indignation were exposed. Things from long ago-things I could only dimly remember-came alive again as part of the ugly litany, resurrecting my numerous failures as a father.
Jason also hinted at some very personal things that had happened to him during college-things his mother and I had prayed would not happen.… At last I was beginning to understand my son.
His verbal assault had a strange effect on me. I was praying that I might really hear him.… Yet as the recitation continued, I felt dismayed.… A desperate feeling of failure began to rise within me. And guilt! …
Why do I share this personal experience of one of the most unpleasant hours of my life? Because it illustrates a keystone principle of family life: It is often the darkest just before the dawn. As the psalmist wrote, “Weeping may last for the night, but a shout of joy comes in the morning” ().
Raising five children to adulthood, my wife and I have learned that God may be most creatively at work in our times of deepest despair and failure.
As their household moved into the new year, a gradual change began to occur. Communication with Jason improved slowly, often during the times Chuck would make for doing things together-playing Scrabble, lingering over lunch, going fishing-“little things.” The talk was superficial at first, but eventually it deepened as Jason realized his parents sincerely wanted to listen, not chastise.
“I began to comprehend that the most important things in life are relational, not intellectual,” says Chuck.
Rebuilding the bridge between us took several years. By God’s grace we all learned to be more patient with each other-even when our viewpoints clashed.…
Church presented a prickly problem.… Again, the Holy Spirit took charge. He gave us the right words and spirit. As I remember, I said something like this to our son: “Jason, the things of God are most important to your mother and me. For us to be honest and natural, we have to say this. But you are an adult and it is not our responsibility to drag you to church. You are responsible directly to God and I believe that in His own time and way, He will create within you a desire. Then you’ll want to be with God’s people.”
We left it at that and went to church by ourselves.
… One Sunday as we ate our meal, he mentioned the morning service. So we knew that he had chosen to attend. Probably he sat by himself up in the church balcony.
Our conversation naturally moved into the sermon. And we realized Jason had indeed “gotten the message.” This began to happen regularly.
On Easter afternoon, Jason finally told his parents he had realized his need for Christ and made a commitment to follow him. As Chuck and Marge tried to contain their joy, their son suggested the family should study the Bible and pray together from now on. They had come full circle.
God, in His wisdom and perfect timing, did what Jason’s mother and I could not do: He made our son a Christian. In retrospect we could discern the Lord’s hand in the very restlessness and dead ends which had brought our son home again. We realized that God had been at work even in the disruption of our family, in the deep resentment and painful alienation.
With Jason’s permission I have shared this episode of our personal family history. God can still work miracles in the family circle. His grace can erase all the horrendous mistakes.2
One of those mistakes, Chuck now sees, was the common problem of a too-full agenda in the pastorate. The idea of taking a day off seemed impractical at the time. “I admit I allowed my work to intrude,” he says. “That’s easy for someone in Christian work. If you’re conscientious, you see the needs, and you move in, as into a vacuum. But you pay a price for that, and it’s not always a good bargain. Much of what happened ten and twenty years ago in my ministry is dross. But the relationship with my kids is irreplaceable.
“It takes a certain maturity to realize you’re in the kind of task where, even if you were triplets working twenty-four hours a day, you still wouldn’t get done. I’m not advocating complacency or goofing off. But you shouldn’t be driven, either. Holiness and godliness are not the same as working yourself to a frazzle.”
His unflappable wife adds a bit of sage wisdom: “I guess I think life is a school, and God is teaching us through all these things that bump up against us.”
Reflections:
by Louis McBurney
PKs are an amazing group. They have special grace, I’m convinced; they put up with an awful lot of stress and abuse from congregations as well as neglect from their minister parent(s). Yet they seem to emerge committed to Christ and understanding the importance of commitment, as this boy did. It’s amazing to me how that can happen.
The fact these parents did not know where their son stood is not at all uncommon. Often PKs recognize the tremendous stress and expectations the church puts on their parents, and so they decide just not to cause any additional problems. They go along quietly and keep their own stress inside. (Of course, sometimes there are tremendous examples of the opposite, too! In this story, the implication is that during Jason’s college days, he rebelled in ways his parents never knew about and thought he had somehow escaped.)
My wife and I had much the same experience with our older two-and we thought we’d been very perceptive, in-touch parents. Melissa was talking to our oldest son not long ago, who has had a real spiritual renewal in the last year. He had never stopped going to church, but he told his mother he had realized his need to change because, in fact, he had been fairly heavily involved in drugs. He said his body was craving the highs, and he wanted some help with that, so he had really sought Christ.
We knew none of this. A couple of times during high school, he’d gone to a beer bust and come home drunk, but we had no idea he was into more than that. He knew what he was doing would have been very painful for us, so he simply kept quiet, not wanting to hurt us or cause problems.
It is hard to tell a Christian leader, “Don’t worry about the social stigma of a wayward child,” but I know that the more pressure a child feels to conform, the more intense the rebellion will be. One minister’s kid we heard about would get high on pot, then open a parsonage window and yell, “The pastor’s wife is a whore!” Well, that gets people’s attention!
One of the beautiful things about this family’s story is that when Jason finally confessed where he was, his father listened to him and accepted him. Often that doesn’t happen; the clamps come down, the guilt is thrown on, and the kid is driven away. Jason came back to the belief system of his parents because he was given acceptance and a feeling of being loved; he saw the validity of what they talked about. Rebellious PKs can very often come back to be strong, committed Christians.
Apparently, Jason felt a degree of openness in his parents’ home, the possibility that there could be communication. Otherwise, he probably wouldn’t have even tried. He would have just left to do his thing somewhere else. But he was comfortable enough in the relationship to risk talking.
*Names have been changed.
This is the sole vignette in this book where actual names and places are used, since part of the Keysors’ story has already been published. Charles Keysor, Forgiveness Is a Two-Way Street (Wheaton, Ill.: Victor, 1982), pp. 50-57.
Copyright © 1985 by Christianity Today
