Children are strange possessions. We raise them so we can lose them.
M. O. Vincent
Not long ago I was at an informal gathering of ministers when the conversation turned to disciplining children. Two of the pastors got into a spirited discussion about how they were raised — and how they were raising their own children.
“This will sound weird to you guys,” said one pastor, “but my dad never laid a hand on me — ever. I remember one instance in particular: we had a long driveway, and when Dad would take his Sunday afternoon nap, I liked to drive the car up and down the driveway. Sometimes, to be cool, I’d open the car door to see where I was going as I backed up. But once I got too close to the house, and I caught the door on the porch steps and nearly ripped the door off its hinges. I remember how frightened I was, but Dad came out, looked things over, and said, ‘I think we can fix it.'”
Another pastor said, “That’s not the way my dad would have reacted!”
Amid the laughter, a third pastor said, “A few weeks ago, my 11-year-old son was riding his bike to school, and on the way he stopped at the dirt track with a few of his buddies. He figured, Hey, I’ve got my lunch; I’ve got my bike; why go to school? By the time he got home, I’d discovered where he had been, but I didn’t bring it up immediately. I wanted to see what he would say. So I asked, ‘How was school today?’ He said, ‘It was okay.’
“‘What if I knew for a fact that you weren’t in school today,’ I asked. ‘What would you think then?’
“He put his head down and said, ‘I think I’m dead meat.’ And he was!'”
While we all laughed, I was struck by the different responses parents make to children’s misdeeds. Some parents are more authoritarian, emphasizing respect rather than intimacy. Others are more democratic, emphasizing participation and feeling close.
No style, however, is guaranteed to prevent a child from rebelling. A child may rebel because of too much control or too little. Ministry families are not immune to this rebellion. Indeed, since family relationships affect ministry so greatly, many pastors struggle with the proper response to children who stray.
Let’s look at the range of children’s misbehavior and how it affects ministry.
Degrees of Disobedience
Misdeeds range from minor to major but fall into four categories.
Mischief. Some misbehavior is relatively minor and a normal part of growing up. “Our church is too small to have a children’s church,” said one pastor’s wife. “So the kids are in the worship service with us. I get frustrated with a child who pipes up in the middle of the sermon, ‘I’m bored.’ So I have a bag stocked with baseball cards, Cheerios, coloring books, and puzzles. Even with these diversions, our children occasionally disrupt the service, and I have to remove them. But I have to remember they are kids first and pastors’ kids about fifth.”
Most pastors have learned to handle such minor “kids’ stuff” with a few simple guidelines.
1. Let children know what is expected before the situation arises. One pastor’s 4-year-old repeatedly tried to get to the platform during the service — by crawling under the pews. He had to learn when he could and could not roam freely in the sanctuary.
2. If children need correction, try not to embarrass them publicly, especially not in front of their friends.
“We practice the 1-2-3 rule,” said a pastor’s wife. “I’ll look at the child who’s misbehaving and let him know I disapprove of what he’s doing. Then I’ll count to three, either verbally or by raising my fingers. If the behavior hasn’t stopped by the count of three, I act, usually by making him sit by himself, or if necessary by removing him from the scene and disciplining him privately.”
3. In public, hold your children to the same standards of behavior as you would other people’s children. “I am teaching confirmation class right now to a group that includes my daughter,” said the pastor of an Evangelical Covenant Church. “As junior highers are sometimes, she was squirmy, so I had to say, ‘Sandy, settle down. Let’s get back to work and not be so silly.’ I would have said the same thing to any other kid in the class.”
4. Offer reasons for correction based on what’s “right and wrong,” what’s “loving or unloving,” what’s “wise or foolish” — never “because Daddy is a pastor” or “because of what people will think.” One pastor has buttressed his determination not to do that by trying to eliminate the embarrassment factor: “I’ve said up front, ‘At times my kids will embarrass me — they’re normal kids — but please let them be kids and try to help me be a parent.’
“I find I tend to overdiscipline when I feel embarrassed. I recently came down way too hard on my son for being rambunctious in the foyer after church. It was because he was embarrassing me, the pastor. I apologized to him afterward. I’m trying to accept the fact that kids occasionally will embarrass you. Our people can accept that; now I’m trying to.”
What effect does a child’s mischief have on ministry? Most ministry families said, “No effect,” and a few said the occasions when they’d had to correct their children had been a positive time of ministry.
“It made my husband’s ministry more human,” said one pastor’s wife in Maryland. “As people saw him dealing successfully with his children, they were more willing to approach him for help.”
Questionable Choices. Slightly more serious than mischief are decisions that make parents squirm. For instance, kids’ deciding they don’t want to go to church.
On the Leadership survey, no one recommended telling the children, “We have to go because we’re church leaders.” Instead, the emphasis was on obedience to Christ or, on occasion, because it’s a distinctive of our family.
David McDowell, who pastors College Church in Northampton, Massachusetts, smiles when telling about one encounter: “We were on our way to the car when our 10-year-old started whining, ‘I don’t want to go to church. I want to stay home and watch TV.’ I decided to be firm. I pointed my finger at him and said with as much thunder in my voice as I could muster, ‘You are the first and last McDowell ever to complain about going to church.’ That was three years ago, and I haven’t had to say anything since.”
At the same time, another Massachusetts pastor said, “As our kids were growing up, we didn’t want them to feel the church is an intrusion. We wanted them to know their lives were not inextricably intertwined with the church and that the validity of dad’s ministry did not hang on their performance. We never required them to be in all the programs. In fact, there were Sunday nights when I said, ‘Why don’t you stay home tonight? You’ve had a rough weekend.’ But nineteen times out of twenty both would say, ‘No, we’re going to church.'”
Yet another pastor’s daughter announced she was going to the youth group at a different church because her girl friend went there, and she didn’t like some of the people where her dad pastored.
“That was sticky,” said her father. “I didn’t care if people gasped at the pastor’s kid going to another church. But I didn’t want my daughter running from relational issues she needed to address, so we compromised. I eventually let her go to events at the other church, but she had to attend at least half the youth events in our church. It worked out well.”
Other questionable choices center on lifestyle issues. One Kentucky pastor describes such a situation: “Our 15-year-old daughter announced one day that she was going to the school dances, which we knew would raise eyebrows in our church. That was the first time our philosophy of freedom of choice was really put to the test. We sat and talked through all the issues as I saw them. She said, ‘I know all that, but I still want to go.’ So with fear and trepidation, we backed her freedom to make this choice. She went to three or four, and then one night she came home early. I said, ‘What’s going on?’ To our great joy, she told us she’d made another decision: ‘Oh, Daddy, those just aren’t my kind of kids.’ And that was the end of it.”
A third area of questionable choices is in rejecting certain parts of their spiritual upbringing. “I remember when our son came home from science class one day and told us that Genesis was wrong and that evolution was a better explanation of origins,” said a pastor. “I knew this was partly for shock effect, so I decided to allow for his disagreement. It led to some good conversations. With some kids, you let them see they’re special to you by allowing them to be different. Most preachers’ kids are too smart to be real prodigals. They know the life of a prodigal is a dead-end street, so the only way to get a minister parent’s attention is to disagree on religious matters. The trick is not to over-react.”
Other pastors have found it helpful to identify whether the questionable choice is an isolated incident or part of a pattern. If it’s a single instance, most tend to be lenient, but if it’s part of a pattern, they’re more likely to intervene.
“I’ve been helped by the analogy of a fence,” said one pastor. “Parental intervention is like a fence post — that’s where the direction of the fence will change, if necessary. But between the fence posts, you’ve got the rails running long enough to see what direction the fence is going. Generally the older kids get, the further the intervals between fence posts.”
Extended Conflict. As they grow, children almost inevitably come into areas of conflict with their parents. This is as true for pastors as for anyone else. Sometimes the conflict is low-key; other times it’s sharp and intense. Listen as one pastor describes life with his teenage daughter:
Late spring of her sixth-grade year, it was as if Wendy came out of her bedroom one day and said, “I’m going to ruin your lives for the next four years.” Overnight she became strong-willed and argumentative.
Of course, she was worried about her appearance, going into junior high, and hormonal changes that she (and I) didn’t understand. Knowing that didn’t make the situation easier; it just compounded my wondering how to respond.
She was moody; she didn’t want to eat dinner with us; she spent hours in her bedroom alone. That summer on vacation, she wanted to do her thing first and then go back to the hotel; she didn’t want to let anybody else do what they wanted to do. It was so awful I called my mother and apologized for whatever hell I had put her through.
Every statement was an absolute: “I’m never going to school again.” “I’m not going to talk to that person ever again.” Because I’m a driving sort of individual, that set up many head-to-head battles. For example, I’d ask, “Where do you want to go for supper?”
“I don’t care.”
“Fine. I’ll decide.”
In the car, she’d ask, “Where are we going?”
“McDonald’s.”
“I refuse to eat there. I want to go to Burger King.”
“I asked you, and you said you didn’t care, so I made the decision. The next time I ask, please tell me and we’ll go to Burger King, but tonight we’re going to McDonald’s.”
“Then I’m not eating!”
It was difficult for me to discuss this with people in the congregation. My wife and I saw a counselor — one who I had referred other people to many times. That was hard admitting we needed help. But I did manage to talk about my fears and anguish with perhaps fifteen people.
What surprised me was that the more we shared, the more we found out some of the “model kids” of our church were like Wendy at home. One lay leader, whose son is a leader in the youth group, told me there were times when he and his son wouldn’t speak for days at a time. I never would have known.
When I did mention this to some of the elders, one said, “If you want my daughter to invite your daughter over for the weekend just to give you guys some rest, please let us do it.”
When another of our elders moved in across the street, we felt the freedom to tell him and his wife, “If you see Wendy smoking, don’t feel you have to hide it from us. We know she smokes, and she takes walks sometimes because we won’t let her smoke in the house.” They were most understanding.
When Wendy shaved the right side of her head, I never said a word, but it ate me up inside. When I told a fellow pastor about our situation, he, a Nazarene, comforted me with a story of his own: “A lady came up to me recently and said, ‘Thanks for letting your daughter dress the way you do. My parents wouldn’t let me express myself when I was growing up.'” That helped.
We also learned to see the humor in our situation. A pastor friend used us as a sermon illustration: “I know a guy whose daughter just dyed her hair orange. That’s probably kind of stupid, but since when is being stupid grounds for not getting into the church? As my friend says, ‘I don’t know why they’re upset about my daughter’s orange hair. Some of the little old ladies in our church have blue hair.'”
The whole process really deepened my love for my wife, Sara, because we were in it together. We realize how kids can ruin a marriage because we had times when we would snap at each other. We had to keep saying, “We’re not the enemy,” and keep renewing and reviewing our love.
It also made me more sensitive to single parents; I don’t know how they get through it. The other day at a soccer game a single parent from our church was talking to Sara and me about how her son is belching all the time now. And how he bought a new toilet seat and cover — the top of it is this big yellow and black sign that says, danger. You lift the cover, and it says, farting zone. That’s being a 13-year-old boy, but this poor woman doesn’t understand that, and she doesn’t have anybody to talk to.
So we’ve been talking about launching a Parents of Adolescents Anonymous, where we get together and say, “Everything said in this room will be confidential. We’re going through it together.” One day in the adult Sunday school class, we broke into small groups, and Sara was in such pain she described some of it. Bob and Jenny, the couple she talked with, said, “You’ve got to pray for us. We’re living through the same things.” So it’s drawn us closer together, deepened our faith. We realize we’ve got to pray like crazy, because nothing we’ve tried is going to change our daughter.
When such conflict erupts in a ministry home, the stress level heightens. But two understandings have helped keep parents from overreacting.
First, a certain amount of rebellion is necessary and healthy. Donald Miller, who grew up in a pastor’s home, said he didn’t go through a time of serious rebellion (“although like many young persons, there were some erratic periods in my service for Christ as I grew up”), but he noted that nonrebellion also has its negative side.
“If there’s a danger in having a father you highly respect and nearly worship,” he said, “it’s that you may accept his views without checking their validity for yourself.”
Second, keeping calm is perhaps the most important statement you can make. One pastor was discouraged because of his son’s negative attitude toward church. A wise elder took him aside and said, “Paul, when your kids are moving into adolescence and you panic, it says all the wrong things. It says you don’t believe in them, and you don’t believe in God.”
The elder went on to say, “I spent some time with your son this week, and he’s going to be okay. He just needs some room to grow.” The pastor said later, “You can’t imagine what a comfort those words were.”
Serious Straying. Some children do more than simply disagree with their parents; they turn their backs on them — and reject their values. These situations cause particular pain.
When the Leadership survey asked, Have you ever had a child seriously stray? overall, 14 percent of the ministry families said yes. But when you don’t count those with young children or no children, the figure is higher. Of those who had children 18 and older, 30 percent said they’ve had at least one child seriously stray. Of course, many of these families had other children who did not seriously stray. And to further put this in perspective, we mustn’t forget that more than two-thirds of the pastoral families surveyed who had grown children did not face serious rebellion.
But 30 percent did, and even one child who strays dominates parents’ attention and strains other family relationships. Open rebellion, spiritual straying, or obviously bad choices not only cause parents deep grief, but threaten to undermine their entire ministry.
Evangelist Dwight L. Moody had a special concern because his oldest son, Will, was cool to spiritual matters. Once he wrote Will a revealing letter: “I have not talked much with you for fear I would turn you more and more against Him, whom I love more than all the world, and if I have ever said or done anything unbecoming a Christian father I want you to forgive me.… I have always thought that when a mother and father are Christians and their children were not that there was something decidedly wrong with them. I still think so.… If I thought I had neglected to do my duty toward my three children I would rather die than live.” Many parents in ministry understand the feeling.
In Moody’s case, the story had a happy ending. The following year Will made a profession of faith. When Dwight heard of it, he wrote, “I do not think you will ever know until you have a son of your own how much good it did me to hear this.”
Not all stories end that way. What about children who do not wind up reconciling with their parents or with God? Does that mean ministry is over?
The answer from pastors I surveyed and interviewed was overwhelmingly no. They were nearly unanimous in agreeing that effective ministry can — and in most cases should — continue even if children rebel.
They identified three overriding principles that guide a parent in ministry when children stray.
Unconditional Love
Children need to know that our love for them is forever, whenever, and with no strings attached. Although we expect them to live the kind of lives God wants them to live, they must know that should they fail, we would still accept them. Parents agreed this should be put into words so children do not doubt it.
Writes a pastor’s wife: “One of our daughters always had a high consciousness of sin, and she kept talking about her fear of going to jail. We explained that even if she did something that put her in jail, she would still be our daughter, and we would love her just as much as if it had never happened. We told her that just as God never stops loving us no matter what we do, we would never stop loving her, either. I might feel terrible and cry a lot, but I would visit her in jail just as I would if she were in the hospital. With a big smile she said, ‘You would?’ That was the assurance she needed. She never brought up the subject of going to jail again.”
Such love tells children they don’t have to test their parents with far-out behavior to see whether they’ll still be accepted. Although this is important for all parents, it’s more so for church leaders, whose children realize their behavior could threaten the parent’s ministry. If they feel ministry is more important to us than their welfare, they may yield to the temptation to act in some socially unacceptable way to force their parents’ hand.
An Unmanaged Household?
One of the fears of pastors is that a child’s behavior will render their entire ministry invalid. A few oft-cited Bible verses make any family in ministry uncomfortable.
“An elder must be blameless … a man whose children believe and are not open to the charge of being wild and disobedient” (Titus 1:6).
“If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s church?” (1 Tim. 3:5).
In addition, there’s the tragic example of Eli, whose two sons desecrated the temple, and as a result God condemned all three (1 Sam. 2:22-36).
What does this mean for people in ministry today? Does a son or daughter who strays render a minister disqualified? Here are the responses of a number of pastors and denominational officials.
“My response is no,” says Donald Njaa, who oversees credentials for ministers in the Evangelical Covenant Church. “The rebellion may well be not against the father or mother; it may be a rebellion against the pressure they’ve been put under by the church.”
“The Timothy passage concludes with a warning not to fall into reproach, and the greatest reproach is hypocrisy — when something is espoused in the pulpit but not upheld in the home,” says Mike Halcomb, a denominational official with the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference. “But that passage is not referring to the normal maturation process of children. Our boys were inclined to pillage and plunder, sometimes in the church basement! I had to reprimand them. But I trust their being normal boys doesn’t disqualify me for ministry. I also don’t think the passage speaks to grown children (and in Bible days, that would probably be 14 to 16 years old) who choose to dissociate themselves from the faith.”
Other ministers, while acknowledging the tragic example of Eli, point out that Samuel’s sons also were rebellious, but Samuel’s leadership remained intact. And while Cain was a murderer, God didn’t hold his father, Adam, accountable.
As pastor Charles Swindoll has said, “There’s been only one perfect Father, and even he has a lot of wayward kids.”
“We’ve known pastoral families where a child has been wild and rebellious,” says a pastor’s wife, “and yet as far as we could tell, the parents did everything they could to bring up that child to love the Lord. Many times, five or six years later, that child will come back to faith, and to love and respect the parents.” In other words, why should a parent’s ministry end because of a child’s temporary insanity?
Eugene Peterson, pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland, says, “There are many possible reasons for children’s not growing up in the faith. I have three kids, all grown. One of them had an extremely difficult adolescence. Now she’s wonderful, and our two sons coming after never knew adolescence was anything but praising God. But when our daughter was in trouble, people in the congregation were gracious. I was grateful they didn’t say, ‘Peterson, you must be doing something terrible at home because your daughter’s acting this way.'”
Perhaps the congregation’s attitude is the key to determining whether ministry can continue when a child strays. They’re the ones observing whether the home is managed or unmanaged in the midst of difficulty.
After hearing Eugene Peterson’s story, Charles Swindoll observed, “Eugene, it was because you have integrity that your congregation surrounded you. You had endeared yourself to those people, and not even the waywardness of a willful daughter could drive a wedge between them and you. Had you been covering up, had you been obviously alienating your family, I wonder if the congregation would have said, ‘Let’s stand by him no matter what.’ They knew the most grieved person in the church was the pastor. That’s managing a family. There was a caring attitude, a consistency and integrity that showed in your grief when a daughter turned away for a time.”
Directed Independence
Whether the parenting style tends to be strict or lenient, the goal of the parenting process is the same: to raise a child who will one day be able to make mature decisions for himself or herself. No parent wants a child to remain dependent upon Mom and Dad for a lifetime. Christian parents desire their children to be able to live independently, and also to make a free choice to follow Christ.
M. O. Vincent, a pastor’s son who now has four children of his own, observed reflectively, “Children are strange possessions. We raise them so we can lose them.”
In a sense, parenting is one form of the Christian practice of discipling — helping bring another person to maturity.
Many ministry parents find helpful remembering that God is ultimately responsible for the salvation and sanctification of his children. That takes some of the pressure off them — and their children.
“None of the four kids in my family went through a significant period of rebellion. For that I must give a small share of credit to covenant theology,” writes Tim Stafford, the son of a Presbyterian pastor. He specifically points to the belief that a child, if raised in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, is not a small representative of Satan in urgent need of reclaiming, but a beginning Christian.
“Though it is necessary for the child, as for all Christians, to renounce sin and to throw himself on the mercy of God, a proper Presbyterian parent does not look on his child as an outsider to God’s grace. He believes that the Holy Spirit can be as unobstructed in a child’s life as in his own. This does a lot to reduce tension in the home. It reduces the pressure on the child to make a radical reversal in order to avoid falling into hell. It merely calls on the child to continue in the direction he was taught as a child and to make it his own as an adult.
“The theological merits of these ideas are arguable, as students of church history can assure us, but on practical grounds I appreciate them very much. I never felt pressure from my parents to be holy. They didn’t see every misdeed as proof that we were in need of conversion. Outside I got pressure being a preacher’s kid, but never in my own home.”
People respond to different things, of course, and some need gentle prodding toward godliness while others, like the apostle Paul, need stronger measures. “Still,” writes Stafford, “I think it is reasonable to say that a child raised in a pastor’s home is likely to know the gospel and to be aware of his need for a Savior. He rarely needs to have the lesson banged home. In fact, since nearly every teenage kid would do anything to avoid being an exact replica of his parents, pressuring him may make his decision much more difficult; to say no is the only way he can prove that he is an individual.”
Another helpful principle is to respect the individual’s freedom of choice.
M. O. Vincent saw this congenial control modeled by his father when it came time to choose between medical school and seminary. “Dad told me, ‘If you feel you can do anything else except become a minister, and be satisfied, do it. I became a minister because I couldn’t be satisfied with anything else.'”
The younger Vincent eventually opted for medical school and went on to become medical superintendent of a large psychiatric hospital in Ontario. His father demonstrated one of the key principles of parenting: offering direction while allowing the freedom for his son to grow and make crucial decisions.
As one Seattle pastor said, “Our children are loaned, not given to us, by God. We do our best to raise them to fear and love the Lord, but eventually we have to give them back to him. How they respond to God is not a total reflection on us. We do our best to be faithful, but we can’t make their commitment to God for them.”
For parents in the midst of difficulties with a straying child, perhaps the sustaining hope is that the final chapter has not yet been written. Parents trust that the One who authored the Prodigal Son’s return will also pen their family a happier ending.
Indeed, based on the survey, there is cause for hope. Time and time again, parents spoke of their anguish as sons or daughters rejected everything the parents stood for. But an encouraging number of the stories wound up with an ending similar to this one:
“One of our four children rebelled. She had a difficult time accepting God’s way, became a prodigal daughter, and eloped with another pastor’s son. They lived in Hawaii; she threw away her Bible and avoided us. We prayed and prayed, continued to write her and send love gifts. After several years, she ‘came to herself’ and returned to a strong walk with God. She has moved back to our city and is a real blessing to us.”
There are others, of course, who do not return — at least not to their parents’ knowledge. These parents often struggle with feelings of failure. They’re tempted to evaluate their worth by how their children turn out.
Ultimately, however, our calling to ministry and our worth as persons are not dependent upon the decisions our children make. The key is how faithful we are in raising our families and in responding to their decisions.
A pastor from Michigan put it this way: “It’s a mistake to think, I have to be a big success with my family so people will respect me. To make our family’s performance the foundation of our credibility is to put a load on them they may be unable to bear. In fact, that pressure may contribute to their cracking.
“No, my role is to be a man of integrity and credibility, a man who is consistent at church and at home, a man who does his best to minister to both his flock and his family. If I do that, I’ve fulfilled my calling.”
Copyright ©1988 Christianity Today
