The most irritating experience an artist can have is to have his work criticized before it is finished.
Andrew Wyeth
As we’ve seen, the ministry has an effect, both positive and negative, on a pastor’s family life. But the converse is also true: family life can have a profound effect on ministry. In the next three chapters, we’ll look at the burdens and benefits that family relationships can bring to ministry.
One of the toughest burdens can be family tensions. Consider the story of this pastor from California:
We were eating lunch in a favorite Chinese restaurant. My son was nineteen, good looking, and engaged to an attractive woman four years his senior, whom he had met at Bible college. We thought he was too young for marriage and had expressed our concern. “Give yourself and your relationship more time to mature,” we said. But when you’re nineteen and the future spreads before you …
“Dad, we’re going to have a baby.”
Time stood still.
“I’m sorry to hurt you like this. We’re going to get married right away.”
We sat quietly, picking at food, grasping for thoughts. An image flashed through my mind: our son’s future, in the form of water and sludge, rushing down an open drain. Pull yourself together, I told myself. I excused myself from the table to make a phone call. Then I dialed the church office and spoke in controlled tones to the familiar voice at the other end so as not to betray the inner turmoil.
“Kill the announcement of my new sermon series, will you? I’ve been having some second thoughts.”
“I’m sorry, Pastor. It’s already gone to press.”
“Okay,” I replied after a moment. “I’ll deal with it later. Please let my wife know that I’ve had lunch with our son and we’ll be leaving for home in a few minutes. It is important for her to meet us there. We have some things we need to discuss.”
Walking slowly back to the table, my thoughts kept coming back to the sermon series I’d intended to begin this Sunday: “The Future Family.” What timing! What could I say when I was still reeling from my own family’s situation?
I told my son and his bride-to-be that I felt the need to tell the church board about the situation. They wanted to meet with the board as well, but I said no. As I reflected later, that was probably a mistake. They should have been permitted to share personally. After all, it was their marriage and their baby. But I was in a protectionist mood. Their problem had become my problem.
Our board of five gathered for the specially called meeting. I shared with them the news. “If even one of you feels this would be too much for the church family to absorb, I will understand and tender my resignation,” I said. I explained how important we felt it was for us to stand with our son and his fiancée if they were to have any chance for a successful future. If that meant resigning, then that’s the way it would have to be.
To a person, the board members affirmed both me and our family. One reminded me of how I had stood with him in a similar crisis some years before. Another offered understanding because he faced similar temptation as a young man. We prayed and cried together.
It was a small May wedding. After a brief honeymoon, my son and his wife went to live with her parents, in order to get on their feet financially. Six weeks later, after an explosive and embarrassing confrontation with her parents, they spent the next thirty days in our home while we went on vacation. Much of our motivation in leaving was to permit the newlyweds some privacy. Soon after our return, they rented an apartment.
In November, our daughter was married. Her wedding was large and beautiful. At the conclusion of the rehearsal dinner (an event my son had not included), my son wistfully commented, “This is really a lot different than our wedding, isn’t it?”
Two weeks later, on Thanksgiving Day, we became grandparents of a beautiful baby girl. The excited father and mother proudly showed off their little miracle. It seemed that, at long last, things might be coming together.
They smiled and laughed when visiting us. We enjoyed our time together. But their apartment gradually became a war zone of angry words aimed to bring the greatest pain. Already unsure of themselves, they felt the pressure mounting of “forever” entrapment. When a terrible mistake has been made, is there ever relief?
She dealt with conflict by going home to mother. He internalized the anger — and began to drink. As the pain increased, so did the number of drinks.
In the church, loving support was given by many, probably too many. Church members reached out to the young couple, but she could not trust the voices because they came from “his father’s congregation.” He could not accept the voices because they seemed like multiple parents. It was like having hundreds of close relatives, never knowing when one would step up with a word of wisdom. And, of course, there was always the underlying guilt and embarrassment of having conceived out of wedlock. People might not say much about that. But what must they be thinking?
Our son knew he had let his parents down. They had forgiven — at least that’s what they said — but in his mind, he was the black sheep, maybe even the lost sheep. It became impossible to measure up to expectations, both real and imagined. The couple began to hate the church, this loving, but impossible Parent.
At first our son sold cars, then burglar systems. Finally he took a position with an aircraft firm. She worked in a restaurant and sold art objects on the side. Together they struggled with financial problems — and increasing hopelessness.
We tried to help when it seemed appropriate, but we did our best to stay out of the way as well. What our relationship with them should be became increasingly difficult to determine. They both began coming to us for counsel, little suggestions and encouragement. They kept looking for that word of wisdom their pastor/parents always seemed to have for everyone else. But when is one’s counsel that of concerned parent and when that of impartial pastor? We were never sure. Even on my most objective day, a “word of wisdom” may not feel objective to the respective in-law. We assisted financially with professional Christian marriage counseling, but even this became suspect, because the psychologist was a friend of his family.
One day the phone rang. Our son’s voice cracked with emotion. He had come home that day to find both his wife and their daughter gone. After he’d left for work that morning, her parents had helped her move back with them. Everything she had brought into their life was gone: the baby, the furniture, the pictures, the wedding gifts from her side of the family. What remained was in a heap in the center of the apartment. On top lay a carefully wrapped birthday gift — and a note saying she wanted a divorce.
That evening we sat quietly around the dining room table. Twenty-one candles burned low on the birthday cake. No one felt like singing, “Happy Birthday.”
The following spring, the divorce papers were signed. Three months later, she remarried.
Our son moved in with us, and on the surface, it appeared we were back to square one.
Then one day, he announced he had resigned from the aircraft company to start his own business. That’s what he’d always wanted to do, he said. Now it was time. He was receiving lots of encouragement from a young lady in our church whom he had been seeing. Her parents were supportive of the idea, too, and assured him he could do anything he really set his mind to do. He opened a home repair and remodeling business. He loved working with wood and was quite good at it. Jobs started coming in. Things were looking up once more.
But his relationship with the young lady seemed to be moving too rapidly. Once again, we found ourselves watching from the sidelines with a growing anxiety. It appeared to be the classic rebound relationship. He disagreed. So did the parents of the young lady. I met with them after church one evening. We spoke at length about the future of our children, but we went away with greatly divergent views of the situation.
Then came the announcement: they were to be married the following April — a big church wedding, even a rehearsal dinner.
The rising tension at home finally boiled over one Sunday before I left for the first service. What we were able to say about this new relationship was not what our son was able to receive. He felt if things didn’t change between us … well, they just had to change. Our voices got louder. At one point I wondered if he would actually hit me.
I told him the time had come to make living arrangements elsewhere. The tension in our home was too high; we were stretched as far as we could go. He listened in cold anger, then said he would be gone before I arrived home from church.
As I drove away, I thought, I’m on my way to church. I’m supposed to bring inspiration and strength to God’s people. But we’re losing our son. Life is out of control. When was the last time any of us were really happy?
“Good morning everyone!” I said minutes later. “Welcome. Let’s stand and sing Hymn 415.…”
Many pastors are familiar with the feeling of trying to minister while knowing things are not good at home. While conditions in other homes may not have deteriorated to the degree they did in the story above, most ministry families have their share of tensions. As one pastor said, “My toughest sermon was the time I had to speak on love the morning after an argument with my wife.”
Another said, “I can barely preach if I’ve gotten angry with my children on the way to church. It’s hard to talk about forgiveness when I need to practice some.”
Family relationships, if strained, can hinder a person’s ability to minister, but many church leaders have learned that ministry can — and must — continue even when conditions at home are less than optimal. Every family will face times of turbulence.
Perhaps one of the most prominent examples of persistent ministry in the face of domestic turmoil is John Wesley.
Before his marriage at age 47, Wesley had at least two romantic interests that ended in disappointment. In Georgia, teenager Sophie Hopkey grew tired of waiting for young Wesley to commit himself; she married another man, and Wesley’s angry reaction brought an end to his ministry in America. Back in England, Wesley’s sporadic courtship of Grace Murray ended abruptly when she hastily married Methodist lay-preacher John Bennet at the urging of Charles Wesley. Charles was convinced his brother’s marriage to Grace would have been a terrible mistake, so he falsely convinced Grace that John had decided to give her up. Wesley was deeply wounded. He wrote to his friend Thomas Bigg, “Since I was six years old, I have never met with such a severe trial.… The whole world fought against me; but above all my own familiar friend.”
Shortly thereafter, Wesley apparently fell in love with a widow named Molly Vazeille. After preaching one Sunday in February 1751, he slipped on the ice crossing London Bridge and hurt his ankle. He was taken to Mrs. Vazeille’s house, where he spent the remainder of the week “partly in prayer, reading and conversation, partly in writing an Hebrew Grammar and Lessons for Children” — an unusual courtship. The next Sunday he preached kneeling, and the next day he married Molly Vazeille.
It was probably the worst mistake of Wesley’s life. “Whatever Molly Vazeille’s defects, and they may not be glossed over, Wesley must bear some responsibility for [the marriage’s] ultimate failure,” writes Wesley biographer V. H. H. Green. “Molly Vazeille was no starry-eyed young girl, enraptured by the divinely sent evangelist. She was a widow with experience of marriage and four grown-up children who had no desire to become part of a traveling caravan.”
As soon as his foot healed, Wesley was off on his travels. Molly tried accompanying him, and at first, Wesley commended her: “They talk of you much and know not how to commend you enough, even for your plainness of dress, your sitting among the poor at preaching, your using sage-tea (Wesley had strong views about the bad effects of green tea), and not being delicate in your food.” But the rough roads, bad weather (“This day,” Wesley once wrote, a bit smugly but no doubt sincerely, “I was wet from morning to night with the continued rain, but I found no manner of inconvenience”), shabby inns, and poor food were too much for the former merchant’s wife. She stopped traveling with him and stayed home, brooding on her perceived mistreatment.
She questioned his affection. When they were together, they exchanged angry words. She began to doubt his fidelity. She found some letters that aroused intense jealousy.
Finding little support at home, Wesley had taken to writing Sarah Ryan, a woman he had appointed housekeeper at Kingswood School, and at times his words were indiscrete: “Conversing with you, either by speaking or writing, is an unspeakable blessing to me. I cannot think of you without thinking of God.”
When Molly found out about Sarah, who was twenty years younger than the 54-year-old Wesley, her anger increased. She discovered Sarah’s checkered past. (As a young woman, Sarah had been a domestic servant and married a corkcutter who was, in fact, already married. When the corkcutter deserted Sarah, she wed an Irish sailor named Ryan, and while he was at sea, she bigamously married an Italian. Eventually Ryan sailed to America, and the Italian joined the British navy, leaving Sarah to return to domestic service. It was then that she heard Wesley preach and was converted.)
When Molly found in Wesley’s pocket a letter addressed to Sarah, she angrily observed, “The whore now serving you has three husbands living.”
The marriage did not survive. Molly turned increasingly vindictive before the final separation. Wesley wrote of “being continually watched over for evil … hearing a thousand little, tart, unkind reflections in return for the kindest words I could devise.” Another time he wrote, “My wife picks my lock and steals my private papers.” She published his indiscretions and defamed him to his critics. In one celebrated incident, she accosted Wesley while he was speaking and tried to drag him away by his hair. He once said she could undo in two minutes more than he could do in two weeks.
For another twenty years, he hoped for the possibility of reconciliation, but in his last surviving letter, dated October 2, 1778, he doubted whether they would meet again in this world: “If you were to live a thousand years, you could not undo the mischief that you have done. And till you have done all you can toward it, I bid you farewell.”
She died three years later, but Wesley did not know of her death for several days and did not attend the funeral.
Certainly the responsibility for the tensions in the Wesley household rests with both John and Molly. When they were married, he was already wed — to his mission. He wasn’t prepared to focus his energies on family concerns. He was certainly no model husband. For her part, Molly became increasingly unbalanced and jealous, and certainly her determination to defame her husband was inexcusable.
But perhaps the greatest lesson to emerge from this story is simply the fact that hardly anyone has heard it. John Wesley has not been judged by history for his failure at home but for his accomplishments in ministry.
Despite the turmoil at home, Wesley unarguably had a tremendous impact throughout England. He traveled more than 250,000 miles on horseback, preached 46,000 sermons (a thousand times a year), wrote 400 books, established hundreds of societies, and founded schools, hospitals, and orphanages. He not only helped change the moral climate of eighteenth century England (he was an important influence on William Wilberforce, a key figure in abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire), but Wesley’s influence continues into the twentieth century (seen not only in the Methodist and Wesleyan denominations, but also in the thousands of small-group Bible studies that trace their spiritual lineage to the “bands” formed by the methodical Wesley to promote Bible study).
Ministry is indeed possible even when family tensions present unavoidable challenges. At times the tensions are a result of our own poor choices — and our responsibility is to right whatever wrongs we’ve committed as much as we are able. Other times the tensions are the result of other people’s decisions or circumstances beyond our control. In either case, two principles help point the way to the place where, by God’s grace, effective ministry can still happen.
Accepting and Admitting Shortcomings
The first principle is to accept and admit the tensions family life produces.
In a Leadership interview, I once asked family-life advocate James Dobson about the inevitable gap between public ministry and private family life. How does a minister encourage family life publicly when he knows things are stressful at home?
Dobson said, “If you don’t have your home life in good order, you have no business teaching others how to handle theirs; on the other hand, no one is perfect at home.
“You can no more be a perfect father or husband than you can be a perfect human being. You may know all the rules for good family life, all the biblical principles — and yet simple fatigue will affect your ability to implement them at certain times.
“So after a sermon it is always possible for a pastor’s wife to say to her husband on the way home, ‘I guess you know you don’t live up to what you preached today.’ That is the nature of human imperfection.”
I asked, “Does Shirley ever remind you that you’re talking further than you’ve walked?”
“She is generous to me because she loves me, but it’s not difficult for her to identify my faults,” he said. “That’s why I frequently talk publicly about my shortcomings at home. In one of my books I describe our classic ‘umbrella fight.’ I’d come home from a trip exhausted. Shirley wanted me to clean the back yard umbrella that Saturday, while I felt entitled to watch a football game. After all, I’d been working hard and deserved a day off. But while I was out of town, she had been taking care of our children and managing the family. Now that I was home, she felt it was high time I offered her some relief. We had a three-day collision of wills over that.
“I think it’s important for family specialists to reveal incidents like that. I have also tried to describe times I did not father our children properly. Chuck Swindoll is careful to admit the same kind of faults. We need to admit we’re not perfect at home. Honesty demands it. And people respond to that openness.
“With one group, I told about a frustrating day when I really rode the backs of my children. I said, ‘That day I violated everything I write about.’ The audience applauded. They need to hear about times I haven’t measured up to my own standard.”
Hanging in There
The second principle is simply to hang in there long enough to see if God’s grace is sufficient to let the ministry continue.
Steve Harris is a pastor who knows family tension of a different sort. His son, Matthew, was born with spina bifida and an unnerving complication, apneic spells, in which Matthew would suddenly stop breathing and have to be resuscitated — as many as twenty times a day. The doctors, unable to explain the exact cause or treatment, warned Steve and his wife, Pam, that the next spell could end Matthew’s life.
“We never know when Matthew might stop breathing and never go anywhere without our medical equipment to help revive him,” writes Steve. “Our current estimate is that Matthew has stopped breathing and nearly died over 2,780 times. A parishioner once suggested that ‘by now you’re probably used to it.’ I wish that were true. Each spell is as frightening as the first, as we anxiously watch, wait, and wonder if we truly are witnessing the end of Matthew’s life.”
Matthew’s medical problems have made ministry — indeed, life itself — a daily challenge. Steve has felt keenly the various emotions that make ministry so difficult for a hurting pastor. But he has learned to minister despite the stressful family situation.
“‘One of the most important lessons you can learn,’ a professor told me in seminary, ‘is that at times, you’ll have to minister when you don’t feel like it.’ Those times have certainly come,” says Steve.
“On a warm July morning I was scheduled to perform a wedding, but right beforehand, Matthew suffered five serious apneic spells within an hour. As I dressed for the wedding in the hospital men’s room, the last place I wanted to be was celebrating with a young couple anticipating the joys of married life. But I also knew I had made a commitment. The wedding went fine, although I’m sure I’ve done better.”
The fact he did it at all was a positive accomplishment. The decision to “hang in there” is an important step for any pastor.
Yes, family tension affects ministry, but as John Wesley, James Dobson, and Steve Harris have learned, it doesn’t prevent it. At times, however, it does demand certain crucial responses, to which we turn in the next chapter.
Copyright ©1988 Christianity Today
