When I First Learned Grown-Ups Bully Kids of Women in Church Leadership
Spoiler Alert: I still played with dolls. Later, I found a kindred spirit in the childhood disdain for hypocrisy exhibited by Miss Jane Eyre.
Let me say something right out of the gate.
Parsonage life can be challenging for all pastors, and it can be challenging for all pastors responsible for kids. In fact, if you grow up around ministry, you probably grow up in a constant, mild state of what kids these days call “deconstruction,” because you’re constantly adjusting to the ways belief and practice can tear apart at the seams. Sometimes pastors’ families get bullied, and that’s always wrong. I’m sorry if that was you. It wasn’t right.
Don’t let hesitancy about how ministry life may affect kids stop you from entering pastoral ministry if that’s your calling. Learning how to respond to adversity isn’t fun; it’s also an opportunity, if you have little Life Apprentices in your life, to meaningfully engage with them about values, belief, practice, feelings, and what a kid is and isn’t responsible for. And there can be many sweet positives, too.
It’s a hard gauntlet to walk, but if you have kids in your arena of influence, you know it - they repeat what you say. It doesn’t matter if you tell them not to. They’ll say it out loud eventually when you’re not around. How we talk about others to and in front of children matters. And for what it’s worth, kids are never responsible for their parents’ choices.
Every pastor’s kid has a different experience of growing up in a very small spotlight. When I was little, you couldn’t swing a stick around one side of the family without hitting a Wesleyan-holiness preacher. At holiday dinners, church life dominated the conversation. My Grandpa had been a pastor for over 40 years, he’d been Assistant District Superintendent, and two uncles were pastors. You couldn’t sneeze without someone ready to take an offering, say a benediction, or issue an altar call.
My Grandma was the kind of “pastor’s wife” who was essentially an assistant pastor. Only at her funeral did I learn that in a difficult phase of extended illness for my Grandpa, my Grandma, a young mother, filled in, preaching with a Bible in one hand and a baby in the other arm, bottle propped under her chin.
I grew up knowing my Grandpa was respected.
My Mom was called into ministry when I was a kid. My heart sank when she told me: I knew that meant one thing - moving. Later, I learned that as Mom wrestled with her call, my Grandma took her aside one day during a visit to share that she and Grandpa had been praying and wondered if God was calling Mom into ministry.
So I entered pastor’s kid-parsonage life when Mom accepted a call from a tiny rural church in a small town - a common option for women in the denomination at that time. It was that, church planting, children’s ministry, or international missions.
It hadn’t always been like that. The denomination actually had a robust history of women preachers, pastors, and evangelists - the oldest lady in Mom’s first congregation could remember far enough back to recall another time a woman preached from the pulpit - in the 1920s or 30s.
Not long after moving to a small town where I didn’t know anyone, I was in a setting where an adult I didn’t know asked me why my family had moved there. (There weren’t a lot of newcomers, and certainly not a lot of industry.)
“My Mom’s a pastor, we moved here because of the church.”
“Oh, your -” [pause, confusion] “You mean your Dad’s a minister?” obviously thinking I’d misspoken.
That had to be the explanation: the kid misspoke.
“No, I mean my Mom’s the pastor.”
[benign friendliness from Grown-Up begins to shift icy]
“OH…isn’t that unbiblical??”
Friends, this person was asking a kid who was about 10 years old.
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