My Career as a Pastor's Wife

My stint as a pastor’s wife was so brief, it is hardly worth talking about, and so painful, it is still hard to talk about more than 25 years later. Way back when, my husband was a number 2. The principal of a Christian school/youth pastor/assistant pastor ‘catch-all’ who was wholly owned by the church for $250 a week. We were newly married, and I was a recent college graduate joining him in his second year at his post. I worked 40 hours a week running the elementary classroom at the Christian school and serving in the Children’s ministry on Sundays. My earnings: $50 a week. John did a devotional message during the Sunday evening service, and we were expected to be there every time the doors were open which included a Wednesday night Bible Study/prayer meeting. We had Saturdays off.

The school was unlike any we had ever seen, and we had both grown up in Christian schools. The culture in the deep south was like nothing we had ever encountered either. Even in 1990, you might still hear an overtly racist joke told at church. While forced segregation had ended decades before, life in Alabama still seemed very segregated. The educational system was near the bottom in the country. A high school diploma qualified a person to be a substitute teacher. Even in public schools, corporal punishment* was alive and well. Shoes were optional (the Kindergarten teacher at our Christian school opted not to wear them). It was a different world and the students we worked with reflected that culture. Many had failed in the local school system for a variety of reasons. A teenage pregnancy. Academic issues. Behavioral issues. Emotional issues. Lots of suspensions and expulsions left students in need of alternatives, and we qualified as an alternative.

This school was one of thousands at that time whose goal was to raise a generation of Christian leaders, and we were hired with that goal in mind. The school was struggling, and we were supposed to turn it around. But the legalistic standards and academic rigor of the model we used were completely divorced from the reality of the students enrolled. The handbook called for demerits for minor infractions. Imagine giving a pregnant teenager a demerit for failing to push in her chair? These kids had real life issues that were far above our pay grade. Making them wear ties to chapel and attempting to enforce pointless rules was completely ludicrous. One of our teens was an emotionally disturbed young man named David who had been in psychiatric care from the age of 5. But no one told us that. David didn’t appreciate all the rules and broke them constantly. One day he showed up for chapel in a tie, but it was tied in a big bow like Minnie Mouse. John made an off-the-cuff remark that in hindsight was inappropriate, but at the time, it seemed harmless. “David, fix your tie. It looks gay.”

More than a year later, that young man would be caught breaking and entering. He would claim he was trying to steal a gun to kill himself. The reason he gave - Mr. Millen said he was gay. It wasn’t true, but we were never asked for details. His parents threatened to sue the church if John was not fired immediately.

While we had students who struggled, we loved them all and we were seemingly loved by all. Families were happy. We had no warning. We were told on a Saturday to use our key to get in one last time to get our stuff. They were glad for me to stay for $50 a week, but they understood if I couldn’t. We got no severance pay so I needed to find a job immediately. John’s health crumbled under the stress, and he became very ill. His gums swelled up until they completely engulfed his teeth. We went to a doctor who told us to see a dentist who told us to see a doctor. No one had ever seen his condition before. He couldn’t eat. We put cold cereal with milk in a blender and he drank it through a straw. It would be a month before he would recover enough to look for work.

During that month, our phone rang several times. We had no idea what church people were told, but they asked no questions. They just called to rant and tell us how terrible we were for what we had done. I still don’t know what they thought, but I almost think they weren’t told anything. They were just left to assume the worst which they did. We had to take money we didn’t have and get an unlisted phone number so the harassment would stop. Later that spring, we had the potato famine of 1991. We had no money so we ate nothing but potatoes for a week. We were 2000 miles from home, and the only people we knew were in that church. They were our best friends one day, and the next, not one of them showed us even a hint of friendship. We moved back to California 6 months later. We tried a few churches after that but for the next 7 years, we would have no church home and we would seldom darken the door of a church. We didn’t walk away from our faith. In fact we were employed in full time ministry for many of those years, but we said we would never be owned by a church again, and we never have. Do you know a pastor who has lost his job under questionable or less than ideal circumstances? What about his wife? Regardless of why he left his post, she likely had nothing to do with it. Did she lose her whole community in that process, or did her friends rally around her and support her through that difficult transition? I’ve talked to too many pastor’s wives and wives of former pastors who cannot tell their stories without tears because even years later, the pain is still close to the surface. Far too often we put people out like last week’s communion cups even after years of friendship. It feels a lot like betrayal and abandonment because that is exactly what it is. We need to do better. *(As an aside, 107 of Alabama’s 122 school districts paddled students in the 2013-2014 school year. The Alabama Education Association voted to ban paddling in December 2016.)