Table of Contents

Exercising Good Stewardship
Over Your Marriage and Family

By Wayde & Rosalyn Goodall

Sidebars: How To Grow In Your Marriage And Your Ministry How To Keep the Ministry From Killing Your Marriage Making Your Marriage And Family Work

Bill Hybels, pastor of one of the largest churches in the United States, wrote, "Lynne and I have never hidden the fact our marriage requires a tremendous amount of work—more than many marriages do. We have been married for nearly 2 1/2 decades, and still it seems we have to struggle for every tiny step of progress we make on the path toward marital joy. Personal woundedness, personality differences, and pressures of a highly visible lifestyle compound our challenges. But we pray, we talk, we seek counsel, we discipline ourselves, we grow, we change, we promise, we apologize, we confess, we adjust our expectations, we remind ourselves of our commitment, we look to the future, and we refuse to give up. We are in this marriage for life—we have chosen to stay with the spouse ‘of our youth’—and we thank God for each step that brings us closer to rejoicing."¹

I appreciate Bill’s transparency. It does take work to build and maintain a healthy marriage. Sadly, some ministers and spouses do not have healthy marriages, and they do not seek help. Pastors and their spouses are not open with fellow ministers concerning marital challenges. They are afraid their friends will talk to others, or the district leaders will find out and their careers will be jeopardized.² Ministers and their wives privately live in pain because they mistakenly believe ministers and their marriages must be perfect.

The Relationship Between the Healthy Marriage of the Minister And A Healthy Church

Most ministers realize that the American family is in trouble. We have read the statistics and seen the reports. Hopefully, we also realize that one of the greatest weapons we have to fight this attack on the family is the uncompromising Word of God. Most churches, however, do not have in-depth programs to address the needs of hurting families or to enhance the health of strong families.

The National Association of Evangelicals uncovered an interesting finding. They found that "few pastors indicated having taken significant steps to help people whose families were in trouble, even though they also said that family disintegration is a relatively common problem in their congregations."³ Why?

Gary Sell, in his book, Family Ministry, gives one probable reason. "The answer is no doubt complex, but one report speculated that many pastors’ families are in so much trouble that the pastors avoid the subject of family. If this is true—if pastors are afraid to tackle family issues lest they call attention to their own ailing home life—it may tell us more about congregations than about pastors. Perhaps pastors are threatened by the widespread attitude that falling short in family life is less tolerable than other failures. We permit our leaders to preach and teach about prayer, evangelism, and other ‘spiritual’ matters without expecting them to have mastered them. Yet we may not allow them to struggle as spouses and parents."⁴

Unless the pastor has a healthy marriage, he will probably not provide the teaching and resources needed for his people to develop healthy marriages. If what Sell says is true, pastors need to strengthen their own marriages as a model and as an encouragement to those in their congregations who need to strengthen their marriages.

What do we do? Since ministers have the same difficulties in life as the people we serve, we need to find ways to communicate, discipline our kids, deal with conflict, stress, illness, tragedy, pain, and disappointment. We must also work toward building a healthy marriage.

Protecting Ministry Marriages

Ministers’ marriages have many of the same issues as other marriages, but they also have unique battles that add to the challenge of developing a healthy marriage. After 25 years of pastoral ministry and after listening to hundreds of ministers and spouses express marital concern, we have discovered that much of the pain in ministers’ marriages comes from eight issues. Identifying the issues that challenge ministry marriages and developing a strategy to fight them are necessary for building and maintaining healthy marriages. Here are the eight areas that will help pastors build a healthy marriage and family in the parsonage.

1. Keep your family, not the church, a primary focus in your life. Next to your relationship with Christ, the next most important relationship a minister has is with his or her spouse and children. Most ministers work hard at what they do. Like executives, they put in an average of 55 or more hours a week. Being on call 24/7/365 and trying to be prepared to meet the needs of people is demanding. Jesus did not ask you to do the work of ministry without paying attention to your family or personal needs for rest, refreshment, and renewal. The context of Scripture exhorts you to focus on finding balance. Jesus said, "My yoke is easy and my burden is light" (Matthew 11:30, NIV).

2. Learn to deal with unrealistic expectations. Some in your congregation feel you work for them. Many ministers are concerned about losing their jobs, so they permit unrealistic expectations from their parishioners to invade their personal lives. Finding balance between what you can and can’t do, learning how to delegate and to whom to delegate, are critical for a healthy life. Jesus sometimes walked away from ministry responsibilities for personal refreshing. You must develop that ability as well. Although "crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses . . . . Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed" (Luke 5:15,16, NIV).

3. Anticipate criticism. When you lead, you will be criticized. Jesus was. The disciples were. All leaders are. Sometimes criticism is given in a mean-spirited manner and is not warranted. You need to learn to not take this criticism personally, and to walk away from it without letting it affect your spirit. Some critics need to lighten up, and some of those being criticized need to toughen up. Sometimes criticism contains truth. All of us have blind spots, and it’s good to listen to our critics. Instead of letting criticism drive you into depression, realize that criticism can provide you opportunity to grow.

4. Keep your calendar under control. If you do not control your time, someone else will. Late night meetings can go on night after night. Block off time on your schedule for family nights and date nights with your spouse. Tell those who want to schedule a meeting that you have an important appointment on those nights. It’s true. Who is more important than your family?

5. Learn how to manage stress. Stress will eventually affect your marriage. In the United States, 30 million men describe themselves as being stressed-out.⁵ In ministry, you go through times of intense stress. Learning coping techniques is critical if you are going to find a balanced life that includes a healthy marriage and a faithful career in ministry. Seasoned ministers have often found good ways to handle stress. One Christian psychologist who works with burned out ministers gives these five ideas to avoid burnout:

• Learn that you can’t do everything.
• Pace yourself.
• Delegate.
• Take time for rest.
• Listen to your body.

Caring people are usually the ones who burn out. As a minister, you are in the care giving business.

6. Learn to cope with economic restrictions. Approximately 64 percent of Assemblies of God pastors serve churches of 99 or less people. Many have economic restrictions and live on tight budgets. Some might need advice from a Christian financial planner to adjust their spending or develop a budget. Others might even need to find a way to meet the needs of their families through tentmaking—working at a nonministry second job.

7. Keep yourself sexually pure and avoid compromising situations. It’s not unusual for people in your congregation to admire, and at times more than admire, the pastoral couple. Be cautious about this and listen to your spouse, because he/she might be sensitive to someone of the opposite gender who has improper feelings. Ministers also need to rely on the opinion of their wives when they counsel women in the congregation. Most of the time counseling people of the opposite gender should be done as a couple.

8. Learn to deal with discouragement. A wise missionary told me that one of the greatest weapons the enemy uses against ministers is discouragement. Times of discouragement come with the occupation. If you’re not careful, discouragement can be a crippling problem in your ministry and your marriage. You need to develop a big picture mentality—understanding that God is at work—even when the tough times make it hard to see Him. Peter wrote, "The God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast" (1 Peter 5:10).

Parenting And the Parsonage

Just as there are unique issues ministry couples face to keep their marriages healthy, developing and maintaining healthy relationships with our children present parents with a whole new set of issues. Parents need to focus on five major areas in child rearing: love, example, discipline, consistency, and the father’s involvement in the family.

Love: Mothers and fathers must love each other and their children. Our love for each other needs to be obvious to our children. Our love for each child needs to demonstrate the characteristics found in 1 Corinthians 13:4–7.

We have often told our congregation that our children are just like theirs. The fact ours are related to the pastor doesn’t take away their normalcy and need to grow as people. It also doesn’t insulate them from normal issues that any young person faces in life.

Example: We are an example to our children in the way we act, react, the things we say, attitudes we have, and emotions we display. How we model the Christian life in front of our children will have great influence on how they choose to live their lives. Children learn from what we do, not from what we say.

Discipline: Everyone needs boundaries, limitations, and guidelines. Discipline provides fences in life. Discipline involves giving instruction about right behavior, not just wrong behavior. Discipline needs to be fair, timely, consistent, and with both parents in agreement. Every child has a different personality. We may need to use different kinds of discipline for each child.

Consistency: We not only need to be consistent in our discipline, we need to be consistent in our love for each other (husband and wife) and our children. If we are consistent, we are predictable. Our children will know how we will act and react to certain kinds of behavior (good and bad). Irrational, emotionally out of control, and surprising behavior on the part of the parents encourages dysfunction in not only the child’s life, but also the family’s.

The father: In one study involving 994 couples with children, researchers found that children who spent more time with their fathers had fewer behavior problems. In another study involving 14,700 teenage girls, researchers found that the closer a relationship a girl had with her father, the more likely she was to delay sex and the less likely she was to use drugs and alcohol (Elias 1998).⁶

The busy pastor is often the absent father. It is critical that the father (pastor, missionary, or evangelist) be involved in his or her child’s life. This includes discipline, spiritual direction, and educational, sporting, and other recreational activities.

Someone asked, "How do you spell love to a child?"

The answer, "Time."

Your marriage and family is an example to the people you serve. One of the greatest things you can do as a minister is to demonstrate how a healthy family functions and how it respects all members. You are not perfect; your marriage is not perfect; your children are not perfect. However, when your family has a higher priority than your ministry, you show the people you serve the importance of family life.

"Family," in the words of one social scientist, "is the most profound of all influences on who we are and what we do." He explains, "The families to which we are born and those in which we live as adults shape us from birth to death. They are the immediate cause of our best and worst times. No other association links us with one another as family does, and none is more influential."⁷ If this is true, your marriage and family have an incredible influence, not only on you, but on those you serve.

The people in your church are desperately looking for a good example for their own marriage and family. Staying healthy (or getting healthy) in this area of your life will pay rich dividends for all involved.

Wayde Goodall, D. Min., is senior pastor of First Assembly of God, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Rosalyn has served with her husband in ministry for over 25 years.

ENDNOTES

1. Bill Hybels, Making Life Work (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 136.

2. Even in extreme marital difficulty, our districts are available to assist the minister. I have witnessed numerous occasions when district officials demonstrated tremendous generosity and understanding.

3. Ted Ward, "Report of the Task Force on the Family of the National Association of Evangelicals" (1988), 1.

4. Charles M. Sell, Family Ministry (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1995), 14.

5. Richard Swenson, M.D., Margin: Creating the Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves You Need (Colorado Springs: Navpress, 1992). Dr. Swenson is the director of the Future Health Study Center in Menomonie, Wisconsin.

6. Stephen A. Grunlan, Marriage and the Family: A Christian Perspective (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House 1999), 242.

7. Steven L. Nock, Sociology of the Family (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1987), xi.