Where Have All the Good Pastors Gone?

I am married to one of them, and on this Pastor Appreciation Day, I want you to know why I dedicated Becoming The Pastor's Wife to him (Surprise, Jeb!)

People ask me why I haven’t lost faith in the church.

I understand their question.

I live in Texas, which means I have not only watched pastor after pastor fall around me (and this story here), but I know people who attend their churches. Just last week I heard another story about clergy sex abuse involving another Baptist pastor and (as much as it sickened me and broke my heart) it didn’t surprise me. After having spent almost two years going through Baptist archives and reading evangelical ministry books, I can tell you beyond doubt that the SBC has built a culture that prioritizes men at the cost of women, even championing a theology that justifies their actions.

I understand why women are leaving the church, even if the churches in my hometown refuse to recognize that this is happening.

I understand why people want nothing to do with church, much less a pastor.

But I also have lived, for the past twenty-seven years, with a pastor who gives me hope that the church can be a much better place.

My husband and I a few months before our marriage as enshrined by an Olan Mills church directory. How young we were!

There is so much I could say about my husband. I could tell you how he spends his day off driving for meals on wheels. The elderly men and women on his route often ask him to officiate their funerals, as he is the only pastor they know. I could tell you about how he spent his first 20 years in youth ministry with no aspiration to become a preaching pastor—teaching youth and providing pastoral care to their families was his vocational calling and he loved it (so did the youth). I could tell you about how he has stood in the gap for women on staff and women in ministry for as long as I have known him, even inspiring young women in our youth group to go into ministry despite the complementarian stance of those churches. I could tell you how he responds to criticism, listening to others and admitting when he is wrong—even to the point of changing a theological stance. I could tell you how he is fantastic at both administration and providing pastoral care—strengths that don’t often receive a great deal of attention but, honestly, are two of the most important skills for shepherding a church.

One of the families gave us this coke bottle as a going away present from our last church.

But let me just share with you what I wrote about him in the 8th chapter of Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry. It is the hardest chapter in the book, as it tells the story of a yet-unknown case of clergy sex abuse and the impact it had on the faithful wife of an unfaithful pastor. The short excerpt below will give you a glimpse of what is coming in my next book; it will also give you a glimpse of my husband.

As my researched progressed, I began to uncover “a story hauntingly familiar to the sex abuse crisis plaguing the SBC. A story connecting the dots between a gender theology that rejects women’s independent pastoral authority and a culture that privileges male clergy over clergy abuse victims. A story that shows the precarity of the pastor’s wife role.

It took me eight months to piece the story together, with the assistance of the SBC archives in Nashville, the Canadian Baptists of Ontario and Quebec at their main office in Toronto, and the archives in the neighboring town of Hamilton…

The story I uncovered reinforced for me how lucky I am in my personal experience as a pastor’s wife.

I may have been powerless in that atrium seven years ago, but I have never been powerless in my marriage. I am married to a kind and generous man who loves Jesus, has integrity, and believes fully in the dignity and equality of women. He majored in social work and became a pastor because he felt called to help people— not because he wanted to build a social media platform and preach before thousands of people. Neither money nor power motivate him. He isn’t perfect, but he is a man after God’s own heart; he loves me and our children deeply.

I am lucky. Not all pastors’ wives are.”

I cannot tell you how thankful I am to be married to a man like my husband. He gives me hope, every single day, that my evangelical world can be better. He gives me hope that pastors can be better, too.