The Pastor as Parent

What Leading a Flock and Raising a Family Teach Each Other

I am a third-generation pastor. I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. One of the challenges of pastoral ministry is the reality that there is no off switch. There is no shortage of crises. You are never off the clock. I have seen the damage this can do to the pastor's family. The pastor can be tempted to find their value in their work at the expense of their family. The family can often blame the church for their struggles and difficulties.

Being a pastor is all I know. I grew up in a pastor's home and raised my kids in a home where the only job I have ever done is pastoral ministry. Pastors face unique challenges, and their sorrows are deep and difficult. Yet, there are corresponding blessings and challenges that are gifts.

In a culture that is quick to blame the church for its problems, it may be surprising and maybe even controversial to say that being a pastor has made me a better parent. Here are a few things I have learned as a pastor that have helped me be a better parent.

1. There are two sides to every story, and then the truth.
   Kids are very convincing. They may have tears and even bloody lips to back up their stories, but there are ALWAYS two sides to every story. One day, my boys were playing soccer outside. This was during a season when my oldest was overly aggressive and my youngest was overly sensitive. I heard screams from outside our house. My youngest son burst through the door and burst into tears. His lip was bloody, but his tears were because his heart was hurt because his older brother had embarrassed him. He told me his story. I called his brother in, heard his story, and found out my younger son had passively aggressively annoyed his older brother. Both needed correction, both needed grace, both needed to be heard, and both needed to be told.

   
   Every person I have ever met has the sinful desire to minimize their sins and exaggerate the sins of others. Parents, make sure you hear both sides of every argument, every misunderstanding. When two sinners fight, both need truth and grace. Listen for what is true and what is exaggerated truth. Speak truth to your kids in love. They need it, and if they are honest, they want it. They want to be heard, and they need to be told the truth. Do both with grace.

2. Communication isn’t about talking; it’s about understanding.
   We live in a hyperconnected yet completely disconnected culture. In my years of counseling couples, communication is the primary problem in every marriage. Everything breaks down from a failure of understanding. This is true of marriage, but it is learned in the family. Communication forms and sustains community.

   
   How you talk to your kids and train them to talk to each other shapes how they interact with the world around them. The way you resolve issues and come to a place of understanding will equip them for marriage, the workplace, and being parents themselves.
   
   The way most people view communication is speaking. Saying what needs to be said. Getting something off your chest. That is speaking, it isn’t communication. Communication only happens when understanding is achieved. Communication starts with speaking and ends with a shared comprehension of what has been discussed, even if there is still disagreement over the particulars. You can disagree and still have strong relationships, but that disagreement has to be honest. It has to come from a place of shared understanding, not from assumptions based on what you think the other person said.
   
   What your kids need from you is the ability to actively listen in a world of distraction and to disagree well in an age of bifurcation.

   

3. Sanctification is a team sport.
   Growing up in the eighties wasn’t perfect, but the longer I live, the closer to perfect that decade feels for me. One of the characteristics I miss about that era of my life was the more visceral sense of community. It seems to me that we tended to identify more with the things that made up our shared identity than the things that differentiated us from others. For example, I remember us referring to ourselves as American more often than Republican or Democrat. There wasn’t as sharp of a red and blue divide. We were all red, white, and blue. I can’t tell you the political party my neighbors and family voted for, but I can now.
   
   This lack of communal identity and the identification of individual characteristics has led to a much stronger sense of an individualized faith. The growth of the Jesus and me branch of Protestantism. While there are situations where seeing ourselves in that very personal light is helpful when it comes to sanctification, viewing our faith as personal and individual could not be more damaging. Sanctification isn’t golf, it’s baseball. There are few sports where one person can’t determine the outcome by themselves, like baseball. If one individual determined the quality of the team, my Yankees would have no competition because Aaron Judge is playing in another universe this year.
   

   Baseball teams show us through sports what families show us through relationships. God uses the relationships closest to us to form and reform us. To sanctify and transform us. I often say if you want to be more like Christ, get married as a sinner to another sinner. If you still are not like Christ after a few months, give birth to a few sinners, and that should finish what your spouse started. Sanctification happens in families. I learned that at church. We try to live that at home. What does that look like? It looks like you praying for each other. It looks like forgiveness and repentance in the relationships that are closest to you.
   
   You can only grow in Christlikeness in a community because it's a community that reflects the beauty of our God, who is three in one.
   

4. Focus on the primary things and have charity with everything else.
   The internet has done many good things for us. It has also caused irreparable harm. The harm it has caused is great. One of those harms is connecting you to the one hundred other people who think exactly like you. This is harmful because it’s enough people to make you believe the lie that you are right in all your thoughts and positions. Which you aren’t. The beauty of a church is that so many people love God, the primary mover and creator of everything. He is primary, everything else is secondary, and because of his love and the gap between who he is and how we live, there is a need for Christian charity.
   
   Charity has been reduced to financial generosity in our day. It is a virtue we confuse with love, but it is, in reality, the fruit of love. When you love your neighbor, you are filled with grace. When you love God, charity looks like a love for truth that allows you to know what is true and hold tightly to that, know what is secondary, and be open-handed.
   
   In pastoral ministry, you need to know what is unchangeably true and what is a preference. As a parent, this is a challenge. What rules do I hold to? What truth trumps every activity? As parents, pastors, and followers of the way of Jesus, we must have an unyielding grip on the truth. This is not easy in a world full of lies. Parents and pastors must remind and model the reality that every virtue terminates in kindness and every vice leads to cruelty.

5. Who you are in your public ministry is forged in your private ministry.
   ”The church is full of hypocrites.” I have heard this in more versions and places than I can enumerate. This can be true of the church because it pushes for truth and goodness. But when what they proclaim doesn’t match how their lives are lived, there is a moral clash, a dissonance we instinctively know to be wrong. There has been a parade of broken homes, broken leaders, and broken churches that have been hurt by people who have proclaimed public truth that has failed to reach the private practice of their own lives.
   
   Pastor and parent. Who you are at home is known by your kids long before it is learned by us. Be the same person at home as you are in public. In a world of curated images and Instagram fame, seek simplicity, sincerity, and humility. The rise of the internet has allowed leaders to become influential faster than the crucible of sorrow can forge humility. Who you are in private is far more important than what you do and what you say publicly. Pastor and parent seek simplicity and humility more than influence and notoriety.

   

6. Your church will have other pastors, your family will not.
   One of the lies I was told in the churches I grew up in was “Take care of the church and God will take care of your family.” In a spirit of charity, I would say they meant well and were trying to push the value of the local church. Let me say I understand and I love the local church. I have given the best years of my life to the local church. But one day I will not be a pastor; when that day comes, I will still be a dad and a husband. I will be replaced at the church and forgotten. But my kids will never have another dad.
   
   We are called to love our church as Pastors. But dear pastor, your family is your first church. You can not save them, but are called to proclaim the gospel with your words and life. I heard a famous pastor say once that he disciples his church and then his church disciples his children. This is almost true. The weight of scripture is clear, as a father, pastor, or not, you are the shepherd of your home. As a pastor, you are called to love, disciple, care, and shape the hearts of those who live in the home you lead.
   

7. Your identity is found in Christ.

   One day, I will not be a pastor. I will quit, be let go, or die. When that day comes, I will not be broken because who I am is not what I do. I am a father who deeply loves his kids. I am a husband who passionately loves his wife. I am a son of parents who cared enough for me to point me to Jesus over and over. I am most fundamentally a child. I am a child of God whose identity is shaped by the world-changing reality that I am not my own but belong, body and soul, to my faithful savior Jesus Christ. Pastor and parent, when your identity is foundational, it is found in something that is unshakeable. When your world shakes, and it will. You will not be shaken.
   
   We live in a world that is both obsessed with identity and, at the same time, completely devoid of identity. When you are Christ’s and when he is yours. You are secure when friends fail you, when family members get sick, when your job turns out to be a source of difficulty, not delight. You will be ok because you are found in Christ. We live in a culture that tells us to be in sports or in politics, and there is no shortage of things to be “in.” When you are in Christ, you train the hearts of your kids through your words and actions, and being in Christ does not exclude you from doing other things. Being in Christ allows you to enjoy other things like sports, politics, and hobbies without those things mastering you.

   
   Pastor, parent, and leader be in Christ, and from that all else will find its proper place, and you and those you love will see the beauty of Christ in a life founded in the truth and lived in love.