interview on balancing family and ministry
16 July 2008 6 Comments
Anybody else run across this interview on balancing family and ministry? A pastor’s kid (PK) who’s now a pastor and raising PK’s of his own, and a guy whose wife is a PK who is now raising PK’s of his own.
“Ministry in the Middle” from Leadership Journal
Here’s an interesting line from one of the answers. The father tells his son, the interviewee, “my generation failed in that we tended to sacrifice family on the altar of ministry. I fear your generation is sacrificing ministry on the altar of family.”
Thoughts on the whole article and/or this line?
About guy m williams
Nice interview. Very helpful. Really a topic for prayer for we pastors who are raising children. Their responses here offer some really cool ways to live out this parenting.
I think mothers who are in full-time ministry face some additional challenges, and I would also say that most pastors don’t even have to think about 30 or more nights a year of speaking engagements away from home! But setting a limit on evening meetings is not only good for pastor’s families; it’s good modeling for other families, too. The problem comes in churches where the active members are older and have a model of going to lots of meetings and don’t have the home commitments themselves that give them understanding of younger family’s current needs.
Thanks for the link, that was interesting.
I think I still tend towards the sacrificing of family on the alter of ministry; although it is easy to see how it could be reversed! I have written a little post about a recent discussion my wife and I had about this in public (you can view it here, if you want: http://radicallyaltered.blogspot.com/). Thanks for the link, it has given me even more to ponder (just what I needed!).
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“…I fear your generation is sacrificing ministry on the altar of family.”
That sentence really rubs me the wrong way. I know quite a few pastors and I’ve never thought they need to spend MORE time on their ministry because they’re spending too much time with their family. Perhaps they’re out there, but I’m not seeing it.
At DTS they always told us to take fewer classes if we were married with kids. They told us to take a B instead of an A if it meant more time with our family.
That works for me.
I would say this can be true for any line of work but in the ministry we tend to think that if we are sacrificing family time for ministry then it’s more important than another’s sacrifice. I think we need to be more careful in how we view ministry in comparison to other lines of work-I don’t like the “higher calling” phrasing…however for the sake of this discussion, anyone in ministry – ordained or lay face this for sure…it definitely comes home with you. The thing I try to be careful of is when I’m at home, I’m home. My mind is there and my attention is there. I never want my children to feel as if their needs come second to everyone else. There’s always a balance of course but if a man cannot manage his own family, how can he manage a church (1 Tim 3:5).