This PK's Life, part 1

A Pastor's Family

If you would have asked my ten-year-old self what it was like to be a pastor’s kid, I would have said it meant moving a lot, having to be at church all the time, and getting to be first in line for potlucks…unless there was a guest preacher, then his family got to go first.

Fortunately, my 35-year-old self tends to dig a bit more deeply into my growing-up years (it’s all part of the whole maturing thing), and I think being a pastor's kid has shaped who I am in ways I've not spent much time reflecting on. That’s why I wanted to write this series of blog posts—to explore what it was about my dad’s profession that influenced my choices and outlook on life.

Growing up, I remember getting strange responses from people when I told them my dad is a pastor. At my first after-school job during high school, my coworkers would apologize every time they accidentally said a curse word...because my dad is a pastor. People I didn't know personally would ask me to babysit their kids because they assumed I was trustworthy...because my dad is a pastor. Elementary school classmates wanted me on their team when we played Bible trivia...because my dad is a pastor. Just a few years ago when I told one of my coworkers what my dad does for a living, she said, "Oh, we need to go to lunch and talk about that further"...because my dad is a pastor. I have a vague recollection from fourth or fifth grade of someone in my class saying he thought pastors' kids were supposed to be perfect (ha!), and it always puzzled me when people said things like, “I’ve heard pastor’s kids rebel when they grow up. Are you going to become a wild child?” Huh?

We were just kids, my siblings and I. We liked the same things other kids liked and felt the same things other kids felt. Our parents had expectations of us to be on our best behavior and to be respectful and responsible, but other parents had the same expectations for their kids. So what made, and continues to make, us different?

That is indeed the million dollar question, and I'm not sure of the answer.

Maybe I'll start with the obvious. I think one big thing my siblings and I experienced that maybe other kids didn’t was a unique perspective about ministry. I have a very vivid memory from when I was five or six years old of my dad taking my sister and me with him when he went to the nursing home to visit the church members who were residents there. My mom would tell us we were going to visit the grandmas and grandpas, and my sister and I both loved those times. The grandmas and grandpas would hold us on their laps, tell us stories, and give us candy from their pockets.

We didn't know we were involved in ministry; we just enjoyed basking in the attention given us by people who probably had far too few visitors. We didn't know our dad was teaching us to offer love to others and be Jesus’ hands and feet. But he was—not with words but by example.

Just this winter, my church offered the opportunity to volunteer at a local care center. When I saw the announcement in the bulletin, the memory of visiting the grandmas and grandpas in the nursing home three decades ago flashed in my mind, and it didn’t take me long to sign up.

Of course, when it came to ministry, we had double the influence, with my dad being a pastor and my mom being a parochial school teacher. I always remember my mom being actively involved in the Sunday school and vacation Bible school programs at whatever church my dad served, and she also played organ and accompanied the choir. Once we kids had flown the coop, she started leading women’s Bible studies and helping organize various events. Needless to say, all throughout my formative years my family spent a whole lot of time at church.

This meant that my siblings and I participated in all sorts of church-related tasks. When I was in second grade, my dad took a call to a congregation that didn’t yet have a church building, so church services were held in the local American Legion Hall. To this day, the smell of stale beer and burnt popcorn and the tinny sound of an out-of-tune piano take me back to those years when my family got up very early on Sunday mornings and arrived before anyone else to vacuum the carpet, set up folding chairs and a makeshift altar and, my mom says, to clean up beer cans, though I don’t remember doing that.

There was a special closeness among the members of the congregation who worshipped in that Legion Hall. There was an appreciation for a place to gather and an excitement for the future. I imagine it probably seemed strange to me at first, not worshipping in a church, but I remember being proud to be part of it. Thanks to that beer-can-littered Legion Hall, it didn't take long for me to understand that ministry can happen anywhere. 

Well, I’ll stop here for now. I keep going off on tangents and then cutting and pasting what I wrote in a different file to use later. I suppose thirty-plus years of memories might come out in a bit of a jumbled mess.

Hmmm, I could really go for a good potluck about now.