The Challenges of Family Life and Pastoral Responsibilities
Describing the difficulties of balancing a career and the Pastor’s Family Life.
The Challenges of Family Life and Pastoral Responsibilities is a personal narrative that discusses the all-too-familiar practice of neglecting your family for your job. Pastors will learn the importance of balancing time and attention between their families and religious careers by exploring the problems caused by one pastor’s prolonged absence from home. Containing research and first-hand experiences, The Pastor’s Family calls for a change in ministry policies that will enable pastors to devote as much time to their families as they do to their congregations.
Containing stories and anecdotes from the pastors, his wife, and his children, we offer suggestions on how to improve the physical, emotional, and spiritual health of a pastor’s family. The information and insight provided by our mentors and coaches will also help pastors wives realize that they are not alone in their demanding roles and will help church policymakers discover the need to improve relations between the congregation and the pastor’s family. With the hope that the universal problems of pastors’ families will be revealed, we will shares with you methods that have helped bring us and our family closer together, including:
- understanding the expectations of the stereotypical “super pastor” and learning how to set boundaries between family life and career
- realizing that a pastor’s family is subject to the same problems and challenges other families face and helping your family deal with this pressure
- learning the various definitions of codependency and how this can attribute to the neglect of your family
- discussing the history of abuse of pastors’ families through the Bible and famous religious figures
- recognizing the discrimination of a pastor’s wife and her sufferings, such as coping with her husband’s various psychological challenges and being expected to always help her husband with his career
- discovering how conflicts can provoke communication, release emotions, identify and clarify problems, and permit individualization
- understanding why people feel a loss of power or personal rejection when their requests are not granted
The Christian Pastor in His Home Life
1Timothy 3:4-5 “One that rules well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity”
The apostle here turns to the family life of the pastor as an important element affecting the public examination of his character.
I. THE IMPORTANCE OF A WELL-ORDERED HOUSEHOLD.
“One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity.”
1. The pastor is no ascetic recluse, but shares in the everyday life of the world.
2. He must have firmness and authority to rule his family – wife, children, and servants; not slack in his rule like old Eli, but faithful as Abraham, who not only taught but commanded his children and household to keep the way of the Lord.
3. He is to rule gently yet firmly, so as, while securing subjection in his household, he creates that gravity of deportment which is the accompanying grace of obedience in children reared under wise and loving mastery.
II. THE WELL-ORDERED HOUSEHOLD THE TEST OF FITNESS FOR THE RULE OF THE HOUSE OF GOD.
“For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the Church of God?”
1. The argument is from the less to the greater. The family is the lesser sphere, the Church the larger family. The family needs much prudence, care, forethought, affection. But while it is the narrowest sphere, it is governed with peculiar advantages, arising from the feelings of love and dependence on the part of the children. If there is failure here, there is a self-evident unfitness for the wider and more complex administration of the Church.
2. The Church of God is to be a subject of anxious care to the pastor. The Greek word implies this thought. The apostle himself had the care of all the Churches upon him. But the pastor has a care for the individual members of his flock, to seek the conversion of sinners, to instruct the ignorant, to guide the perplexed, to comfort the doubting, to check the wayward, and to defend the flock against errorists and terrorists. “Who is sufficient for these things?” Let’s us ask and let get the solution?