Setting boundaries with your husband’s church

Yes, that’s allowed.

In fact, I recommend it.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, being a pastor is a lot like being a politician. Everyone knows about you, but nobody really knows you for you. It’s an excruciatingly public role and has many stereotypes (both admittedly accurate and wildly off-base) attached.

It’s a very personal job, and often a pastor carries intimate knowledge of his congregation members on his own shoulders. He knows the worst bits of some people in the pews and the best parts of them, too. At times, the personal nature of this role makes it difficult for churchgoers to remember that being a pastor is a job, a mere facet of him, not his entire life. It's difficult to see the man, husband, and father beyond the intimidating white robe.

It's all too easy to call the pastor at 11 pm when there has been a small car accident. When you're scared and need a shoulder, I'm glad that you thought of spiritual care first.

It's all too easy to call the pastor when the speaker system isn't cooperating on his day off. You need answers, and he knows them. Monday seems a superbly random day to be off, and I totally agree.

It's all too easy to pull the pastor's wife aside after church and ask her if she'll help you with VBS. You need a volunteer, and you know she's invested in the life of the church (but in my case, I'd rather gouge my eyes out with a spoon).

It's all too easy to comment on the behavior of the pastor's kids in church because you spent the entire service watching them, for better or worse.

This is where boundary-setting comes in. Pastors need to establish boundaries for their own personal welfare, as well as for the sake of their wives' sanity. We spent hours digging into (and occasionally fighting over) what boundaries we thought necessary before our feet hit the ground at my husband's first call post-seminary. Once we became acclimated to that church, we edited those boundaries, but overall, I found this practice extremely beneficial.

What kind of boundaries do you need? I'm glad you asked.

1. Work day
   

Let’s start with something easy: the work day. What is the work day for your husband? How many hours is he expected to work in a week, and how does that shake out per day?

 A consistent 9-5 work day for a pastor is just not a thing. Sorry to burst your bubble.

There will be evening meetings, overnight conferences, and 6 am Bible studies. A good rule of thumb is to think about the day in thirds and stick to a 2/3 rule. There’s the morning, afternoon, and evening. If it’s an off-schedule day, encourage your husband to confine work to 2/3 of that day. On a typical day, it probably looks like work in the morning and in the afternoon, and he comes home for the evening. On other days, he might need to shuffle that around. Regardless of the day's schedule, he must take at least one of those thirds off either for himself or to be with you or your family.

Must? Well, that's a little harsh, isn't it?

Sorry, not sorry. Let me tell you a story of what it looks to work 3/3 thirds of the day.

When we were on vicarage, my husband went in early one day to work on a sermon. But it wasn’t just any day. It was Christmas Eve. He was really nervous about it. His supervising pastor had entrusted the entire 11pm service to my husband, and I understood why he was jittery. We didn’t have kids at that point, so I told him to go ahead and work on it. Honestly, he was driving me nuts, so I was relieved when he took his rampant anxiety out the door.

Because he’s a perfectionist, he easily spent the entire morning and afternoon working on that service, making sure that it was just right and that the church facility was ready for all of the Christmas Eve services. It's the only time my husband got a talking to from his supervising pastor. The pastor explained that this sort of work day wasn’t sustainable, and it wasn’t fair to me, either (even if I claimed I was okay with it!). My husband had easily worked from 6 AM to midnight that day, and when he came home, he was beyond exhausted. It would’ve been an exhausting day anyway, but he chose to go in at 6 am due to nerves rather than at 2 PM like the other pastors.

After that experience, we had a serious conversation about what it meant to be prepared for services and how long that should take, even if he felt nervous or unprepared. We set limits on how early he could go in and how long his work day should be. If we could have a do-over, he should’ve stayed home for the morning and taken that third of the day off.

Stick to the 2/3 rule, and hold your husband accountable to it. You both need it.

2. Personal information boundaries
   

Lots of people want to know you now. Hopefully we can all agree that they do not need to know every detail of your life. It may feel odd, but it’s helpful to actually script out how you and your husband are going to respond when someone asks an impertinent question. I’ll give you a classic example.

"When is the next baby coming?"

This is a deeply personal question on so many levels, and I could write an entire blog post solely on how inappropriate it is to ask, but you may need to script out a stock response in your back pocket when someone asks.

Because they will.

They have no reason to know if their pastor and his wife are having protected sex or not. (I mean, that's what the question boils down to.) That is, frankly, none of their business. It's a pretty extreme example, but you may have to sit down and talk with your husband about what information he can share openly about you and vice versa.

My husband and I have a strict positivity boundary. It’s natural for people to bash on their husbands or wives, even playfully, but in our case, it's just not worth it to vent for a minute and get the whole church gossip mill running for weeks. So we only speak highly of each other in public. It just makes things easier for us personally.

Sometimes people ask about it jokingly, saying, "Hey, is your husband perfect or something?" And I say something like, "No, of course he’s not perfect, but I just try really hard to speak well of him since he is your pastor and I don't want to change how you see him. It’s just a rule we have." Sometimes, blaming a rule removes any personal sting that might be felt by the listener.

We also have a firm rule that we don’t talk about church gossip in public. We have exactly one couple from church that we have agreed to share frustrations with, and that’s the end of it. It’s important to have someone to vent to, but it’s equally, if not more important, to know who not to talk to.

There may even be topics that you personally feel are private, but your husband doesn’t realize are sensitive in your eyes. Please talk over those topics before they come up. For instance, I joked with his coworkers about his very stoic demeanor and saw immediately that he was touchy about that. I didn’t realize it because we joke at home and with old friends about it, but that didn't change the sting he felt. He explained how that made him insecure, and I apologized. I felt the same way when he tried to set me up with friends at church, sharing that I was feeling a bit lonely as a stay-at-home mom. He meant it in love, but it made me uncomfortable when he shared with near-strangers. Find your touchy subjects and talk them out as soon as you can.

3. Pick your people

After about a year so in a call, you might find one or two people that you’ve grown really close to. For us, it’s that couple I mentioned earlier, and they also work at church, so we can air out frustrations we’re having in the workplace and church setting. We know for certain that the conversation stops with that couple, and they know the same for us when they share concerns with us. Find your people and explicitly establish with your husband what those people can know and what is off-limits, even with them.

4. Define what an emergency is (and isn’t)
   

When people get scared, they often want to know God cares. That means they go straight to the source and ask their pastor to stand at their side while they struggle.

But what constitutes an emergency to one person is not the same as another. And frankly, the pastor isn’t EMS. He can’t make any practical changes to the situation. His prayers aren’t more valuable than yours. He can’t get your loved one to breathe or stop the bleeding.

The church needs to value your husband‘s off time. For them to do that, he needs to set forth clear expectations for that off time and what he'll accept calls for during that time. A planned hip replacement? Not an emergency. That’s something that can be scheduled for a meeting with the pastor at an appropriate time during the workday. However, a life-or-death situation with a regularly attending member of the church might constitute an emergency.

Notice that I said a regularly attending member. It's not to be mean or make the church into a closed group. There have been times when my husband has received calls from people sitting in a hospital room who have little to no ties to our church. My husband doesn’t know them. He doesn’t know how to pray for them beyond the generic. He can’t even put a name with their face. Those are times when we have established a boundary for him to refer that particular person to the hospital chaplain to receive spiritual care. He explains to our congregation members that there’s no mystical power in being a pastor and seeing one pastor versus a different pastor doesn’t get you any closer to God.

If my husband is leaving the house outside of his work hours to attend to an emergency, he knows the people well, he’s established that there is, in fact, a real emergency going on, and he feels personally compelled to answer the request. The fourth criterion is that he talks it over with me first, and I have the power to veto most of those decisions if I feel it necessary. If a call meets all four of those requirements, he usually goes. But a call rarely meets those requirements.

Remember, a pastor is another sinner in need of a savior. He has no magical powers to extend spiritual care on the grave, and his attendance at a scary event will not alter the situation. When a pastor arrives on the scene in an emergency, he’s really there for the people on the outside of the hospital room. He’s not a doctor, and he’s not God, so he can’t do a whole lot for the person inside the operating room. He can offer some Christian comfort, but in reality, the biggest part of his job in that situation is comforting the grieving or scared people who love the person undergoing care.

5. Involvement boundaries
   

It’s natural for any pastor to want to plug into their church in as many ways as possible! In fact, I think that's a good sign that he's at a good fit call. But it’s critical that whatever he gets involved in fits into that 2/3 rule. For instance, my husband genuinely enjoys playing late-night volleyball at church. It’s great exercise, the people there get to call him by his first name, and he gets to let loose and be off duty while still being at church. It’s a really special time for him. So we make that work in our day. He comes home during the morning or afternoon since he's at church in the evening. That being said, that’s one of only two nights that he’s away from home in a standard week. He has one night a week for meetings, and he has his volleyball night, and the rest of the nights we protect pretty fiercely.

When we first got to one of his calls, he tried stepping in to revitalize a young adult Bible study. But before we knew it, just that one extra night a week away from home was really tearing at our marriage. I was at home with a new baby that hardly slept and was firmly attached to her dad (so inconvenient, really), and he was away three out of four nights per week. We had to evaluate this boundary.

There have been other similar circumstances where we’ve had to establish boundaries with his real priorities versus what he feels expected to be at when his presence isn’t actually necessary. It’s actually created some good conversations with the congregation. It’s ticked off some people too, but that’s part of being human. Our church is very understanding, mostly because we forced them to be very understanding that my husband puts myself and our family higher than church functions on his priority list. Not higher than God, but higher than church functions.

This practice also calls people from the congregation who have natural leadership gifts and talents to step up a bit more and really excel and make the ministries stronger. If a really passionate person can lead a group or ministry or event and actually has the time to pour into it, I can guarantee it’s going to go better than an overstretched pastor trying to make it work in his schedule. If there’s no one to lead an event or a group, then that particular group probably shouldn’t happen. It sounds harsh, but it’s true.

6. Family boundaries
   

You need some context with this one. I’m a pastor’s daughter. I grew up in a church that had no boundaries with the pastor and the pastor‘s family, and I absolutely felt like the property of my church. I remember not being allowed to have toys in the pew because I was expected to be perfectly behaved during the worship service. I had to watch his other kids had snacks and treats and toys while I sat and braided the hymnal ribbons together. (If you grew up in an old Lutheran church, you know the exact ribbons I’m talking about.) I was expected to be at every event and volunteer at them. I remember having to use a step stool to dry dishes in the church kitchens while other kids lolled around eating desserts.

I’m not saying that my childhood was all bad. In fact, some of those ladies that I dried dishes with were like grandmothers to me, and I grieved their passing more than I can possibly tell you. But I do think it was a little overkill to be raised that way: in fear of the church rather than in fellowship. All I wanted was a normal childhood, and while I knew that I couldn’t have a totally normal childhood as pastor’s kid, I at least wanted us to try.

Now that I have two daughters of my own, I have pretty firm boundaries surrounding them at church. The first one being that the church isn’t allowed to touch them. Not unless my daughters initiate the contact. From when they were newborns, I tucked them up and a fabric baby wearing wrap so that if somebody tried to touch them (and they did) they’d basically be touching my right breast if they wanted to touch her head. It felt easier to step away from that sort of contact, even as an introvert. Because my husband and I are on the same team, he also knew to be watching for this and would politely tell people not to touch our kids. As they’ve grown into little girls, I don’t make them greet anybody or give high-fives or hugs when people ask for them. Our rule with our kids is this: they don’t have to be friends with anybody they don’t want to be, but they do need to be polite. My daughter isn’t allowed to lash out and hit people when they ask her for a high five, but when she hides behind my legs, I don’t make her come out and greet them.

In fact, she has a pretty good stink eye, and I kind of love that for her.

I also don’t let the congregation guilt trip me into sending my kids to any events. I’ll be honest, Sunday school is not our church’s strong suit right now, so I don’t send my kids to Sunday school. It’s ruffled a lot of feathers, but I’d rather Sundays be a peaceful day than them go to a poorly planned event just for the heck of it. My girls are also still in a strong stranger danger stage, so I don’t drop them off in the nursery yet. They stay with me at most events. That’s just the way I roll. I want them to be comfortable at church because, realistically, it’s where their dad spends a lot of his time and I don’t want to create any fear or worry in that space. I might be a bit paranoid, but I think I like it this way better than trying to make them get used to a nursery or Sunday school setting that they’re really not ready for and don’t benefit from.

My oldest also doesn’t attend preschool at our church and school yet. The first few years with her were really hard and to rub dirt in the wound, she was a fierce daddy’s girl from the moment she exited the womb. We’re finally moving into a really great place together, so, selfishly, I want to hold onto that a bit longer. I am trained as a teacher and she’s crazy smart so I’m not worried about her missing out on anything, and she also has a lot of little friends so I’m not really worried about her getting social skills worked out. I prioritize my time with her over pleasing people at church who think that she should naturally be going to preschool every day just because it’s there. I don’t know if when she’s going to go to school. I get asked all the time about it, and I just tell people that for now she’s home with me.

This hasn’t come up yet, but my husband and I have also discussed boundaries around comments that people might make regarding our children’s appearance, personality, temperaments, and so on. While I do endure a lot of report cards in the after church shuffle about how well or poorly behaved my children were that day, I know that someday these comments might hit a little closer to home for my girls. It might become targeted toward then rather than me.

Personally, I’ve learned to not really care if someone thinks my kids were poorly behaved during church. While they probably were a wreck (they’re one and three-what more do you expect?), that’s for me to manage. I’ve learned the right things to say to brush commenters off, ruining their fun by being flat and expressionless, just saying “ok” and turning away. But I worry for my girls. Someday a comment from a congregation member might feel like an attack. I know I’ve experienced it.

“Your skirt is awfully short, isn’t it?”

“Why are you being so shy?”

“Your hair looked so much nicer long.”

My husband and I are both ready to respond in those situations, to step in and show our girls that they are more important to us than any congregation member’s comments. We’d rather protect their feelings than the church’s because they are orecious to us. I’m not saying we’ll to be mean to the congregation member, but we’ll help them treat our family with respect.

Ultimately, that would make our relationship with the congregation better, I think.

To the pastor's family: I hope and pray that setting some boundaries allows you to have a beautiful relationship within your home, as well as a strong relationship with the church that sees you for you.

If you’ve wandered across this post as a regular churchgoer, I hope this list helps you remember that your pastor‘s family is human, is sinful, and has a private life. They are no different than you...except that your husband doesn’t have to wear a silly white dress on Sunday mornings (I mean, really. It's a goofy-looking uniform.).

Love,

The Pastor's Wife