Family Dynamics

It is my firm belief that one of the biggest challenges of pastoral ministry is caring for multiple generations of the same family.

First of all, every family (and sometimes every generation of a family) has its own culture of how much it's okay to share with outsiders. (And if those standards are high, a pastor usually remains an outsider for a long time.) So it's hard to know if you even truly know what's going on.

Then, there's the issue of parenting other people's children. This is an issue for everyone in a church. And for me personally, it becomes more difficult as the children get older, in situations where I feel the parents are sheltering their child in unhealthy ways. Because I have strong feelings about children's exposure to the world being important, it's very difficult for me to respect some parents' approach to that.

Then as children get even older, you have the issue of parents' adjustment to the children now being adults, with their own lives and ways of being in the world. It's hard to stay neutral.

Then, at the other end of the spectrum, there is the challenge of pastoring elderly people and their children. The children often want certain things, which sometimes conflict with the parent's wishes. It is hard sometimes to realize that we're treating our elderly parents like children, especially when we're doing it "for their own good." As parents lose their hearing and sometimes their capacity for tracking all the details (say, of their own health) we tend to infantilize them. As a pastor, I'm called to help protect their dignity. But most would probably call that meddling.

Families are a mess. Maybe you just can't win. Maybe a pastor should just stay out of it. But that's not what we're called to do, is it? It is a tricky calling to negotiate.