by: Nandy Heule
10/1/2007

About a year ago, late in the evening at a Christian retreat near Toronto, Ontario, I was sitting with two other pastors’ wives and talking about what women tend to talk about: our children, our schedules, our grandchildren…

With one of us retired and two of us about to celebrate 25 years in the manse, we also talked about what only pastors’ wives discuss: Our husbands who visited the sick and lonely while we sat alone at home, feeling pretty sick of it all.

Moving. And moving again.

How elders made our lives good, bad, or worse. And how all of this had influenced our families.

Soon, a “normal” woman joined us, then another, and a third. After listening to us briefly, one of them offered the standard, “Well, everything has changed.” She added, “It’s all different for pastors’ wives now. You can do whatever you want, just like us.”

Has life in the parsonage really changed for pastors’ wives in the past 20 to 30 years? Or are parishioners buying into a myth when they say clergy spouses can develop their own careers while supporting their husbands’ pastoral work, possibly raise families, and achieve some type of work-life balance.

While clergy spouses may have to meet fewer arbitrary and unspoken expectations, and the manse isn’t the fishbowl it used to be, fundamentally not much has changed about the ways clergy careers and callings influence the lives of their families.

My Own Story

For more than 20 years I completely denied how being married to a pastor profoundly influenced my life. I came to the United States from Holland to be with my sister, fell in love with a really cute seminarian, and married about a year later. The words ministry and calling were barely in my English vocabulary. In Holland, life had been significantly more secularized. In short, I had little concept of what it meant to marry a pastor and intuitively concluded that my husband was called to ministry, not me. Moreover, I secretly decided I had emigrated once and wasn’t going to move longdistance again, ever.

Early in our marriage, my husband, Nick Overduin, and I agreed that we preferred to never move more than a one-day drive from my family in Michigan. This has always been possible for us—so far (although we never moved more than seven hours from Grand Rapids, we crossed a border to emigrate to Canada in the mid-eighties—God’s sense of humor at work).

Being a pastor’s wife meant I supported my husband, primarily by listening attentively and giving him a break at home when church life became especially busy. I built my own career and volunteered at church like other employed women and men.

A few years ago Nick was the senior pastor of Brampton Second Christian Reformed Church (now CrossPoint CRC—still one of the largest congregation in Canada). I was working full-time in a management position in downtown Toronto, and we had two school-aged children. And, of course, a dog. And I taught Sunday school, took my turn greeting on Sundays, tried to fit in the mandatory volunteer hours at our Christian school, called my mom every Sunday evening, and so on, and so forth. Then Nick accepted a call to a neighboring church, partly to be less busy but mostly because he felt he was called to it.

When I crashed a few years ago (that’s another story), for the first time I began to understand what it had meant to be married to a minister for almost 25 years. And many of the issues relating to a clergy spouse’s building a career are closely tied to the unique pressures that come with being married to a pastor.

Challenges Unique to Clergy Life

Many challenges come with the territory of clergy life:

• Working on weekends and evenings is the rule, always. And they don’t get overtime for working Christmas, Easter, Mother’s Day, or Labor Day weekend.

• Frequent relocation is the norm, not the exception, and rarely leads to significant career improvement.

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