Marriage Enrichment for Clergy Couples
This article originally appeared in “Pastoral Psychology,
Vol. 30, Spring 1982, pp. 151-159. © 1989 Human Sciences Press.
David R. Mace, Ph.D
School of Pastoral Care,
Baptist Hospital, Winston-Salem. N.C.
Vera C. Mace, M.A.
Association of Couples for
Marriage Enrichment
ABSTRACT: Following a four-year study of clergy marriages, the Maces
arrived at certain conclusions. In this
article they comment on what they learned from this investigation, and offer
some recommendations designed to help clergy couples to appropriate their
relational potential.
The message proclaimed from the pulpit can be expressed in a variety of ways. Yet the heart of it is surprisingly simple. What the preacher is trying to tell us is that behind the vast complexity of the universe there is a Person whom we call God; that despite all apparent evidence to the contrary, God is compassionate and loving; that in Jesus of Nazareth we see, in understandable human terms, the nature of God demonstrated; and that those who respond to his call will be enabled to change and grow into loving persons who can in their lives model the divine nature, and by doing so help to bring human society nearer to the divine purpose. There are thousands of ways of saying this – but to say anything less than this is not to preach the Gospel. Right?
An inescapable corollary is that the preacher himself must be a loving person – not only to outward appearance in the pulpit, but in his dealings with others in the work-a-day world, and above all in the intimate associations of his private life. And one of the direct results of the Protestant Reformation was to enable the preacher to have a wife and to raise a family. Previously denied in the Catholic tradition, this privilege has now been available to preachers for about four hundred and fifty years. What has been the result?
Oddly enough, this question has not been asked or answered to any significant extent. William Douglas, who in 1965 published a massive study entitled Ministers’ Wives (New York: Harper & Row), makes this interesting observation:
It is striking how seldom books on the Protestant ministry take account of the fact that most ministers are married, with responsibilities as husbands and fathers. The guiding image, after the Protestant Reformation as well as before it, appears to be a celibate priesthood, in which the clergyman gives his undivided loyalty and time to the Church. Few authors meet realistically and constructively the conflicts faced by a minister who seeks to balance the competing demands and responsibilities of his family and his congregation.
The World Council of Churches met in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1975. During the session, the Reverend Leslie Clements of New Zealand, then serving as Executive Secretary of its Office of Family Education, brought a proposal before the delegates. In the course of the discussion that followed, someone asked the question – “What do we really know about the family life of Christian Ministers?” No very satisfactory answer being forthcoming, Mr. Clements was asked to investigate the matter further.
At this point we came into the picture. We had for some years served as family life consultants to the WCC, and had helped to set up the Office of Family Education. Being specialists in the field, we were therefore asked to look into the question of the married life of the Christian minister.
We soon found that we had a difficult task on our hands. We went through book after book about the life and work of the minister; but found, as Douglas had done, that his role as husband was seldom mentioned. We unearthed two or three doctoral dissertations which dealt, often tangentially, with the subject. We inquired of denominational leaders with special concern for the ministry, and of counselors who had served as pastori pastorum, but found little that was coherent. The entire subject was, apparently by common consent, shrouded in mystery.
At that point we decided on a national consultation, which took place in Washington, D.C., in September 1977. We carefully selected thirty persons to represent a variety of interests, and the group was assembled under the auspices of the National Council of Churches, officially represented by William Sheek. It was a good meeting, but we were all aware that we were only beginning to open up a vast area of inquiry. Since we had no funding to publish our report, it was circulated only to a very limited number of persons.
However, interest was stimulated, and we began to be aware of grave concern about pastors in marital trouble – some of them seeking divorce. At this time our publishers approached us, asking us to consider writing a book on the subject. After much hesitation, we finally agreed. The book has now been published under the title What’s Happening To Clergy Marriages? (Nashville: Abingdon, 1980).
Our survey of the literature finally enabled us to compile a bibliography of a hundred and twenty resources. But in the meantime we had inaugurated a more direct investigation of our own. Its shortcomings as a research project are frankly acknowledged, but in the absence of other evidence we offer it in the hope that a much more adequate study will soon be undertaken. Despite the limited nature of our investigation, however, the pieces of evidence we were able to put together showed a high degree of consistency; and it was this fact that encouraged us to make it available, until such time as a more comprehensive study can be undertaken.
In essence, our method was to lead a series of intensive residential retreats for groups of clergy couples, representing a variety of denominations and of geographical region, focusing on the pastoral ministry, both urban and rural, and covering a wide age range. We used questionnaires which were separately completed by husband and wife, and sent in before they came together for the retreat. This enabled us to tell them on arrival, statistically, where they stood, and this greatly facilitated open discussion, both in small groups and in plenary sessions. We also had them, on arrival and before any discussion occurred, list for us privately what they individually considered to be the advantages and disadvantages of being in a clergy marriage. We ended up with a sample of three hundred and twenty-one persons experiencing clergy marriage, all of whom we met personally and from whom we elicited a considerable amount of material. The findings agreed closely with reports from other available sources and from persons well informed about clergy marriages.
Our first task was to find out what it was like to be a clergy couple, in terms of the practical and situational aspects. Oddly enough, the advantages and disadvantages listed evened out at nineteen each. There were four disadvantages, however, that were mentioned much more often that the others:
1. Unreasonable Expectations of the Congregation. This item was referred to by eighty-five percent of all the husbands and fifty-nine percent of the wives. It just kept recurring – somewhat to our surprise. The language varied, but the issue was quite clear. These couples felt that they were expected to measure up, in their marriage and as parents, to superhuman standards of behavior. There was the husband who wanted to “blow his top” once in a while, and the wife who had to survey the yard closely before she could yell at the children. The complaint was that the standards imposed were unreasonably perfectionistic and far above those accepted by the laity. Our attempts to check this out directly with the laity did not confirm the judgments of the clergy couples; and in the end we reached a tentative conclusion that we were dealing with a projection of guilt. We will return to this later.
2. Intolerably Heavy Schedules. There was much talk about the pastor’s “seventy-hour week.” Actually, sixty-two percent of husbands and fifty-five percent of wives raised this issue, and some objective studies confirmed that this is no exaggeration. One mitigating circumstance was the flexibility of the schedule, but on the other hand there were bitter complaints about the fact that the pastor’s most busy times are the very hours when other husbands and fathers are free. There was evidence, too, that this has recently been exacerbated by the fact that more than half of all clergy wives are now gainfully employed. There was also evidence that one aspect of the husband’s difficulty in finding leisure time was his compulsive drive to be successful. The ministry in the United States appears to be a very competitive vocation.
3. Lack of Family Privacy. The “goldfish bowl” syndrome was referred to by fifty-two percent of the husbands, but only thirty-two percent of the wives. However, sixty-eight percent of the wives, in another connection, registered their exasperation about being deprived of “time alone together,” due mainly to their husbands’ heavy schedules and the lack of privacy. Much was said about the parsonage system, most of it negative. The case for having a home of their own found vigorous confirmation in the fact that house ownership is today for most couples a vital way of beating inflation.
4. Inadequate Salary. The medieval priest who took the vow of poverty, as well as of celibacy, no longer serves as a model of ministry. Increasingly, today’s pastor sees himself as a well-trained professional, entitled to appropriate compensation. We found that, in the list of over four hundred occupations compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the clergyman ranks somewhere over three hundredth – bracketed with cooks, waiters and waitresses, and farm laborers. As recently as five years ago, clergy couples we questioned were too dedicated to make this a major issue; but with raging inflation the limits of tolerance have now been reached, and the ratio of complaints today has risen very sharply. This may be reflected in the interesting fact that we stumbles on, that of all ordained clergymen in the United States, only about half are actually serving parishes. Many others, it would seem, have found greener pastures in more specialized occupations where they are paid at the same rates as their lay colleagues.
Other recurring complaints were the confusion about the clergy wife’s role and status; difficulties in developing in-depth friendships with other couples, either in or outside the church; emotional stress caused by dealing with crisis situations; the wife’s resentment of her husband’s counseling with other women; unfair criticism from church members; and uprooting by frequent moves (for Southern Baptists, the average tenure is under two years).
Advantages included shared commitment and spiritual resources, unity of purpose, the respect of the community, meeting interesting people, opportunities for study and travel, ready-made friends, gifts and services from the congregation, creative work and job security.
The next part of our investigation concerned the personal and interpersonal aspects of life as a clergy couple, and what the external stresses already noted were doing to husband and wife in their intimate life together. While our findings about the outside picture can be confirmed in large measure by observation, the inside story is, as far as we can determine, a field hitherto largely unexplored. We know of no previous systematic report on what is going on. Given the situational stresses, it might be guessed that some negative results would be found; and this was indeed what we encountered.
Putting our evidence together, we found three clear and disturbing situations frequently occurring in the clergy marriages we investigated.
1. The Quality of the Relationship. We had done a good deal of counseling with clergy couples in trouble, and knew what to expect; but we had not anticipated what came to light in this more widely representative group. Yet the evidence was clear. Fifty percent of the husbands, and no less than sixty-nine percent of the wives, needed help in managing anger and other negative emotions; fifty percent of husbands and sixty-two percent of wives felt unable to communicate effectively with each other; forty-two percent of husbands and forty-six percent of wives were not satisfactorily resolving their relational conflicts; and thirty-seven percent of husbands and thirty-two percent of wives had difficulty in expressing affection. These are simply different aspects of a basic inability to achieve a creative relationship of loving intimacy; and it is tragic to think that just about half of all our couples were in this kind of trouble.
2. Dissatisfaction of the Wife. Notice, in the above findings, that in three of four areas the wife was suffering more acutely than the husband. In other respects, too, she was experiencing the greater stress. She scored forty-three percent to the husband’s twenty-four percent in lacking acceptable opportunities for social life and recreation; and she was carrying the main burden in money management and in dealing with in-laws and relatives. Forty-eight percent of all the wives were confused about their roles, forty-four percent disturbed about their husbands’ counseling, forty percent about friendships outside the church, and thirty-six percent about the implications of having an outside job.
The major earlier studies of clergy wives by Denton1 and Douglas were published in 1962 and 1965 respectively, and completed well before the advent of women’s liberation as we know it today. Our evidence would suggest that replication of these studies would find the situation considerable changed today – a supposition supported by an investigation made by Mary Mttis2 for the United Presbyterians in 1977, and by Bonnie Niswander’s article below.
3. The Couple’s Spiritual Life. Of all areas of their married life in which our clergy couples were having trouble, the third in order (after anger and poor communication) was “family devotions,” checked by forty percent of husbands and no less than fifty-five percent of wives. For some, there was so much stress and tension in their relationships that it seemed unreal and hypocritical to try to pray together. For others, the constant interruptions of the telephone, radio and TV, and protesting children, made all attempts at spiritual exercises so discouraging that they gave up in despair. Although some couples viewed this with minor concern, others were feeling quite guilty about it.
Other aspects of the couple relationship which emerged as trouble spots included cooperation in household chores and in parenting, both greatly exacerbated when the wife was working full-time outside the home. The issue of “separateness and togetherness” (coordinating individual and corporate identity) was checked as an area of contention by thirty-five percent of husbands and forty-one percent of wives. Sex relations was one of the most consistent areas in our group of couples – the number referring to difficulties here was a constant and unvarying one in five of all husbands and wives we investigated. It is interesting to consider what the casual outside observer might speculate – probably that a clergy couple would have little difficulty with anger, but might have some real hang-ups about sex! In fact, it turns out to be the other way around!
What emerges from this inside investigation is a rather sad picture of highly idealistic men and women struggling unsuccessfully to achieve the kind of marriage they feel they should enjoy, and feeling frustrated and guilty about it. This led us to speculate whether the complaint about congregational expectations, so vigorously voiced by such a high proportion of our couples, might really be a projection of their own inner sense of failure, and to wonder whether the accusing voice comes after all not from the pews but from the pulpit. For a clergy couple to live with such secret guilt without finding a scapegoat could prove well-nigh intolerable. We have discussed this possibility with several marriage counselors who work with clergy couples, and found that they re substantially in agreement.
We offer three practical suggestions by way of answers to the questions raised by our investigation:
We personally have been leading marriage enrichment retreats since 1962, and it was the high proportion of clergy couples who came to these events, and the high motivation with which they followed up the experiences, that led us to suspect that this was a widespread need. The focus of the marriage enrichment movement is precisely upon the very areas of the marriage relationship in which our subject couples were having so much difficulty – dealing with conflict, anger, and blocked communication. The new concepts, skills, and tools that can be learned in marriage enrichment events provide exactly the resources which these couples need to clear up their obstacles to marital growth. We see great future possibilities in this direction.
Marriage enrichment is primarily for couples who are not in serious trouble in their relationships. For these latter, more intensive aid from qualified professionals is required. Until recently, it has been very difficult for clergy couples to secure such help. In whom could they confide? They could hardly announce to the congregation that they were having marital difficulties. To share this information with clergy colleagues or ecclesiastical superiors might mean serious loss of professional status. To be seen going to a marriage counselor’s office in their home community might start a scandal that would go round the town. So there was nothing for it but to suffer in silence as the relationship progressively deteriorated.
Happily, many denominational systems are now manifesting an enlightened concern about this poignant situation. Arrangements are being made to furnish clergy couples with a list of approved marriage counselors in a wide geographical area. The couple can then select a counselor to whom they can go in complete privacy, pay only a portion of the professional fee, and get help subsidized by the denomination without their identity being disclosed. This system, to our knowledge, is working very well. It is well described by Donald Houts in the preceding article.
Knowing what we now do about the sad state of many clergy marriages, and recognizing the increasingly tolerant attitudes to divorce in our culture today, it seems inevitable that, until we can put effective preventive measures into operation, we must expect to see an increase in the incidence of clergy divorces. There has been much confusion on this issue in some of the churches, though more compassionate attitudes and more realistic procedures are now emerging, as described below by Sandra Brown. We will content ourselves here with quoting one minister who, after struggling painfully through divorce proceedings, offered the observation –“The Christian Church is the only army I know that shoots its wounded.”
Conclusion
In Geneva, Switzerland, back in 1976, we met some officers of the World Council of Churches to discuss and plan the inquire we have reported in this article, and in our book. At the conclusion of our meeting we tried to put ourselves in the shoes of the married minister, and we came up with the following statement:
If my marriage isn’t rich and fulfilling,
it will be hard for me to be a loving
person;
If I don’t function as a loving
person,
I
cannot be an effective pastor;
If I am not an effective pastor,
my work will make me increasingly
frustrated;
Then my frustration about my work
will feed back destructively into my
marriage;
This will cause my marriage
to function less and less effectively;
Therefore, working to achieve a
loving and creative marriage
is for me as a pastor a major priority.
References
1. Wallace Denton,
The Role of the Minister's Wife
2. Mary Mattis, Pastors' Wives Study. Report of research Division of the Support Agency, United Presbyterian Church, new York, 1977.