Preachers' Kids
I believe that parents should lay out all the options and then let their children choose their own way.
I watched a documentary the other night about a very influential Black leader whose children did not, as they say, “walk in his footsteps.” The man gave his life to a cause. His son became a musician. He had a few daughters, and they too chose their own paths. And when the film was over, I found myself thinking not about him but about my own two sons, and about the children of so many ministers and pastors I have known across the years.
There are denominations where it is almost expected that a pastor’s son will one day succeed his father in the pulpit. In that tradition, they did not believe in female pastors, so the girls were spared that particular weight. The boys were not. I watched a good number of them grow up under that expectation and quietly buckle beneath it. They were plainly more interested in other things. And in case after case, the children of these pastors, sons and daughters alike, chose to do something other than what their fathers had done.
My own father was a part-time pastor. That simply meant he did not earn his primary living from the church. His full-time work was education. He taught English at a junior high school for most of his career and ended it as an assistant principal at a large high school in northern New Jersey. But the honest truth is there is no such thing as a part-time pastor. When people get sick, when family members die, when something goes wrong with the building, the pastor is expected to be there. That is doubly true in a small church. In the larger churches, like the one I served in New Jersey, a pastor has a budget and a staff and plenty of volunteers. In many ways it is easier to lead a big church than a small one. My father had none of that help. He worked himself hard, and he carried a dream of one day giving up the secular job and serving the church full time. That day never came.
I watched my dad pour himself into that little church and get disrespected for it. There were members who decided he didn’t do a good enough job, and they were open and public about it. I saw it. I decided as a young man that I would never put myself in a position to be treated that way. Add to that my own bent toward social activism, and by the time I got to college I had made up my mind. The one thing I would not do with my life was ministry. If I am telling it straight, by then I was done with the church altogether.
My father was a serious Christian. By serious I mean strict. In our tradition (an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventist Church) strictness meant keeping the Jewish Sabbath from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday, and a good deal more besides. I could not go to parties. I could not play youth sports. We did not watch television on the Sabbath. It was a rigid, rigid house, and I could not wait to get out of it.
So, when I became a father, I decided I would not raise my sons the way I was raised. I believe my father’s strictness is a good part of what drove me into a season of rebellion once I was finally out from under his control. And as I grew and stretched theologically, I came to see much of that old strictness as legalism, more religion than faith, and more of it than any child needed. I did not want that for my boys.
And yet, having been raised the way I was raised, I have to confess there was always a part of me that wondered if I had been strict enough. Whether I let the pendulum swing too far the other way and robbed my sons of some of the discipline that came bundled up with all that rigidity.
Neither of my sons became a minister as I did. Both of them have a real appreciation for who God is, but neither would be counted an active church member. My mentor had the same experience with his sons. So did my pastor. It would have brought me tremendous joy to see one of my boys enter the ministry, maybe even stand one day in the pulpit I stood in. But I am truly at peace with the fact that I let my sons walk their own road and grow into their own men. The leader featured in that documentary had one son who avoided pursuing his father’s cause and he pursued music. It seemed to me that the father made his peace with it. Though with these things you never really know.
I believe that parents should give their children the best instruction they can. That they should be the best moral and professional example they can be. That they should lay out all the options and then let their children choose their own way. My aim with my sons was simpler than any of that. I wanted them to know, whatever they chose and whatever came of it, that their father loved them. I pray I have done that much.