How to Save a Pastor’s Kid

The most challenging requirement to being an elder is that your kids need to be faithful and well-behaved. Your kids are simultaneously their own people, with their own wills and personal faith, and part of your resumé, open to evaluation by your church. The requirement is then difficult on two fronts: you are being evaluated based on someone else’s character and behavior and the church has a legitimate interest in observing your kids.

I didn’t grow up as a pastor’s kid; in fact, as far as I can tell, I’m the first pastor in my family going back at least 8 generations. But the reputation of pastor’s kids veers wildly from the most-straight laced, spiritual kids (who may or may not burst out of their inhibitions upon adulthood) or church-based terrors. And pastors often make the mistake of treating their kids not as their own child first, but as extensions of their ministry to the church. This looks like kids being turned into ministerial props, and their lives being put on display (sermon illustrations anyone?) with no sense of privacy and dignity fir the kid. Especially as the kids get older, the realization that they are constantly being watched and evaluated, and that their parents are holding them to a high standard precisely because of that evaluation, often leads to resentment, pressure, and rebellion. Or worse — entitlement, when the kids think they have some kind of trickle-down authority in the church because of who their parents are.

So, the very nature of the requirement that a pastor’s kids be faithful often raises the pressure that encourages unfaithfulness. This is something I think about a lot with my own kids.

And of course, pastors want their kids to grow up Christian. If the kids you’re raising don’t follow Jesus, then how can you expect the church you’re shepherding to follow him? And that desire isn’t just one of ministerial qualification, but pastors love their kids and genuinely want them to have faith. All of this is creates a heightened angst around pastor’s kids and their faith.

I’ve known pastors whose kids’ behavior or faithlessness disqualifies their parents from ministry; the parents don’t know how to manage their own home, they didn’t know how to raise kids in the faith and don’t know how to produce faithful disciples. I’ve known pastors who were terrible parents but their kids turned out great — God’s the one at work. And I’ve known pastors who did everything right and their kids still walked away from the church. Pastors, like all parents, need to be open, loving, firm, and intentional in raising their kids as Christians. But the hope is God.

Grace Leuenberger has a great post on Mockingbird about her reflections growing up as a pastor’s kid and why she stayed a Christian:

So what kept me from snapping? Was it something my parents did? Didn’t do? What’s the secret to raising pastors’ kids to have their own faith, to value the church, to maintain relationships with their family, to not resent it all?…I think it all comes back to grace and mercy…You can do everything “right” as a parent, as a pastor, as a congregant, and relationships will still suffer; faith will falter even under the healthiest of circumstances because we live in a fallen world full of fallen people. By all means, listen to practical advice and take it to heart, but please remember that in this situation and others, we do not have the power to hold things together; only God does. God’s love, God’s mercy, God’s grace is the golden thread.

How to save a pastor’s kid? The mercy and grace of God.