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The Gospel According To Esther

PASTORS' WIVES AND THE EPIDEMIC OF MEANNESS

TWENTY-FOUR

“While the people of Israel were still at Rephidim, the warriors of Amalek attacked them. 9 Moses commanded Joshua, “Choose some men to go out and fight the army of Amalek for us. Tomorrow, I will stand at the top of the hill, holding the staff of God in my hand.” 10 So Joshua did what Moses had commanded and fought the army of Amalek. Meanwhile, Moses, Aaron, and Hur climbed to the top of a nearby hill. 11 As long as Moses held up the staff in his hand, the Israelites had the advantage. But whenever he dropped his hand, the Amalekites gained the advantage. 12 Moses’ arms soon became so tired he could no longer hold them up. So Aaron and Hur found a stone for him to sit on. Then they stood on each side of Moses, holding up his hands. So his hands held steady until sunset. 13 As a result, Joshua overwhelmed the army of Amalek in battle.” —Exodus 17 (New Living Translation)

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I've never been a fan of Aunt Esther,

the histrionic stereotypical black church lady from our dearly departed Sanford & Son. Aunt Esther represented the absolute worst in the black Christian experience. What made the satire funny, though, was how thoroughly ingrained and accepted that behavior is. In our tradition, we regularly accept and overlook a chronic bipolarity, especially among our women. Loud, aggressive, pushy, mean, covetous, vengeful, vulgar, duplicitous women, in gregarious hats and too much perfume, flood our churches every Sunday. And we, in our ignorance, in our capitulation to this cultural staple, place these women in key positions of leadership where they go about wreaking havoc and creating division and discord in the church. We often vote or appoint people to leadership positions who have repeatedly demonstrated a penchant for, if not an addiction to, the one thing God truly hates— stirring up discord among the brethren [Proverbs 6:16-19]. Some people are just discordaholics: they can't help themselves. They can't keep their mouths shut and they can't just let people be.

“I make no excuses for how the choir sounds today.” The pastor's wife made this pronouncement into the microphone before launching into a preemptive, unscheduled solo. Apparently unsatisfied with the choir's performance this particular Sunday, the church's First Lady took it upon herself to right the apparent wrong and bring the joy to the congregation the choir apparently could not. It was a poor choice, one which could not possibly have been inspired by the Holy Spirit but by whatever motivated her in that moment. In the very best light, it was sloppy impulse control, this sister unable to resist the undertow of her disappointment with the choir. As black Christians, one of our major challenges is impulse control. James warns us in his Epistle [James 1:19] to be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath. The truth is, the exact reverse is often true. Many of us have hair-trigger tempers and extremely thin skin. We receive everything as an insult and perceive most everything as a threat. And our sisters, most especially, have a real problem simply keeping their mouths shut.

I criticize my sister not so much because she was thoughtless or even that she thoughtlessly wounded so many people and undermined her husband yet again by brandishing raw power in the midst of service— power she appropriates simply by being the pastor's wife: not ordained, not licensed, not called to this ministry, and clearly not submitted to anyone's leadership— I criticize my sister because, days later, in the sobering calm of distance from the heat of that moment, she still appeared unrepentant and seemed indifferent to the choir and its leaders. As of this writing, no apologies, no efforts at reconciliation, have taken place. I have no way of knowing whether or not the pastor has brought this matter to our sister's attention, but in the absence of any apparent accountability on her part, his standing as pastor, as husband, as spiritual leader, has been diminished. Again.

It's not the first time she's done something like this. It probably won't be the last time. We all have our blind spots and Lord knows I've got more than a few shortcomings. But this behavior, especially on the part of a pastor's wife, is exponentially destructive to the sister herself, to the pastor, and to the church. That our sister apparently sees no conflict between what the scriptures direct us to do and what she impulsively does speaks directly to either her lack of spiritual discipline or her lack of spiritual submission. That the pastor remains silent and seemingly unaware or unaffected, while his wife insults good people who are doing the best they can, wounding them and destroying their morale, speaks directly to his qualities of pastoring a church.

In the film As Good As It Gets, Jack Nicholson is asked by an adoring fan how he manages to write women so well, “I think of a man. Then I remove reason and accountability.” We should all strive for both reason and accountability. Sister, we love you. You are our family. May we all examine ourselves, take time, assess, forgive one another, and move on in the Lord. If not, then, seriously, we're just going through the motions, serving only ourselves and making a liar of the Cross.

Our pastors’ wives—often lonely, neglected and insecure—terrorize and oppress us with pushy arrogance, asserting power, control and influence that is not in any way biblical. There is absolutely no biblical office for the pastor’s wife. She is his wife, his help meet. She is not the de-facto vice-pastor and, biblically, she has absolutely no “power” or “office” within the church. Our tradition of elevating this woman, whom the church did not call and did not vote in, did not ordain for any purpose, is not God-driven but is tradition-driven. Calling her the “first” lady (and even more absurd titles, "Lady Elect" and so forth; nobody "elected" her to anything) and acceding to her unwritten and uncertain but sweeping powers of authority applies rules of political tradition (i.e. the U.S. president) to a theocratic governing. It is completely wrongheaded and indicative of either the pastor’s shortcomings (caving in to this nonsense to appease his needy and insecure wife) or the pastor’s dangerous lack of biblical education or ethics.

Get mad at me if you want, ladies: if it isn’t in the Bible, we shouldn’t be doing it. Also, if the pastor’s wife is so needy and so insecure that she feels compelled to always poke her nose into church business and make everybody’s life miserable, that is a fair indication that there are problems within the pastor’s marriage. If she is acting out, there’s something wrong at home, and the body is obligated to ask the pastor to first get his own house in order before he can lead God’s house.

Many churches will not consider an unmarried pastor (like me). Most are far too worried a single or divorced pastor will be an easy mark for the women in the congregation, or that he’ll inevitably be caught up in some indiscretion (or, worse, that he’s gay). Which makes a liar of the cross, as such assumptions proclaim the blood of Jesus is far too weak to keep us pure, and that an abstinent lifestyle is not humanly possible. It says we are wasting our time because the sin-free lifestyle Jesus gave His life to offer us is simply a sham.

What these same churches fail to consider is how many pastors they are hiring who are in bad or even dead marriages, joined to women they barely speak to. Miserable in their own homes and living separate lives. Even if he’s not cheating on her, the love is gone, the lights are out, and they’re just keeping up appearances for the sake of his pastor’s job. There’s a lot of that going around, congregations clearly seeing the pastor and wife growing apart and doing nothing about it as they tax the man day and night, and he uses his pastorate as an excuse to neglect his wife. She then either withdraws or, worse, becomes the insufferable pushy old bat you just want to run over in the parking lot.

All of which makes the divorced or single pastor a real bargain.

Many women, perhaps lost in their husband’s shadow, or perhaps lacking his attention at home and/or at a loss for real direction and meaning in their own lives, badger their husbands into making them “co-pastor.” I am deeply suspicious of the husband and wife “co-pastor” arrangement. Any “co-pastor” arrangement has, at best, shaky scriptural ground. I suspect incidents of married couples who have genuinely been called to the pastorate at the same time and place are exceedingly rare. My strong suspicion is, more often than not, it’s the Tammy Faye syndrome. The bizarre and clearly disturbed wife of televangelist Jim Bakker, Tammy Faye grew increasingly discontented with simply being Jim’s wife, and eventually bulldozed her way into being Jim’s full on-air partner, despite the fact she had no real pastoral training or that her very presence—in full Michael Jackson clown pancake and drippy eyeliner—greatly undermined her husband’s credibility by reducing his once-serious ministry to a laughing stock. But, I don’t blame Tammy Faye for that. I blame Jim. I blame his weakness and his willingness to sacrifice his ministry just to appease his wife.

Which is what too many of these “co-pastor” deals are really about—appeasing the wife who has become lost in her husband’s shadow and who has no real goals or pursuits of her own. So she demands a piece of the action and he caves in just to keep peace in the home.

The fact is, if these women were actually called to pastor, they’d already be pastoring or at least be somewhere along that goal, when they married in the first place. Many if not most of the women “co-pastors” had no interest in or thought about pastoring until their husbands became successful at it, and being His Wife was, eventually, not enough for her. By becoming “co-pastor,” she’s now become, legitimately, the boss, and not merely boss by presumption. But, what many pastors fail to realize is, by promoting her to “co-pastor,” he’s lost the confidence and faith of a great many members who now see him as henpecked and weak.

There are the rare exception of women who were called to pastor and who made their husbands “co-pastor” to appease his ego or the expectations of the church. This is equally misguided.

Please understand me: sisters, if you feel called to pastor, by all means pastor. But the office of the pastor is a sacred trust, not to be taken lightly and not to be entered into simply because your husband is not showing you enough attention. You’re sitting around watching Oprah, bored out of your mind, and suddenly you want an office next door to his. God gives us a hunger, an unrest, about things He wants us to do. It’s like ants crawling all over your body, an ambition, a thirst that simply cannot be abated. That’s how a pastor should feel about pastoring. It shouldn’t be a band-aid for poor self esteem.

Pastors: if your spouse is twisting your arm about ministry, I dare you to pack them off to some ministry across country or even in another land. Let your wife (or husband) who’s nagging you to be co-pastor, go serve somewhere else for a season. Let her get training and experience and let her run the gauntlet, perhaps at a ministry less endowed than your own, less comfortable than your own. Let her discover her own gifts and her own passion for ministry outside of the comforts of home and the presumptive respect her home church offers her.

In other words, let her go and find herself. Find her ministry. Get some real experience and real chops. So, when you present her to the church, you can present a credible candidate and not a spoiled soccer mom simply tired of Oprah. If she truly is ordained to this purpose, the experience and perspective she will return with will prove invaluable to your ministry. If this is just some whim of a spoiled child vying for more attention, or a self-esteem fix, a year or so in the trenches will bring that out, and she can quietly retire from her “co-pastor” notion with a minimum of embarrassment. Most pastors, however, will cave to the wife’s pressure and appoint an untried, untrained and undisciplined person—someone who has never even functioned as a minister—as “co-pastor.” This is a capitulation to a needy woman , a betrayal of your vows to God and an abdication of your responsibility to the church. It does not, in the long run, help her or address what’s really wrong with her. You should never trade away souls just to keep peace in your home. Any woman who insists that you do is not acting within God’s purpose and is, certainly, not submitted to your leadership as either pastor or husband. In which case, the most disastrous thing you could do is place her in authority over the church.

Christopher J. Priest
8 February 2004
30 January 2006
17 June 2007
editor@praisenet.org
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