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More from Fidelia:
I began seminary with several single classmates, but our number was significantly reduced over the three years we spent there. By senior year, it seemed like a mass headlong rush to the altar. Those of us who had not joined the stampede mostly avoided the topic, as though voicing it would speak it into reality, but in a fit of honesty, a friend moaned one night, “Once I’m a pastor, all hope of getting
married is over.”
At the time, I was puzzled by – and occasionally scornful of – my classmates’ partnering inclinations. “Get Married” has never made it to my life to-do list. It still hasn’t. Although I’m sure I’d make it
work if it happened, I can’t imagine doing ministry as a married person. I can’t imagine living as a married person. Still, doing ministry and living as a single person has brought my classmates’ fears
into sharp and sometimes painful clarity.
Of course I had heard the stories about well-meaning congregational matchmakers and the joys of navigating dating relationships while living in a parsonage. I had wondered how a congregation would react to a single female pastor in particular. I had wondered about the willingness of potential partners to date a minister – because, really, what sane person wishes for that?
It wasn’t the rockiness of dating as a young clergy woman that caught me by surprise. As an extrovert who has lived in many places and developed a wide social network, it never occurred to me that it would
be so hard to simply make friends as a pastor. No one warned me that, without the built-in connections of academia or work colleagues, I’d have to work so much harder just to meet people. I never anticipated that once I met people, so many of them would instantly react to my vocation with either suspicion or neediness. Read more
It’s happened too often to write it off as a fluke. There was that one time in the pulpit, and again the Sunday after Hurricane Katrina hit. At the last board meeting, once during choir rehearsal, and of course the day after we found out our beloved dog was dying of lymphoma. I’ve only been serving my congregation for twenty-six months, and I’m inching toward needing a second hand to count the incidents. No, it’s not a fluke. I’m a crier.
I always have been, and it seems as though I always will be. When I am hit by public or personal tragedy, when I am besieged by anxiety or drowning in hormones, my tear ducts kick into action and flood my
cheeks with saltwater. Though I haven’t let loose and sobbed in church (thank you, baby Jesus), in the privacy of the parsonage I have wept and sniffed and hiccuped until I’m all cried out. The blissful, empty
feeling after a good cry makes the reddened eyes all worth it, and my blood pressure thanks me for not repressing my emotions. Crying really is a blessed release.
Except, of course, when it happens at church. Read more
We’ve been in our home for a year now. In actuality, it’s been almost two years, but that first year, this didn’t feel like our home. We were renting. Now we own our home (or at least part of it), and I feel settled.
I am a nester. Not in the sense that I like to clean, but in the sense that I like to decorate and I don’t like to move. I love to hammer nails into the plaster. I am the one who buys the paint entitled “late tomato red.” In our last home, my husband and I embellished our upstairs with the designs of the Ndebele tribe of South Africa.
I am from the South. I feel artistically alive when I travel along Rainbow Row in Charleston, the French Quarter in New Orleans, and the Mexican color of East Austin, and I want my home to reflect that vibrancy. I despise the white walls and beige carpet of rental property (For this reason alone, I could never be Methodist. The denomination would surely defrock me after they saw what I had done to the parsonage).
Our house does, in fact, still have the walls of an institution, except for the kitchen, which is a magnificent pumpkin. I’ve picked out the colors for the rest of the house, which I plan to transform, bit by bit. I’ve got time. We’re not going anywhere soon; at least we’re not planning on it. I am an AP, and the average life span of Associates is only two to three years, but I hope to beat the odds because I love the church so much.
Ed White’s research demonstrates that long-term pastorates create healthier congregations. I would suggest that a pastor’s particular housing situation is a key factor in how long the pastor can stay. Read more
