Dual Career Households and the 21st Century Pastor

Ozzie and Harriet were, in reality, a Dual Career Couple.

As the months tick by, and the necessary preparations for my departing my congregation continue, I'm keeping my radar crankin' to see where the calling might lead next.  Reality has so far served up some clear signals.    There are wonderful churches looking for pastors, sure.  There are churches where I'd be able to serve effectively.   But with a glut of pastors seeking calls in the DC area, it's looking more and more like things are trending towards a void.

When a supportive, insightful and good hearted Presbyterian official suggests that...given my locational limitations and the competitive environment...it's time to be looking at being Lutheran, things aren't trending well for the continued union of calling and gainful employment.

My set answer to folks who ask what I'll be doing after October 30, 2011 now tends to be either 1) I'll be the Associate Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Nowhere, or if I'm feeling less whimsical, 2) I'll be working on my studies, taking time to write, and "spending time with my family" or, if I'm feeling blunter, 3) I'll be unemployed.

One never knows, of course.  The Lord doth work in ways motht inthcrutable.  Still, my shamanic reading of the dripping entrails of the Presbyterian call system points in a very challenging direction, at least in the short term.

Most of my challenge comes, I think, from being in a 21st century relationship.  Were this 1957, I'd be the sole breadwinner, the one with the career in the institutional church.  With things wrapping up at my church, my poor-as-church-mice family would be preparing to follow me from my little country church to a bigger church in a larger town, living the semi-itinerant life of the parson.

But this is not 1957.  I'm not the only one who works.

Ours is, as is the case in so many American households, a dual income household.  Well, for the moment.  My wife's career...which is flourishing...is here.  When I entered the ministry, her income became the primary income.  Following a recent job change, followed by a raise, followed by a major promotion and another raise, she now makes more than triple what I make in my part-time Presbytery minimum pastorate, and more than enough to sustain our household even in the complete absence of my income.

More importantly, she's good at what she does, and she likes what she does...most days.  It's her vocation.  Which leads to the challenge facing pastors of a moderate-to-progressive bent in this era.  How do we balance our vocation with the vocations of our wives/husbands/life partners?

Do we just assume that they'll be nice and submissive and follow us around from church to church to church, because we are Called By God (tm) and they "just have a job?"

"Yes, I know you like what you do, honey, but if you don't quit, you'll be impeding the will of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who has told me that I must now go serve a slightly larger church for slightly more salary three states away, just like He always does after I get into a fight with the Session."

I've got a Proverbs 31 problem with that, not to mention the fact that this way of thinking flies completely in the face of the Reformed and Protestant understanding of vocation.

Pastoring is not the only calling, eh?

Problem is, we've structured our church life under the assumption that it is, and that assumption prangs up against the reality of how most families look these days.

Productivity and Progress

This morning, as I chatted with a couple of moms at my youngest son's bus stop, they were talking about the struggles that one of them was having with the whole "going back to work" thing. With a kindergardener and a preschooler, there was a job opening that she was struggling with. Should she take it? Should she schlep across the metro area for hours every day to go to a part-time job...one that might sprawl out into a full time job? Her life was already full of kids and household and pets, and the prospect of cramming work into it as well seemed intimidating. Yet it felt almost compulsory.

I'd actually been thinking about that over the last few weeks, particularly as more reports have come out describing the job market as the equivalent of a stagnant, algae covered economic pool. As workers are driven to be more and more productive in order to hold on to jobs, and businesses streamline their processes to make themselves more efficient and competitive, those pressures would seem to lend themselves to...well...fewer jobs. Or fewer total hours worked, rather. Yet we continue to scramble to produce more so that we can buy more.

Back when my parents were in the workforce, the vision of the American workplace of the future was rather different. Increased productivity would result in...more leisure. More taking it easy. If advances in technology allow you to produce in four hours of work what used to take eight hours, then you don't put in twelve hours of work to produce three times as much. The sane thing to do would be to take the remaining four hours and go for a nice walk in the woods. Or play with your kids. Or find some unmet need in the community and volunteer your time to help meet it.

We haven't done that.

Instead, particularly in my area, not only do we work longer, we now are ALL expected to work longer. Looking up and down my street of humble ramblers, I see households that used to only require one full time income to maintain. In those houses, there are now families that struggle to make ends meet on two full time salaries. The stressors that this produces are considerable. They take considerable toll on relationships, on parenting, and on marriages. Heck, on our happiness as human beings. We fret, and we struggle, and we worry, and things come apart.

So...why are we going backwards here? Why, if we are so much more productive, are we so incapable of living lives in balance? It all depends on how you define progress, I guess.