Supporting Planters' Wives

Relationships within the church, pressures on their husband, and spiritual exhaustion can make life as a ministry wife - especially in a church plant - stressful and difficult.

Yet, it is possible for ministry wives to maintain their joy and thrive in their relationships. The start of a new ministry or a church plant can provide a God given opportunity to ensure a ministry wife is cared for and enabled to flourish.

"I was exhausted, depressed, questioning should we be in ministry. My joy in Christ had gone, without realising I'd become serving from a place of duty."

"I thought I have to be okay because of my husband's ministry. So I carried on until I couldn't. I went to bed for six months. I didn't know who to speak to or what I was allowed to say, and so I said nothing."

"I was really struggling. I had no one in church that I was able to talk to. I couldn't share my hurt and disappointment with, so I paid a counsellor so that I had someone to talk to."

These are three real women, three real testimonies, three different church contexts.

A number of pastors' wives were asked to choose three words to describe how they felt.

The most commonly selected words were: stressed, lonely, dry, tired, bruised, distrustful, confused, passionate for Jesus still. At least there's one positive in there! When asked, what is stressful being married to a pastor, pastors' wives commented: relationship with church family, pressure on the husband, spiritual and emotional exhaustion, seeing the hidden struggle.

Not sure of their own gifting or training, many felt inadequately equipped, prepared for ministry. This often led them to feeling like a fraud. And pay attention here: the biggest impact of ministry was on marriage and home. Wives cited their husbands working weekends and evenings, a lack of boundaries, when unpacking this.

So as I read all these testimonies and examples of what pastors' wives have said, it just feels so depressing, it's such a discouraging picture. But unfortunately, it is a realistic one for many pastors' wives. I remember going to a pastors' wives conference at the start of my time as a pastor's wife, a planter's wife, and being really discouraged. The prayer time was so depressing as wives shared hard story after hard story. Joy seemed in short supply.

In contrast, as a brand new, planter's wife, I was full of energy and excitement. I loved my husband and felt deeply loved by him. I loved my church, it felt like family. I loved God, and was in awe of what he was doing, how he was building his church in Wavertree, Liverpool.

Was I just naive? Was I just in a honeymoon period? Did everyone's journey begin like mine, but continue in a different direction? I remember feeling awkward sharing any encouragement, felt apologetic about sharing how God was growing our church, people were being saved. I didn't want others to be discouraged in their own context.

If I'm honest, I was also a bit judgmental. Comparing their presenting negativity to my positivity. One thing was certain, I knew then that I did not want to get to a place where I was struggling to share evidences of God's grace in the life and of our church and ministry.

Maintaining joy, thriving in relationships

And so the question is, can you, planter's wife, maintain your joy? Can you continue to thrive and enjoy a healthy relationship with God, a healthy marriage, a healthy family life, and healthy relationships with church family?

Well, I'm hoping that all of you believe that that is actually possible, but if you need some help believing it, after all of those depressing statements I began this little talk with, then here are a couple of other testimonies of pastors' wives who have got 15+ years experience as pastors' wives.

The first one goes like this:

"Although it isn't always the most comfortable path and we have had to walk some difficult steps, I do think it's the best. I get to have a front row seat to see God build his church. I love serving with my husband, that life and ministry roll into one so often. I love that our kids have grown up in a ministry home that they have experienced so much fruit and have been surrounded by real people doing life with and around them.

"When my husband and I first began our journey into church planting, we said the best discipleship our kids could ever have is seeing people become Christians around our dinner table. For them to witness firsthand the undeniable power of the Lord as he transforms hearts and lives. By God's grace they have seen this, and I would not exchange this."

A second lady said,

"To see my husband grow in his gifting and love and knowledge of God has been my greatest blessing as a pastor's wife. To see God move through my husband's preaching and use him to get alongside men specifically has encouraged me and made me want to step into my own gifting and serve."

Now the wonderful thing is, is that you're all sitting here near or at the front of your journey as planters and planters' wives, and so you have the brilliant God-given opportunity to help ensure, under God, that in the planter's wife, your wife, that she is cared for, that she has the context to flourish, and that in 20 years time, if she was being asked how she would describe her lived experience as a pastor's wife, she would use words like: thankful, joyful in the Lord, content.

And I want to add that the testimonies I have just shared from are from a context where there has been a lot of pain, a lot of difficulty, and yet they testify to God's goodness. So the next question, the important question, is: we know it's possible, so how does the planter's wife, how does the pastor's wife, flourish?

Flourishing planters' wives

Now, I think the first thing to say is that I totally understand that every church, every marriage, every planter's wife is different. There isn't a prescription that I'm going to give, because that wouldn't be helpful. Instead, I'm going to give a few principles and examples from my own and others' lived experience of how these principles have been applied, and then you can think and pray through how they can be applied to you.

Invest in your marriage

The first principle and area to talk about is marriage being the responsibility on the husband, which obviously, this is obvious, but, just to bring that to the fore. So the first principle is, to invest in your marriage, be intentional. This is your first priority after your relationship with God.

What do you need to put in place to ensure its health? What are you doing now that's really good and needs to continue? What's maybe missing? Do you need help to work it through? To work it out? Have you asked one another what you need? The important is often not the most urgent, and so the inevitable business of church planting life often takes precedent over marriage.

So, how are you establishing good rhythms, conversations, habits, which will ensure your marriage is healthy, and your wife can be cared for, you can be cared for, as a planter's wife? They're just some really good questions to ask at the start of your journey to ensure longevity and health.

For my husband and I, and it's changed over the years, but we always had one evening a week that we would have together as a date night. Now it wasn't exclusive, so like it, there would be times when we couldn't have that, but that was the principle we tried to keep to, and we'd do 24 hours away every year on our own without the children.

That's changed as the children have got bigger, we've lost our evenings to kids and lifts, so we have the privilege of having a day off together on a Friday, so we have a date day. and we are pretty, pretty consistent with that, and we've been married for 25 years this year. So we've done that for 25 years.

So they're just two things that we've put into practice. There are other things that we've done as well. But just be thinking in your context, what does health look like for you, and how do you put rhythms in place to maintain that health?

Manage expectations

Expectations is another thing I want to talk about. This is a really big deal. What is the church's expectations of the planter's wife? What is your expectation, husband, of her? What is her expectation? What does she think is expected of her? What does she expect of her? The reality is there is actually no job description for a planter's wife, and yet the planter's wife's presence and the influence is vital in the church planting journey. So this can be a real issue.

So my question is, how aware of you - pastor's wife - how aware are you - pastor, husband - of this, how can you help your church with this and therefore your wife?

Again, just one example and there are many more, but I haven't got loads of time. At the very beginning of our church planting journey, Steve, from the front, publicly and on more than one occasion, explained to the church that although I was fully in, I was really excited, fully on board with the church plant, that I didn't have a paid position and that my first priority under God was the family. I also worked at the time, I was a part-time teacher doing two days a week as a secondary school teacher, and so he basically said to the church, Siân will be stuck in, she will get really involved, but don't put expectations on her that aren't fair and just think of her as a really sort of active church member type thing.

And that was really helpful because it made the church have the right posture of heart and it helped me feel no pressure and at no point have I felt pressure from my husband to be a certain way, and I think that's really important. So I've been able to step into my giftings and where I felt led by the Lord.

Set the culture

A third thing is, as the church planter, you are responsible for, and this often is your whole family too, for setting the culture. Culture in your marriage, culture in the church, your leadership community as it grows. Here is another essential ingredient in that feeds into church health generally, and that of the pastor's wife.

Culture flows from conviction. So, if the care of your wife in the context of a church plant is important to you, you will seek to put things in place. We call these things constructs, constructs to ensure a healthy, caring culture for your wife and the wives of others in the leadership community.

Here are some examples of what we do again at Cornerstone. Before I give you these examples, I really do appreciate that Cornerstone and the Cornerstone Collective includes five churches, and it's a large leadership community, and we've been going 15 years. But it wasn't always this way, and it began with just Steve and I, so much of this will be aspirational. but you have to start somewhere.

So what we do is, as elders’ wives, we meet together once a month and we pray and we pray for our marriages, our husbands, our own souls. So we confess sins, we reflect on our relationship with the Lord, and we do that together. As elders and wives, we meet once a month socially, in fact, we just had a social the Friday gone and I cooked a meal for everybody and, the men went to the fire pit and chatted there, and the women stayed in the kitchen and we chatted there and it was just a beautiful, beautiful social time together.

We had a time of prayer that wasn't scheduled, but it was just an impromptu time of prayer that we had together. Other times we'll spend the whole evening, a lot of it in prayer, but a lot of the time it's just social and friendship building and just that kind of getting to know one another. Three times a year, the pastors and wives across the whole Collective, get together and we do one of those get togethers with the whole families.

And amongst the elders, the pastors across all the Collective, they get together every single week and have a time of sharing, and like how has the week gone? How was the sermon? How's church? And then they do like a deep dive on one of the pastors, going in turn different weeks to see how they're all getting on: heart, marriage, etc.

So there is quite a lot of time that we spend relationally together, but it is really fruitful. We are so close as a leadership community, and I feel very supported and very loved by the ladies and the men in our local context.

But what was the first thing Steven did? So you maybe just starting out in church planting, you're thinking, "well, all of that is lovely, but we've got 10 people". Well, the first thing that Steven did was he got each of us in the church plant to go into each other's homes and lives. He said, "knock on each other's doors, even though it's awkward, just turn up and be present with each other."

And we did. We literally did that. We just cringed our way through the knocking on someone's door and said, "Hey, we just wondered if we can come in for a coffee". And that's how we built this really relational community. One of the ways the pastor's wife can be helped to thrive as well is to have somewhere to go to when things that she wants to share but maybe she can't even share them in that church context, even if the relationships are really tight.

Planters' wives cohorts

And so I'm going to just tell you about something really quickly that I'm going to put together. Hopefully after Easter, I'm going to start putting together some small cohorts of ladies, planters’ wives, and the idea behind these cohorts is, there's a few. One is relational community. Another one is to just to try and grow some gospel resilience. And a third one is just to help one another as we all figure this planting journey out, which looks different, but we're figuring it out together, so we can help each other.

So, I want essentially small groups of friendships to really grow and develop, but not just on a "how can I pray for you?" level, deeper than that, because I want it to be a real spiritual accountability as well. Like how can I, what are we struggling with here? What are we not believing about the Lord right now that we need some help with? How can we press on in the gospel when we just don't feel like we want to? Or how can I really encourage you with a gospel story that's happened this week? And it is worth it. The fruit does come.

So that's what I'm looking to set up after Easter and I hope that many of you'll be able to do that and be really blessed through it.

As I close, I really don't want you to dismiss what I've said. I want you to really consider the importance of the health of the church planter's wife.

It is within the top two reasons why church ministers, pastors come out of ministry because their spouse is just really not coping or not happy, so it's really important that we pay attention. Thank you.