Reconciling Your Primary Responsibilities to Church and Family

When I was a little boy, we used to go to a park near our house to play at the playground. I didn’t think about it then, but a significant amount of the equipment–and the games we played on it–depended on balance. There was a wooden balance beam, a seesaw, and some of those little rocking toys on oversized springs. We would walk up the slides and across the monkey bars. We would shimmy up the poles on the swing set and sit on top or hang from it. We would play “ground is lava,” where you had to leap from equipment to equipment without touching the ground. The point of every game was don’t fall. 

That often feels like the objective (see also: threat) of navigating ministry and family life. Except this “game” is high stakes, and falling doesn’t lead to laughter with friends or mere scraped knees. Instead of a light-hearted adventure, this feels like a tightrope walk across a chasm of open flames, and if we fall, everyone gets battered and burned–the church, our kids, our spouses, and ourselves.

I have come to realize, though, that trying to balance ministry and family life is just another name for pitting the two against each other. It is a paradigm for unnecessary conflict. It puts them at opposite ends of a seesaw, which means one is nearly always up while the other is necessarily down. We need a new way of thinking about the relationship between family and ministry than “balance.” Two foundational biblical realities can help us see a new paradigm. 

1. A pastor’s primary responsibility is to his family.

From the first chapters of the Bible, we see God’s design for family and his valuing of families. We see this in the design for marriage and the gift of children. He calls children to honor their parents in the Decalogue (Ten Commandments). We see it in the commending and honoring of Jesus by his Father– “This is my beloved son” (Matthew 3:17, Matthew 17:5). God’s foundational design for humanity was the family, and his primary call to any parent was to prioritize the care and shepherding of their family. This is especially significant because family is the paradigm God uses to help us understand the church and not the other way around. So, while it is tempting for a pastor to think we are primarily responsible to the church, that is not God’s set of priorities or his paradigm. If he has given us a wife and kids, we are to care for them above all. 

In isolation, that last sentence seems to pit the ministry against the family–like we are to pick our family over the church. In an unhealthy, dysfunctional context, that is true. But in a gospel-reflecting, healthy context, we need not make that choice because . . .  

2. The church is a family.

Throughout the Bible, God’s idea of family extends far beyond biology. Something more defines our closest, most meaningful relationships: Jesus Christ. Jesus himself said, “Who are my mother and my brothers? . . . whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.” (Mark 3:33, 35) When His disciples ask Him to teach them to pray, Jesus says, “When you pray, say, our Father . . .” Do you see what Jesus is saying in these two brief exchanges? He is expanding and defining what it truly means to be family to those who faithfully walk with Him. “Family” is not a mere metaphor or simile to help us understand the church. The Bible doesn’t say the church is like a family; it says we are family. We are brothers and sisters in Christ. We are children of God. Mark 10:29-30 explains what that means for us:

Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel,who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life.”

These two biblical realities reframe everything for a pastor. We no longer need to see family on one side and church on the other. Rather, we should be able to see our family as part of the church and our church as part of our family. Instead of thinking, “How do I protect my family from the burdens of ministry?” we should be thinking, “How can I help my family love the church we are part of?” Meeting with a member is not a “task” any more than a conversation with your son or daughter is. An elders meeting is not a work meeting but a conversation among “parents” of the church family. 

This may sound idealized and even impossible to many people in ministry, but it doesn’t have to be. Developing this kind of relationship with the church and with your family may not be easy (especially if there is a significant amount of dysfunction right now), but it is possible. And it is necessary for your joy, your family’s, and your church’s. Here are five steps you can take to foster this kind of relationship.

1. Speak to your family of meetings, whether with members or elders or whomever, as relational, not as tasks. While there might be an agenda and tasks to accomplish through these meetings, they are gatherings with brothers and sisters in Christ. 
2. Exercise discernment about what ministerial hardships you bring home. You want your family to be able to walk into church with a sense of participation and belonging, not with trepidation, suspicion, or looking for red flags.    
3. Open your home to the extent you are able. A church can’t be a family unless we eat together, laugh together, and have some sense of how each other lives.
4. Learn to say “no” to requests from the congregation for the sake of your family. This might seem contradictory to the church being family, but in God’s design, there is a priority. A church member asking you to coffee cannot take precedence over your daughter in crisis or your son’s baseball game. By prioritizing your nuclear family, you contribute to their joy in the church and the church’s respect for them.
5. Pray for church people and issues by name in your home, and pray for your family with people from the church. (Of course we must be judicious in how we bring church people issues to our family and family member issues to people in the church to protect privacy and reputations.) If we are lifting up all the layers of the family to the Lord with all the other layers of the family, then the Lord will be the defining factor in the relationship between all the layers of the family. 

Balance cannot be what we pursue in ministry and family. In the end, that will lead to falling off one side or the other at the expense of everyone. Instead, let us pursue familial unity in Christ for the good of our families, churches, and ministries. 

©2024 Barnabas Piper. Used with permission.