If you’re a pastor (and you know you are), make sure you’re doing everything you can to help out your wife:
- She needs a clearly defined and guarded role.
- She needs some help with the kids and house.
- She needs some help getting to and from church on Sundays.
- She needs a designated parking place.
- She needs a handful of safe relationships with other godly women.
- She needs to choose her own friends and define her own relationships.
- She needs to see her first jobs as Christian, wife, and mother, not free hire for the church.
We can all thank Mark Driscoll for that gender-equal list.
(Actual pastor’s wife) Julie Clawson has a terrific response to the list:
Wow my own parking place at church, that would really make my life easier. And to be allowed (within my protected and guarded role) to choose my friends! What am I – a grown woman or a kindergartner? Maybe it would have helped if he had added to the list – “She needs to have a husband who doesn’t say that a pastor’s sexual sins are the fault of his wife not looking hot.” But that might be asking too much.
These books and this advice is so condescending it’s embarrassing. Sure the stereotypes and the expectations have caused problems, but I would think that allowing a women to be herself would be more useful than defining and restricting her role more. It’s a messed up system, the whole church culture is a messed up system. We’ve created this ultra-ritualized pageant where people are expected to act in certain roles. It would be amusing if it wasn’t so very sad. So do I have a point here? I don’t know. Just that I refuse to be labeled with any of the expectations of being a pastor’s wife. And that I feel sorry for the women who are confined by that role.
[tags]atheist, atheism, Christian, church[/tags]
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