Transcript
Ben Fallon: Paul, in the last episode, “98,” of Ask Paul Tripp, you helped pastors and churches navigate the unique challenges that come with being a pastor's kid and how we can protect these young souls from disillusionment, even deconstruction. Now this question is very similar. “How does the pastor prevent from over committing to ministry and abandoning his family? What are the warning signs, and then, what did you do with your family and kids back in your pastoral days?”
Paul Tripp: I have come now, in my fifty years of ministry (Just in case you wondered, I started when I was seven!) to understand that one of the most important things you have to admit is your limits. And one of the primary limits I find myself talking about are the limits of time. If you are a pastor, you will never get 40 hours in a day; you will never get 10 days in a week; you will never get 50 days in a month; you will never get 450 days in a year! God has ordained for you to live in that 24/7 environment and limits that he's created.
Now here's what this means. If you keep saying “Yes,” you don't get extra time. What happens is those ministry commitments, that you've agreed to, begin to eat into other essential areas in your life. And one of the areas that it eats into, immediately, is family, marriage, parenting! And so, you have to realize that it's not always godly to say “Yes.” Sometimes the most Godly answer is to say, “No, I can't.”
There's a great Old Testament example of this. Moses is alone as the judge in Israel, about a million people. And Jethro, his father-in-law, comes to him and says, “Moses, what are you thinking? This can never work. You're going to get exhausted and beaten down because this is just too heavy!” And Jethro says, “What you need to do is appoint leaders.” And so, he appoints leaders over ten, leaders over one-hundred, leaders over a thousand, and Moses organizes the leadership of Israel, because ministry is always a community project.
Let me just tell you how I handled this as a young pastor. I was afraid of my family getting lost in the process, the demanding busyness of starting a church and a Christian school. And so on a Sunday, I made an announcement to my congregation that between the hours of 4:00 and 8:00 P.M., I would have no meetings and see nobody for counseling. Why? Because those were the hours where my children, who were now school children, were going to be home. Those were the primary moments when I was going to be with them. We had family worship after dinner. I helped oversee their homework and put them to bed. I said, “I'll see you very early in the morning. I'll see you at lunch. I'll see you after 8:00 P.M., but during that period of time, I can't do this.” One of my contributions to the congregation was to be a good father, and I was determined to do that.
People would say to me, “Well, I can't see you early, I can't see you at lunch, I can't see you late at night.” And I would lovingly say to them, “If you had an impacted wisdom tooth, and your dentist said, ‘I can only see at 6:00 in the morning, or during your lunch hour, or at 9:30 at night,’ you would say, ‘I'll take any three of those. Just get this tooth out!’” “Well, if what you're going through is difficult and painful, we can make this work.”
There's a second thing that we did. Luella and I didn't want our marriage to get lost in the busyness of ministry. And this will seem extreme to some people, but we covenanted with one another that we would be out of the house one day a week. In the beginning, it was just for an hour because that was all we could do. When we got more babysitters in place, it was an evening. But we did that religiously. Both of us would say, “That was a great salvation to our marriage!” We always knew we had those times. We always knew that things that we couldn't talk about in all the busyness, we would talk about then. Now, I want to say this, “We didn't go bowling. We didn't go see a movie. We went someplace, whether a quiet restaurant or a park, so we could be together, so we could talk, so we could enjoy one another.”
So what are some of the signs of being overcommitted? Well, one sign is when you begin to see your family as a burden or interruption. When you are a pastor, and your wife says, “Friday, we just need to be together as a family,” and you go, “Ahhhh! Really?” Something's wrong because one of the qualifications for an elder is a person who manages his family well. If you can't pastor your family, you're probably not going to be a good pastor of Christ’s Church. Ongoing impatience and irritation inside of the family is another sign. Absence from important events in the children's lives. I've talked to ministry children who have said, “My dad was never at my games, never at parent-teacher meetings!” So, no time, outside of the house, with your wife; regular exhaustion and feelings of being overburdened and overwhelmed.
I counseled a ministry leader who was doing too much. They had five or six little boys; think about that, and his wife met him at the door and essentially said, “I'm done! It's us or your ministry, but I can't continue to do this anymore,” because he was an absentee father and an absentee husband, and his wife was left with the burden of the entire family on her shoulders.
One of the things I would encourage pastors to do is sit down with your wife and children, children who are old enough to do this, and tell them you won't get angry, but ask them to write down, on a piece of paper, five character qualities that best describe you in your home, whether that's as a husband or as a father, and then take that list seriously. Maybe that list will tell you, “You are living beyond your limits, and you are in a spiritually unhealthy place, and your children, the hearts of your children, are going to pay the price for that.”
The final thing I want to say is, “In terms of limits, establish accountability with your wife and a fellow leader.” Let your wife say, “I think you are doing too much, you shouldn’t say ‘Yes!’ to this. Where is this going to go? We don’t have any more time!” I had a dear friend say to me, I’ll never forget it; he said, “Paul, no one is going to say ‘No,’ for you; you have got to learn to say ‘No!’” And just that one statement rescued me from a lot of ministry and family difficulty.
BF: Well, Paul hasn't written a book specifically to pastors that address marriage and parenting, but we do have three books that touch all aspects of this answer. The first would be Dangerous Calling, which helps pastors understand their identity in ministry. And then Paul's book, Marriage: 6 Gospel Commitments; and Parenting:14 Gospel Principles, talk about marriage and parenting in general. All of these and many more are available at paultripp.com/books.
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