The pastor's wife

Kim Fisackerly is getting ready for another move, her fourth since she was married 22 years ago.

After 11 years, her husband’s job is taking the family away from a comfortable life in Estero to the uncertainty of Englewood, north of Punta Gorda. This move is mandatory, and not guaranteed to be for longer than a year.

Just like any family move, the Fisackerlys have to find new schools for their children. A new grocery store, a pharmacy and a family doctor.

Kim Fisackerly is a pastor’s wife. After more than a decade at Estero United Methodist Church, her husband Bill is getting transferred.

When the Fisackerlys get to Englewood, their lives will be scrutinized. Again. The clothes they wear. Their manners. How they interact with parishioners. Every single detail.

Just as the church will take a long look at its new pastor, his sermons and his presence, his family will also be judged and compared to the church’s predecessors.

“There’s no getting away from that,” Fisackerly says. “People expect you to be perfect at everything. But none of us are perfect. The whole reason we are in church is because we need God and salvation.”

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Just before Christmas in 1993, my father accepted a position as the pastor of Yount Memorial Church, a small church in the rural community of Garwood, Mo., about an hour from our ranch. His previous two stops as a pastor were at churches where my family had strong ties — the first his grandparents helped establish, and the second was the home church to most of my maternal grandmother’s family.

But Yount Memorial was new to all of us. We’d only had one visit to the church as a family, a month before when Dad delivered a tryout sermon.

From the moment we pushed through the swinging double doors separating the sanctuary from the entryway, all eyes were on us. Though the congregation at its peak was about 100, and averaged about 70, it felt like to me that we were on a Hollywood red carpet.

We were, of course, dressed in our Sunday best — slacks and button-up shirts, “tucked in, thank you,” for my brother and I and a dress for my mother. My mother still remembers worrying about dressing appropriately.

Were we sitting in an appropriate pew? The second from the front to the right of the pulpit, where she would sit every service until Dad left the church six years later.

Do you remember the names of the deacons and their wives? Wouldn’t want to slight anyone.

“You don’t know all the rules (at a new church),” my mother says now. “There are just so many unspoken things that you don’t know about.”

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While the expectations of a congregation play into the pressure, some of it is self-imposed, says H.B. London, vice president of church and clergy of Focus on the Family, an interdenominational evangelical Christian group that counts more than 80,000 churches in its ranks.

Many of these women come from a long line of church-going families. Sometimes their fathers were ministers. There’s a good chance their fathers-in-law were, too.

“They think they need to live a certain kind of life,” London says. “And if they don’t live up to that standard, they feel like they are failing their husbands, their church and sometimes God.”

Early on in her life as a pastor’s wife, Fisackerly fell into this trap. She tried to do anything and everything needed in the church, regardless of her aptitude or interest. If there was a job that needed done — Sunday School teacher, in-service baby sitter, youth leader — she took it all on.

“I just did it,” she says. “And it was miserable.”

Many of the things she didn’t enjoy doing, and that feeling made it all the more worse.

Her mother-in-law, also a pastor’s wife, took her aside and told her that it was impossible to be everything to everyone. Only then did she beian to feel comfortable not getting involved in every aspect of the church.

“She said, ‘You are allowed to be our own person,’” Fisackerly remembers. “I know there are certain things that I can’t do. I stay with areas that I enjoy.”

Fisackerly also doesn’t show up just because the church doors are open. She attends just one service on Sundays, where she serves as the sign-language interpreter. Still she’s at the church more than a normal parishioner, and fills in here and there as needed.

On a recent Thursday, she took a turn behind the receptionist’s desk. And when someone couldn’t show up to run the computerized portion of the contemporary worship service, she jumped behind the computer to quickly put something together.

“You have to spend a lot of time around the church,” agrees Naomi Gonzalez, whose husband is the pastor of Victorious Life Ministries in Bonita Springs. “And you have to fill a lot of jobs — administrative assistant, accountant, counselor.”

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By the end of her first year at Yount, Mom was as involved as anyone could be. She taught Sunday School, ran Children’s Church and taught a Wednesday night Bible study class.

“The only time I wasn’t doing something was on Sunday nights, and that’s just because there wasn’t anything to do,” she says.

Add to that organizing fellowship dinners, baby showers for soon-to-be mothers and any extras that went along with a holiday service. Easter egg hunts. Christmas card distributions. Thanksgiving food baskets.

You name the holiday and there was something to do. Even Halloween and New Year’s Eve, two holidays more associated with debauchery than Christianity, got special treatment.

Mom never really complained, which Dad always said was an amazing achievement of the Lord.

“I truly believe God put us together,” she says of their relationship. “Except for my mouth, I was born to be a pastor’s wife. I don’t mind doing those things, and I like to stay busy.”

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If there’s one sure-fire way for a pastor’s wife to get in trouble in the church, it’s gossip.

Religion is already filled with passion and tension. A person’s faith runs at the very core of their being, perhaps only a step behind breathing as the most important thing in life.

“It can hurt so much because we love so much,” Fisackerly says.

At the same time, gossip is part of the social fabric of just about any church. There’s really no way around it. People are going to talk. And the personal politics can sometimes reach Machiavellian proportions.

“You think it’s just harmless, but it’s not,” Fisackerly says about gossip. “I’ve learned that I have to stay away from it.”

The pastor’s family is an easy target, especially in larger churches. Everyone knows who they are, but odds are the family hasn’t met every person who attends service.

“You live in a glass house or a fishbowl,” Fisackerly says. “Sometimes people are just looking for flaws.”

Marion McMillan — whose wife Meredith is the pastor at Lehigh United Methodist Church — says he constantly reminds his children that their behavior is always being monitored by parishioners they might not know.

“Kids will be kids,” he says. “But I remind them that people hold pastoral families to a higher level and they need to understand that people are watching them.”

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Growing up in small-town America, you get used to people knowing everything about you. In a small-town church, the magnifying glass is even more powerful.

My brother and I called them the “Front Pew Ladies.” They knew everything about everyone, like an episode from “Peyton Place.”

Looking back, Mom says gossip does some good. It helped her keep track of what needed to be done around the church. “You need to know who has lost their job or who is sick,” she says. “That way you can know who you need to spend a little more time talking to or giving financial assistance.”

The trouble comes when judgment accompanies the information.

“If you say ‘Ron lost his job,’ that’s one thing,” she says. “But if you say, ‘Ron lost his job. That was the fourth this month.’ Then it gets a little bit more tricky.”

Mom admits that gossip and concerns about propriety kept her from doing something things she might have otherwise done. For example, I don’t think I saw my mom ever drink alcohol before Dad retired in 1999.

When I ask her about that, she points to a lesson Paul preaches in the Bible. He writes in 1 Corinthians 8:9 — “But make sure that this liberty of yours in no way becomes a stumbling block to the weak.”

“Just because something isn’t a sin doesn’t mean you can do it,” Mom says. “If I love peanut butter, but live in a community where eating it is considered bad, then I shouldn’t do it just because I don’t believe it’s a sin.”

Or as Paul put it: “Therefore, if food causes my brother to sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I may not cause my brother to sin.”

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Being a pastor’s wife (about 97 percent of pastor’s spouses are women) is a lot like being the wife of a politician. Anything and everything you do is up for public consumption.

It’s a lonely life. Sometimes desert island lonely. The everyday stress of life — job woes, marital difficulties, raising kids, running a household — compounds with the pressures of being a pillar in the church.

“So many pastor’s wives deal with depression,” says H.B. London, of Focus on the Family.

Fisackerly says her faith gets her through some of the more difficult times. “Without God, I don’t think I could take it,” she says. “There are times when I would just want to quit if it wasn’t for Him.”

That inner turmoil bubbled into the national spotlight recently when Mary Winkler was arrested in the murder of her husband, Rev. Matthew Winkler. The pastor was found shot to death in late March at the couple’s Selmer, Tenn., parsonage, and no one really knows the story behind the killing.

Winkler’s attorney, Steve Farese, told an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter that he has received dozens of e-mails from pastor’s spouses empathizing with her situation. He says the women “finally have an outlet to say, ‘Let me tell you what it’s really like (to be a pastor’s wife).’”

Fisackerly also empathizes. “I could totally understand being driven to that point,” she says. “Then who do you go to?”

Many people turn to their pastor during periods of high-stress. But when your pastor is your spouse, that isn’t always an option.

Early in their marriage, Marion McMillan and his wife, Meredith decided to draw the line more clearly. They decided that if Marion needed spiritual guidance, he’ll look for help beyond his Lehigh United Methodist pastor wife.

“She’s my wife, not my pastor,” he says.

Marion comes to the position of pastor spouse differently. He didn’t have ministers in his family, and he says he have much interest in music or teaching. He was an employee at a french fry manufacturing plant who didn’t get to church as much as he’d like.

When he married Meredith after meeting on Match.com, he moved to Florida and started to attend church regularly for the first time.

“They didn’t really know what to do with me,” McMillan says of the congregation. “As a new Christian, I was undergoing a spiritual transition.”

It took a move to a new church and a few years of experience, but McMillan has found his role. “I just be myself, help out where I can and leave the rest to God,” he says.

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The Internet Age has created a virtual community that many pastor’s wives use to share their experiences. Dozens of chat rooms and bulletin boards have popped up. Some are run by large groups such as Focus on the Family and the Urban Alternative. Others are just grassroots efforts from women hoping to help.

In the past 20 years, London says, people have started to realize that pastor’s wives need attention, too. And those needs are greater, he says, because of a changing pastoral environment, where many new pastors come to the church late, after trying the secular working world first. The average age at seminaries is rising, up to around 34 from the mid-20s just a few generations ago.

And many are dragging their families into this even if they don’t share their “call from God,” London says.

A recent Focus on the Family study showed that only half of women in recent years have felt the same pull toward a religious life.

“They are worried about the practical things that their family might be leaving behind as their husbands go to seminary,” he says. “The house, the finances, the children. Things that their husband might not have taken into account.”

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The worst part of being a pastor’s wife is the loneliness, Mom says. “You can’t really have any friends.”

She says churches are a lot like throwing a large dinner party. You have to treat each guest equally, and you can’t favor anyone. You want to make each person feel just like everyone else.

This posed the biggest difficulty for her during Dad’s tenure as a minister.

Mom loves being around people, talking to people and doing things for them. It keeps her going. So to not be able to have close friends was a struggle — the point where human nature clashed with what she felt was the divine will of God.

“I felt isolated,” she says.

But the isolation never dampened her faith in the church. She says she felt that God was calling her to that role, and that while Dad was the Biblical scholar, she knew enough to not test God’s plan.

“I didn’t want to be in the belly of a fish,” she says of Jonah’s fate for disobeying God. “Or be blinded on the road like Saul. Or to be stranded in a boat during the storm like the Apostles.”

She is quick to remember that all of those incidents led to affirmation of faith. But, she says, “My eyes are already open.”