Word: pastors
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...choice many make is to work. At least 70% of pastors' wives work outside the home, many in professional jobs. Ann Toll had an established career by the time she married Robert, senior pastor of Christ United Methodist Church in Fort Collins, Colo., in 2005. A previously married mother of three, Ann, 48, is a financial analyst for a NASA contractor in Boulder who works 10-hr. days, not including the 40-min. commute. She writes for the church newsletter on her lunch break and runs a Sunday youth group, but she draws the line at joining the choir...
...Pastors may feel prepared for the lifestyle, but, says one study, 84% of wives don't. "I had no clue how to be a pastor's wife," says Amy Andrews, 32, a mother of two in Rochester, N.Y. After nine years, "I still don't." Born in Ethiopia to missionary parents, Andrews had begun college in Fullerton, Calif., when she met Brian, a Stanford grad and aerospace engineer from Los Angeles. Six months after they began dating, he awoke one day with a calling. Hired by Vineyard Church, he moved with his new wife to their current post...
Loneliness is a running theme among pastors' wives, the piper's tune that drives them online. "What do you think is the No. 1 problem that preachers' wives have?" says Lynne Dugan, author of Heart to Heart with Pastors' Wives. "Friendship. Loneliness. You're surrounded by all these other people in the congregation, and you feel isolated." The Christian support group Focus on the Family concurs: loneliness is the top topic on its hotline for pastors' wives. After all, a PW can hardly discuss marital woes or child-raising tribulations with her husband's flock, and colleagues or other friends...
...have the conversations I wasn't having in real life"--about "theology, politics, family life, knitting, baseball." Recently she struck up a heated conversation online about the role of the sacraments, a subject she would never bring up at Bible study. She has learned that any pronouncement by a pastor's family is fraught. During a tense discussion about renting the church to another congregation, their son asked where Sunday school would be held, leading churchgoers to think the pastor was against the plan (he wasn't). It's hard to separate her husband's identity from hers, says Horn...
...they feel most alone in their marital struggles, so perhaps it's not surprising to find separate Web networks of FPWs: former pastors' wives. Stephanie Elzy, 36, was driven to launch her FPW website after a brush with divorce, a crisis that led to her husband Rod's leaving the ministry (making her an FPW of another sort). She and Rod, both Seventh-Day Adventists, married when she was 22 and he 29. Though she felt called to her new role, his job soon strained their marriage. Rod earned $38,400 as pastor of a church in Athens...