What happens when the pastor’s family isn’t perfect?
In the back corner of a furniture store I picked up an end table to test its weight. The first was too light, so I moved to the next. Working through the next five, I pushed each one to see if it would topple. The sixth one held steady: heavy with blunt edges. Strong enough to withstand a tantrum.
This is one of many decisions I make as a mother raising a child with emotional and behavioral challenges. It’s a weight other parents carry too, but for those of us who pastor and lead church ministries, there is an unspoken expectation: Hide the pain and be composed during church, even when we’ve spent the week in crisis.
Across the body of Christ, I’ve watched fellow leaders carry versions of the same heavy heartbreak. Some, like me, spend our days trying to keep our children from unraveling into meltdowns they can’t control. Others I know have watched their grown children struggle with addiction or mental illness. Adult children may reject faith, which is its own kind of loss.
As leaders, we have to stand up on Sundays, lead worship and preach, and then go home to households that are falling apart. It happens every week. But almost none of us will admit it.
This was brought to my attention by a question on an ordination recommendation form I filled out for a friend. The form covered their beliefs, spiritual formation and prayer life. But one question stood out: Do they have well-behaved children?
I know what people would write about me. Her child doesn’t listen to anyone. He’s always bolting away. And underneath it all, the real question: How can she lead us when she can’t even seem to lead him?
That question, particularly in the context of readiness for ordination, reveals a theology of ministry many of us have absorbed without realizing it: that our households are evidence of our fitness to lead. Scripture calls leaders to manage their households well. But scrutiny and unspoken judgment have twisted that standard into something else: the belief that our children’s illnesses and personal choices are a referendum on our calling.
When our children are thriving, we feel affirmed, not only as parents but in our Christian calling. When they are not, we bear the burden of shame. We feel like failures, not only as parents but also as ministers. That shame keeps us silent.
But here’s the problem: When we model a faith with no room for honest struggle, we teach families managing their own crises at home that the church has no room for them either.
I am still learning that our children’s struggles do not disqualify us as leaders in ministry. I have prayed two prayers while holding a thrashing child: that God would calm his mind and that God would show me what it means to love even in utter chaos.
If we let shame go, our persistence — rather than the absence of conflict — can deepen our understanding of the gospel and our relationship with Jesus. As a pastor who has sat with their child through a psychiatric evaluation, I personally know a God who does not abandon us in our darkest depths. We can sit with prodigals and with the parents waiting for them to come home, because we also know how to wait and carry radical hope. We can confidently assure our congregants that God will never give up on us, because, despite everything, we have never given up on our children.
For ministers who carry private family pain, I offer two pieces of advice that can make the difference between leading sustainably through suffering and being undone by shame.
Separate your children’s story from your identity
When our children struggle, no matter their age, our shame as parents becomes so entangled with our ministerial identity that our entire sense of self feels under indictment. We must do the work of disentangling our worth from the outcomes we cannot control.
The God who called us into ministry was not surprised by our children’s diagnoses or the decisions they have made. Our children are not our credentials but part of our ministry. If we understand that our own behavior does not change who God is, why do we apply a different standard to ourselves and our children?
When we anchor our identity into who God says we are rather than in how our families appear, something releases within us. We can become more present to our congregations. We can become more loving to our children. When we do this, it will make us better parents and better ministers.
Learn to lead from the middle of an unfinished story
Ministry culture loves a testimony with a clean ending. We have been trained to tell our stories of struggle in three movements: problem, faith, resolution. Many of us believe that we cannot testify until we reach the third one. But mental health struggles do not always resolve.
Addictions can be a lifelong battle. Some of our children may be in and out of crisis for decades or perhaps for the rest of our lives. My son is on a long waiting list for cognitive behavioral therapy to help manage his emotional dysregulation and sees three other specialists every week. No simple cure is in his future.
We do not need our children to be healed before we lead. Our calling does not require all our problems to be solved but demands our faithfulness and obedience in what’s left unresolved.
The people we serve are in the middle of their own unfinished stories. Our congregations need to know they are not carrying these burdens alone. God will complete what he has started in us, and within our children, but for today we are called to do the work until our time here is done.
Our churches were never meant to be museums of perfect families. We are part of a broken community being made whole. God loves our children more than we do, and God will not forget them. When we remember that, we can minister from a place of depth rather than weight.
I am still learning that our children’s struggles do not disqualify us as leaders in ministry.
A worship pastor in Santa Cruz County, California, told me something I can’t shake.
“You get so conditioned in ministry to just ‘get what you get and don’t throw a fit,’” he said. “It’s labeled as ‘contentment.’”
He continued, “Wanting something more is sort of treated like you are spiritually immature.”
Hmm. So this guy was leading in worship but lamenting in private.
He was renting, in the housing-affordability spiral. The pastoral team at the top owned homes — bought early, spouse in tech, whatever. The rest were absorbing the cost of California housing on ministry salaries, shielding the church from a crisis it didn’t have to see.
“As long as we stay, that’s proof there’s no problem,” he said.
I run a housing nonprofit for ministry staff called Aslan Housing Foundation. I came into this work thinking I was helping churches solve a logistics problem — matching resources to needs, building tools, facilitating conversations. I was wrong. Somewhere along the way, the scales fell from my eyes, and I stopped being neutral.
It happened on a Zoom meeting, not the road to Damascus. A finance elder was pushing back on the idea that a pastor might want to own a home. The tilt was familiar: He’s a pastor. Why should he expect that?
I stopped him. “Hold on,” I said. “In the Catholic tradition, priests get modest pay, but they get lifetime provision — housing, insurance, retirement. The institution carries them.
“In Protestant churches, we’ve inherited the expectation of sacrifice without the institutional commitment that made it sustainable. And without getting into the errors of the prosperity gospel, we have a biblical mandate to support our pastors. If we think homeownership is a wholesome goal for the people in our pews — the stability, the rootedness, the equity — why would that not be a wholesome goal for the people in our pulpits?”
Sound in the room grew muted. I’d said the quiet part out loud. And I realized I wasn’t just helping churches anymore. I was fighting for pastors.
Scripture is not subtle about this. Paul tells Timothy that elders who lead well are worthy of “double honor” — and lest we spiritualize that into mere respect, he clarifies in the next breath: “The worker deserves his wages” (1 Timothy 5:17-18, NIV).
The Greek word for honor, timē, can also mean price. Compensation. Paul isn’t speaking in metaphor. He’s talking about money.
In America, in 2026, that wage needs to provide a roof.
But here’s what the system hides: Churches are exempt from filing 990s. Unlike every other nonprofit, they don’t have to disclose
So why not be transparent about pastor pay? Many congregations see a line item marked “personnel” and nothing more. Elders set salaries behind closed doors, benchmarking against vibes. The exemption isn’t the problem — churches could choose transparency anyway. The problem is that too many don’t. And in that silence pastors learn that asking is unseemly, that wanting is weakness, that contentment means keeping quiet.
This is the trap. Caring is the job, so self-advocacy feels like selfishness. The same instinct that makes someone a good pastor — attentiveness to others, reluctance to center themselves — makes it almost impossible to say: “I need more. I deserve more. My family deserves more.”
So they absorb it. They take the problem onto themselves and shield the church from seeing it. They rent in cities where their congregants own. They watch their kids grow up knowing they could be displaced any month. They tell themselves it’s temporary, or it’s sanctifying, or it’s just the cost of calling.
Until it isn’t. Until they move to Idaho.
That’s not a dig at Idaho. It’s a eulogy. A pastor I worked with told me plainly when Aslan was just starting: “If I can’t get into a homeownership position before my eldest starts kindergarten, we’re leaving.”
He left. He’s in Idaho now. The church lost a pastor. His community lost a shepherd.
Shrug. Shucks. It’s just the way things are.
No. It’s not inevitable. It’s a choice.
It’s a series of choices made by some churches and congregants that don’t see what they’re not looking at, protected by structures that don’t require transparency and sustained by a theology of pastoral sacrifice that never asks who’s actually paying the price.
I didn’t start this work as an advocate. I started as a facilitator. But I’ve sat in too many rooms, heard too many pastors whisper the thing they’re afraid to say out loud, watched too many finance committees flinch at the idea that their pastor might want what the committee members have.
So yes — I’m vehemently pro-pastor now. Not because pastors are perfect. Not because ministry is easy. But because in a capitalist society, love and care also look like money. And until churches reckon with that, we’ll keep losing the people we can least afford to lose.
I’m not asking for new regulations. I’m asking for old faithfulness. The kind that looks a pastor in the eye and says, “We see you, and we’re going to act like it.”
And in that silence pastors learn that asking is unseemly, that wanting is weakness, that contentment means keeping quiet
In 2007, when he was a young pastor at a church plant in Salem, Oregon, the Rev. D.J. Vincent noticed that a group of unhoused people had been living in Cascades Gateway Park. He and his parishioners wanted to do something to help them out and settled on a simple idea: They’d host a potluck.
That impulse to share a single meal started a ministry that has grown into a multimillion-dollar nonprofit called Church @ the Park. It now offers outreach services, workforce development, emergency shelter and permanent housing to the area’s unhoused population. In 2024 they served nearly 2,000 people across six locations.
As Church @ the Park evolved, so too did Vincent’s approach to ministry. From his conversations with unhoused folks at the meals, he gained a new perspective about dignity, humility and relationships. He felt he needed to change the way he was thinking about his service work; in looking for guidance he came across Street Psalms, a faith-based organization committed to developing strong community leaders.
The organization, a network of more than 40 organizations in 100 cities around the world, was formed to help create “communities in mission” that foster human flourishing in urban spaces. Street Psalms is based on “theology from below” — that is, learning alongside people at the margins rather than imposing solutions from above. This approach aligned with Vincent’s experience at the potlucks.
“The spirit of God exists in this community, and we had to learn how to listen,” Vincent said. “I started to see how important it is to do things with people, not just for people.”
In Street Psalms, Vincent found an enriching framework for serving his community. The organization promotes cities of peace, with a special emphasis on caring for the most vulnerable. Their approach is like a fungal ecosystem. Mushrooms are the fruit of an intricate network of mycelia, the thread-like roots that connect trees, share nutrients, and create the conditions for new life to flourish. Church @ the Park is one of the mushrooms, and Street Psalms is the underground network of relationships and shared wisdom that makes it possible.
“Street Psalms created a bubble of belonging for us,” Vincent said. “They value connectedness and relationship, and our organizational values are the Street Psalms values. We aren’t just a place for people to get resources, but where they can find value and dignity and responsibility.”
Learning to be peacemakers
Street Psalms calls itself a “sodal” expression of the church, as opposed to a more traditional “modal” one. “Sodal” comes from the Latin “sodalitas,” meaning “companion” or “partner.” The organization uses this description to explain how it seeks to develop leaders who are embedded in vulnerable urban communities, people who are trying to enact meaningful change in their cities.
“We’re an urban monastery without walls,” said Sarah Moore, Street Psalms’ senior fellow for applied research, who came to the organization after a career as a psychology professor. “We prepare people for the challenges they face out in the real world of service.”
What are the invisible or less visible support networks that help your ministry thrive?
They teach a set of questions they call the Incarnational Framework, based on four concepts that go by the shorthand “See, Do, Be, Free.” It starts with three questions:
- Does your way of seeing call you out of the myth of scarcity and into the reality of abundance?
- Does your way of doing call you out of theory and into practice?
- Does your way of being call you out of rivalry and into peacemaking?
Living according to these three values — prioritizing abundance over scarcity, action over ideas, peacemaking over rivalry — leads to the end goal of nurturing a comprehensive sense of “gospel freedom,” one founded in love, mercy and service. It’s the capacity to act without reacting and to live in accordance with the Spirit, not just self-interest. The framework is used as part of a training guide and is a diagnostic tool to help leaders examine their own approach to transforming their communities.
“The framework is very much a part of what I’m doing as a pastor and what I want our congregation to become,” said the Rev. Lina Thompson, pastor at Lake Burien Presbyterian Church, just south of Seattle. Thompson, who is on the
Street Psalms staff, leans on the framework in all aspects of her work. “I go into weekly meetings and think about abundance and about how we can be peacemakers.”
Forming leaders who serve communities
Thompson has been with Street Psalms since it was founded in the 1990s. The organization initially served urban youth workers in Philadelphia and was an initiative of the Pew Charitable Trust. Kris Rocke, the current executive director, had written a curriculum for World Vision, a youth mentorship organization, and he realized that the leadership skills it cultivated could be applied to anyone looking to share the “good news in hard places.” In 2023, Street Psalms officially became a religious order.
“Our charism has crystallized, especially over the past eight years,” Thompson said. “We’re committed to the formation of leaders who are serving their communities. It takes a special kind of spirituality to do this work, and we realized people weren’t getting the training they needed in a more formal seminary.”
While Street Psalms has always mentored leaders in their specific contexts, its programming and curriculum has become more formalized and refined over the years. Its nontraditional seminary is not affiliated with a denomination and does not ordain pastors for local churches. Instead, it trains people to lead communities in mission. It ordained its first cohort of leaders in 2010.
Who is accompanying the vulnerable people in your community? How are they supported or connected?
“We say we’re joyfully unaccredited,” Moore said. “While we do not believe, not at all, that this replaces formalized and accredited seminary training, we do believe that this offers the type of transformational experience that prepares leaders to serve the sodal form of the church.”
Street Psalms offers a one-year novitiate program that ends in ordination. Through daily, weekly, and monthly rhythms and practices, as well as synchronous and asynchronous classes and workshops, ordinands learn the Incarnational Framework and how to employ it in their communities. Nearly 40 people around the globe have been ordained. The organization also has a one-year fellowship program that finances specific community projects. Funded by grants from large and small benefactors, it gives all of its materials away for free.
The program is rooted in a specific hermeneutic, a way of reading the Bible that prioritizes and centers the most vulnerable people in Bible stories and parables.
“What you practice with Street Psalms is a way of reading Scripture from below, from the perspective of the marginalized,” Thompson said.
“During my formal training for my M.Div., nobody helped me see that the context of Scripture is about people who were oppressed,” she said. “It’s written to tell that story, but you very rarely hear that. The Lord’s Prayer, for example, came about during the context of the Roman Empire. When you think about it like that it gives it a new resonance.”
Learning to read with this lens prepares leaders in urban communities to ask questions of the text that might unlock new significance for its constituents and to be open to new and surprising interpretations.
“One of the big things the church doesn’t talk enough about, that Street Psalms does talk about, is violence,” Thompson said. “It’s not just physical violence, either. It can be the political thing and the pressure to pick sides.
“With Street Psalms, we want to curate the kind of conversations that don’t create enemies on the other side. I don’t know where I’d be as a preacher or as a spiritual leader if I didn’t have this framework.”
What is the role of relationships and trust in making change in your community?
Building ‘communities in mission’ around the globe
Street Psalms trains leaders to love their city and seek peace in it, which entails learning how to listen to their city’s “sacred song”— the literal meaning of “psalm.”
“With the name, you have two images coming together and resonating,” Thompson said. “’Street’ says, ‘I’m here,’ ‘I’m with my community.’ And ‘Psalms’ is all the joy and lament that you find there. All the raw ways history shows up through our people.”
The organization takes different forms with all its partners; every mushroom that blooms from the network is unique. These partners do many kinds of work, from homeless outreach to after-school programs to helping survivors of domestic abuse and walking with people coming out of prison. And they’re all over the globe.
When an organization commits to following the Incarnational Framework, it becomes a “community in mission,” which in the simplest terms means that it shares the See, Do, Be, Free philosophy and can tap into a web of support when it needs help navigating challenges that can arise when doing things with people and not just for them.
“We’re kind of like the wholesalers,” Moore said. “And our partners are the retailers.”
Changing the way leaders engage with the world
In addition to the seminary, Street Psalms runs a design studio that functions as a kind of incubator for innovative social change. Partners can put their ideas through their paces before testing them out in the world.
One idea that came out of this is the Preaching Peace Initiative. At gatherings called “Tables,” partners tackle issues that pertain to their communities using the Incarnational Framework and the “theology from below” hermeneutic. Thompson visited a Table at one of Street Psalms’ partners in Kenya.
“In Nairobi there was a Preaching Peace Table with Christian pastors and Muslim clerics, and they took a common theme and discussed it from their different perspectives,” she said, adding that there had been violence between these communities in the past.
“The theme was: ‘What does it mean to love your neighbor?’ So you get in this room and you see the kind of conversation about peace. It helped foster these ideas of abundance and peacemaking and asked what it would look like for that to exist there, in that community.”
Thompson likened that work to what Vincent is doing with Church @ the Park.
“They have a clear picture of what it means to serve the most vulnerable,” she said. “They have a common language of scarcity and abundance and what it means to work across difference for the sake of the poor.”
Which of the four ideas of the framework (See, Do, Be, Free) speaks into your current ministry moment?
During the early potlucks, Vincent saw problems to be solved, needs to be met, deficits to be addressed — what he regards now as classic scarcity thinking. But as he listened to the people he was serving, he learned to see differently. His perspective shifted to one of abundance and collaboration. And he understood that the community already had what it needed to flourish.
“We grew into a ministry of mutuality, where folks can find not only resources, but value and dignity,” he said. “The goal is co-creating a better reality, and we are our best selves in community, not in isolation.”
Vincent now takes all of Church @ the Park’s staff through a version of the Incarnational Framework during their training. He wants the organization to be as inclusive as possible, serving people regardless of their faith background, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other typical dividing line. More than half of the employees don’t identify as religious, but they’ve found a sense of belonging in the organization and its mission for peace and relational abundance. This kind of radical acceptance and baseline humility is what helps make Street Psalms unique.
“It’s more than a curriculum or content,” Moore said. “If you embrace the framework, it changes the way you engage with the world.”
How does a scarcity mindset make change more difficult in your congregation or community? Where does an abundance mindset offer new opportunities?
Questions to consider
- What are the invisible or less visible support networks that help your ministry thrive?
- Who is accompanying the vulnerable people in your community? How are they supported or connected?
- What is the role of relationships and trust in making change in your community?
- Which of the four ideas of the framework (See, Do, Be, Free) speaks into your current ministry moment?
- How does a scarcity mindset make change more difficult in your congregation or community? Where does an abundance mindset offer new opportunities?
As a Christian leader, I have received the grace of learning many things by failure. Perhaps my clearest and most repeated lesson from failure has been about how the Spirit moves differently in various contexts.
Thirty-five years ago, I was a young campus minister, and I recruited about 20 students for an intensive Bible study. Brimming with self-confidence and overflowing with zeal, I led in all the ways I had been taught. I am a white male, and I had learned to lead in a particular style. For example, my communication and conflict styles were polite but quite direct. My previous experiences of learning and leading these studies had been amazing, so I felt like an expert — for about three weeks.
After a good start, I realized my students were not responding like I expected. The group dynamic was slow and tense; it seemed like their commitment was waning. As I discussed this with my wise supervisor, Dana, she didn’t blame the students, and she didn’t rebuke me. Rather, she taught me to ask some new questions.
Dana suggested I meet with each student and ask questions like “What do you experience in my leadership?” and “What might help you feel connected and committed to our group?”
So, with what zeal I had left, I met with each student individually. Those conversations were challenging for me and for the students, in different ways. I had to learn to ask questions and listen carefully without explaining or defending myself. This was surprisingly difficult, and a little embarrassing for the guy who three weeks ago felt like an expert!
My group was diverse, with many students of color. I learned in these conversations that many of them felt it culturally challenging to speak to me about the ways my leadership wasn’t working for them. I learned so much: about communication and leadership and listening, as well as about the cultures and families my students came from. And by the grace of God — and the mercy of my students — all of us recommitted to the study.
From that experience, I began to realize how fundamentally contextual leadership is; what had worked for me as a student wasn’t working for these young people. A transformative Bible study may look very different from context to context. For example, direct forms of communication and addressing conflict were not helpful in my group. Healthy Christian leadership is organic, not formulaic. The ministry of Word and Spirit must be planted in the soil of particular communities, and it grows differently based on where it is planted.
The word in the wilderness
The third chapter of the Gospel of Luke shines light on the role of social context in the movement of the Spirit. Leading up to chapter 3, the reader anticipates something dramatic is going to happen. And sure enough, the word of the Lord comes to the miraculously born prophet John the Baptist, and it comes “in the wilderness.” This was a big deal for the people of God; it had been 400 years since the last prophet.
Luke says that John’s ministry is the fulfillment of Isaiah 40:3-5:
“A voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him. Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill made low. The crooked roads shall become straight, the rough ways smooth. And all people will see God’s salvation.’” (Luke 4b-6 NIV)
Isaiah likens the coming movement of God’s Spirit to the most ambitious of public works projects: creating the kind of road that kings and emperors use. Valleys will be filled, mountains cut down and a smooth, straight road constructed. The dimensions of the project are massive!
Yet John’s prophetic ministry, of course, is leveled not at physical mountains and valleys but at the landscape of culture, economics and power. The adjustments to be made, the road to be built, concerns territory of a different order.
In his enactment of Isaiah’s road-building vision, John speaks to Hebrew and Gentile, to rich and poor, and to powerful and weak. He challenges them all to a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Luke 3:3b). John exhorts children of Abraham not to presume upon their ethnic identity but to humbly seek forgiveness.
He challenges the rich to share with the poor. He challenges tax collectors to live simply and soldiers to reject violence. He does so openly in a crowd where the powerful and marginalized were gathered. This word of the Lord — a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins — arrives in a distinct social landscape and speaks clearly to that context. Word and Spirit always move in ways that both reveal and challenge the social topography.
A map for leaders
I’ve noticed that as a leader I’m often tempted to ignore context and presume that leadership can be formulaic, as if the road to a fulfilled vision will be smooth and predictable. Universal strategies, however, are like the illusion of a mirage in the desert — they appear satisfying but ultimately disappoint.
In order to address this temptation, I have found it helpful to stop and prayerfully reflect on my context, using the following exercise in my book, “Formed to Lead.”
Bring to mind the social context of your leadership role. It could be family, school, organization, professional community or neighborhood. Imagine that context as a landscape with mountains and valleys, and then begin to map the social topography.
Who or what is on the mountaintop in terms of influence, power or voice? Who is in the valley? What does your map look like in terms of resources? What might be the roads or connections between different individuals, groups and levels? To what degree can people or groups change their level in the landscape? What is the nature of religious power or influence in your community?
And finally, where do you fit in this landscape of privilege, power, influence and need?
I find it helpful to actually draw maps of this social topography. When I’m drawing, I often see new dimensions, connections or concerns.
When I practice this, I often learn something about myself by picturing the people, groups and systems around me more clearly. I usually find new insight into God’s movement in my community. I find myself freed from the tempting illusion that I can lead according to a simple formula.
I suggest you try this map exercise. After reflecting on the topography of your context, spend a few minutes in prayer, asking God about distinct ways Word and Spirit might move in your particular landscape. And don’t be surprised if the Spirit gives you new insight about God’s heart and your own calling.