• Home
  • About Us
  • Resources
  • Authors
  • Write for Us
  • Forward Movement

Grow Christians

A community of disciples practicing faith at home.

  • Parenting
  • Discipleship
  • Liturgical Year
  • Prayer
  • Archives
    • Seasons of the Year
      • Advent through Epiphany
      • Ash Wednesday, Lent & Holy Week
      • Easter & Pentecost
      • Ordinary Time
    • Seasons of Life
      • Childhood Years
      • Teen & Young Adult Years
      • Grandparenting & Godparenting
    • Saints and Feasts
      • Saints
      • Feasts
    • Discipleship
    • Making Faith Visible
    • Special Series
    • Grow Christians Updates & Giveaways
  • The Good Book Club
  • Holy Day Resources

Embodied: On Parenting and Pastoring

November 21, 2020 By Molly Baskette Leave a Comment

Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared on Bless This Mess as part of the book launch blog tour for Embodied: Clergy Women and the Solidarity of a Mothering God. While the book’s author writes from the intersection of motherhood and priesthood, her reflections and discussion questions are for all of us engaged in any sort of ministry and raising children. It would make a lovely Christmas gift for most clergy mamas. We share the this today today with permission from the author.  I hope it resonates with you as much as it did with me. —Allison, editor

There is nothing like both parenting and pastoring to strip you bare.

Sometimes literally. My daughter, as a toddler, was fond of interrupting sensitive coffee hour conversations and getting my attention by lifting my skirt above my waist.

My son, not to be outdone, had a habit of slipping away from my husband while I was preaching, stripping buck naked, and army-crawling the length of the sanctuary under the pews.

There was the time I took the youth group to Ground Zero in NYC one hot summer day as a newly minted mom, and forgot to bring a breast pump. My cups, ahem, runneth over, to the delight of all the teenagers. I bought a hand pump in a drug store, and pumped and dumped, crying and cramped in a dirty restaurant bathroom.

And of course the vulnerability and hypervisibility of parenting while pastoring has manifest in more symbolic ways. There was the time I left a wake for a beloved elder, screaming and sobbing and running home in heels, because the ambulance siren I heard was for my daughter, heading to the ER with allergy-induced anaphylaxis, again.

Or the many, many times our upstairs neighbor in the parsonage, who was also a church member, heard me lose my shit with my kids at the end of a long day.

Or the scary season in mid-high school when our son was struggling with substances, and we were battling him—and had to figure out how to ask for support while protecting his privacy. Years earlier, an older clergy mom friend had said chillingly, “little kids, little problems. Big kids, big problems.” Already completely at my limit with job and the baby who would become that teen, I answered lightly, “well, that’s terrifying.”

Every one of those parenting conundrums taught my congregations better than any sermon that:

1) even professional Christians are not perfect
2) bodies have needs and limits (& are often hilarious), and most importantly:
3) vulnerability is not just acceptable. It is, in fact, the Way.

A Way that Jesus, vulnerable on purpose from birth to grave, himself lived.

My soul work, never done, is to continue to give credence to the idea that vulnerability is a form of strength. Our egos want to protect our image and our vulnerability (literally: our wounds), but our souls want to be integrated–literally, to have all our pieces in the same place instead of feeling always scattered, trying to remember which secrets to protect and which subterfuges to maintain.

My hope, as both parent and pastor, is to be as integrated as possible, fully myself everywhere. That means being unafraid to let my messy backstage show for fear of disappointing a public who might want me to project only a faux put-togetherness.

But it also means being willing to work as hard to be a Christian with my family as with my parishioners, which is to say: to be loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle and self-controlling. As my best friend says, it’s good to be kind to the people you live with, since they are the ones who can most easily kill you in your sleep (in case you needed further motivation).

Parent-pastors, I pray for you today: that God gives you a little more vulnerability with your public, a little more patience with your family, and the peace that comes with being fully yourself no matter who you are with.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Email
  • Pinterest
  • More
  • Pocket
  • Reddit
  • LinkedIn
  • Skype

Filed Under: Parenting Tagged With: Church Publishing Inc., clergy, parenting

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Encouragement in your Inbox

Enter your email address to receive notifications of new posts.

Join 4,775 other subscribers
The Spy Series

Grow Christians is brought to you by Forward Movement, a ministry of The Episcopal Church that seeks to inspire disciples and empower evangelists. Follow on Facebook or Twitter.

Search:

Like us on Facebook

Like us on Facebook

Recent Posts

Popular Posts

  • That moment you realize the voice you’re hearing isn’t God – it’s Satan
  • The Feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple
  • Candlemas: History, Traditions...And Crepes!
  • Using Minecraft to Teach Kids About Christianity
  • A Window into Heaven – and Here

Copyright © 2023 — Forward Movement • All rights reserved.