We lived 50 feet from the door of the church I was pastoring. I loved it, but my wife felt owned and on duty 24-hours a day. It may not sound like much when a parishioner asks, “As soon as my husband arrives, please have him call me,” but over the years such you-are-there-and-it-is-easy-for-you can wear thin. And we frequently had people calling and asking me to convey a message to someone practicing softball behind our home or whatever the case may be, and I would have to drop everything, get our two boys (ages 6 and 4.5) dressed for the weather and deliver the message. We wanted our own home and it needed to be a comfortable distance from the church.
We were a typical young couple hoping to buy our own home. We had been living in a church parsonage for the last five years. It was a nice home but it wasn’t ours. And we were not seeing any financial gain on the house, because we did not own it.
Our salary just wasn’t enough to buy a home and then there was the problem of what to do with the church parsonage which was already paid for. We didn’t want to be looked at as unspiritual, putting a house before the needs of the church. We continued to pray that God would open the way.
Today, the assumption is that a pastor will own his own home and have a retirement program in place. In previous decades, neither was a part of the church culture.
Our details will be different from yours, but the spiritual teething points will be the same. Ours may have cost more or less money than yours, but the think-time, pray-time and sanctify-time will be the same.
We wanted a house, but God wanted us to look and act and hold values more like His Son. Our desire was His agent for our growth. So impressed is God the Father with God the Son, that He is determined to replicate the Son in those who claim the Lord Jesus Christ.
I was 34. Many of our friends had become homeowners ten years before. We felt behind. Homeownership looked very appealing. It was time.
Spiritual Teething Point: Are we worth a house? Does what we do deserve a house? Are we contributing to God’s work and society sufficiently to be worthy of home ownership? The answer we arrived at through months of thinking, praying, and talking with people was, “Yes, this is legitimate.”
Having settled the contribute-to-society question, other questions assaulted us: “Are we being materialistic? Are we being selfish? Are we too focused on money and security?” Sometimes we lost the argument, other times we won. Gradually winning came more often.
We were also in search of the balance point between conscientiously serving the Lord and taking care of ourselves and our family. Work versus home.
We concluded, “No, it is not wrong for us to have what others already have.” And we reasoned that no pastor is going to do a first-class job on the church while remaining mediocre with his own family. We reasoned, “If the church wants me to be diligent for them, then they need to be equally diligent for our well-being.”
Because the previous pastor had slipped into immorality, I faced an annual-vote-of-confidence in the pastor vote, which makes planning presumptuous.
Marilyn and I were investing our whole selves, seeking to honor God and bless the church, and we needed them to reciprocate. We reasoned, “They want me to want to know them and serve them . . . know all the names of their children and build a relationship with each child . . . and genuinely care about them. That’s what they want me to want to do for them. So it isn’t inconsistent for us to ask them, ‘What does the church want to do for us?’” Through many sleepless nights, pressure was building.
Spiritual Teething Point: Trust that God knows best. Faith that He loves us and will do right by us eventually, no matter whether that “right” includes a house or not.
We felt like we were ready to pop when I first spoke with our board chairman about this. He listened. In three months, the way seemed clear for us to look for a home in the area. A housing allowance vote passed by 90% to (a vocal) 10%.
But we did not want a house at the cost of a divided church, so we decided to put the church first and go to sleep on the matter.
Spiritual Teething Point: Dying to what we wanted and felt to be reasonable, responsible and appropriate was a tough pill to swallow. For us, this was an act of supreme patience. We soldiered on, trying to get it off our minds. All the while, we are supposed to have a good attitude toward those who opposed this (and we did most of the time).
Since we loved the people, some visitors were being saved, and the church was growing, we were able to focus on the church. In the five years I had been the pastor, the church had grown from about 100 up to 225 in attendance so we felt a sense of accomplishment. God was gracious to us.
You know what it is like to pray for something. You also know what often happens—nothing. Then you really pray. Earnestly, intensely pray. Still nothing. Then one can pout for a while (we didn’t, but we are not above doing so). Since there was no other option to obtain a house with God’s blessing, we continued appealing to God. And what happened? Nothing.
Spiritual Teething Point: persevering in prayer and waiting in faith isn’t obtained by reading another book.
One year went by with no one speaking to us about this. There seemed to be no interest in the congregation that came to us voluntarily. I wish I could say our imaginations were inactive, but they were not. Meanwhile, our expectations for ourselves as Pastor and Mrs. Pastor and their expectations of us remained in force.
But we still wanted our own home. David and Daniel, 8 and 6 respectively, needed some room to rip and run.
Another year went by. I turned 36. No house, and nothing on the horizon.
In our case, waiting was an essential quality He was developing. (1) Waiting increases the value on what is waited for. (2) Waiting is God’s way of asking us, “Am I not of greater value to you than what you are waiting for? Focus on Me.” (3) Waiting purifies our motive—why did we want a house. Who was it for—us or for God to grow us to be like His Son? (There can be many spiritual lessons learned through home ownership, so the reader should not assume I am saying, “Home ownership is unspiritual.” (4) Waiting is also God’s way of asking, “Are you sure you want this?”
One day a well-respected, young, energetic deacon was over for lunch, and said, “You have not spoken about this house thing for a long time. Are you still interested in pursuing it?” We were to the power of ten. House10.
He ran with it.
Spiritual Teething Point: When I asked for a home, there was insufficient response to make it happen. But when God moved through Deacon Steve, there was immediate (four months) progress.
Because of his leadership, the church agreed to form a committee to study the issue. For about ten weeks it met on Wednesday nights. Later we were informed about some of their discussion:
- The Levites did not get an allotment when the Promised Land was distributed—why should our pastor? He is the spiritual inheritor of that role.
- What are other churches doing for their pastors’ housing? (We imagined the committee thinking, “Certainly he would not expect us to lead on this issue or do anything for him that other churches had not already done for their pastors.” Forgive my sarcasm)
- Do we want this man [me] to stay for years? Do we like him THAT much?
- Can we afford to pay him a housing allowance—we own the parsonage free and clear so he gets housing as part of his pay, but at no cost to us
If a church is going to move a pastor in and cut him loose two years later, having a parsonage makes business sense. But if a congregation wants a man to stay and invest his life in the people, they need to take as good care of him as they want him to take of them. The stability of a long pastorate is how to grow a church. The committee heard from a lot of people and did their work carefully. They came back with a recommendation that the parsonage be sold to us. Each month another $200 slice came off the $40,000 price of the parsonage (with no interest being charged), retroactive to our starting date with the church in 1975, provided we could move it to our own lot and make it livable there.
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