4 Ways to Win as Pastor and Parent

Written by Andy Cook

Attempting to balance your role as a parent with your role as a pastor is one of the most difficult tasks you face. How do you balance these roles and truly be a biblical leader for your family?

Here are some solid principles that have guided many pastors who also have the privilege of being parents:

1. Love your children more than your church.
It's not only OK to attend an important event in your child's life, it is critically important. Meetings can be rescheduled or missed completely, bearing no long-term scar on your family's life. However, a season of missed basketball games will never be forgotten by the son who wanted you to see how hard he had been working on his jump shot. Special speakers can fill a pulpit, but only you can fill a seat at your daughter's senior recital.

2. Let your daily parenting speak louder than your sermons.
The greatest sermon on parenting you will ever preach might just be the Sunday when you didn't preach at all. When you miss a Sunday in order to be with your child, the message is obvious. As important as pastoring a church is, parenting is more important. When you shed real tears over a family heartache or healthy laughter over a family story, you may share more truth about biblical parenting than you could have shared from any parenting passage in the Bible.

3. Involve your children in your ministry and help them understand the family's responsibility.
If you haven't already done so, call your children together and explain the truth about living in a glass house. In a pastor's family, it's not just you sharing truth from a pulpit. It's the entire family showing other families how to live. Our successes are there for the entire church to see as well as our failures.

If God is real to the pastor's family, then there's a chance another family will make the same discovery. Even the youngest children can understand the simplicity of helping other families.

We're also not the only family in town to live in a glass house.

The principal's son has to behave for every teacher, in every hour, for what must seem like his entire life.
On occasion, the mayor's daughter winds up in the newspaper.

Our job as a pastor's family is equally visible, and infinitely more important. Thankfully, most children growing up in a pastor's home can understand their challenge, and rise to meet that challenge.

4. When in doubt, refer to Principle #1.
It will always return to this truth. If a church conflict is damaging your home, leave the church. If you're caught in a dilemma between your church and your child, choose your child. If discipline can't be escaped, stop the sermon. If you can't help but brag on your son from the pulpit, don't stutter. If your daughter needs a hug before a crowd, make it real. Always ask permission to share a family story, then tell it with excellence.

About Pastor Andy Cook

Andy is the Pastor of Shirley Hills Baptist Church in Warner Robins, GA. He is the author of the following books available online from LifeWay Stores:

Related Articles: