A Letter to a Pastor’s Kid

Growing up in the fishbowl of the ministry is difficult, but with forgiveness and a good attitude, it can turn into a blessing!

Dear Pastor’s Kid, 

Thank you for reaching out to me and trusting me with your questions. I deeply resonate with the questions that you are asking, and I know that it is hard to reach out and trust someone as you struggle with your faith and feelings. I am a pastor’s kid, too, and I know what it feels like. Being raised in the ministry is a blessing and a curse. It is hard because you see the worst of the ministry and church life, and it is good because you get to see the love and beauty that God offers to people that believe Him and follow Him. You can see the reality that God exists and that He has power in people’s lives, but you can also see how much evil and dysfunction gets blamed on God. 

The hardest truth that we have to come to grips with is that life is suffering. It can feel different at different stages of your life. It can also be perceived differently based on if you have power and money, or if you are poor and powerless. People who have power think of suffering as something they can overcome, so even when they experience it, they have hope for the future. People who are poor and powerless, often experience this same suffering as an insurmountable evil. Modern psychology calls this “the locus of control” - People with an internal locus of control think that they control their own destiny, but people with an external locus of control feel that things are decided for them and can’t be changed, not matter how hard they work. These assumptions come down to us in early childhood, and they take a long time to unlearn. All of our suffering is the same, but the perspectives about what it means and how to deal with it can be very different. What Christianity does that is so different to other world religions is that it makes our hope not dependent on our current situations. It makes it possible to be poor and powerless but still see purpose in suffering, such as a light at the end of the tunnel. We can see that, regardless of the outside circumstances and the temporary triumphs of evil, God is still in control, is a judge of the good and the bad, and that ultimately, everything will be righted in God’s time. 

Everyone makes bad decisions and we have to pay the consequences because of them. The hardest thing for children is that they have to pay the consequences for their parents. Suffering is passed down from one generation to another. This is how dysfunction and patterns of misbehavior pass down, over and over, without a way out for the children who are brought up in these dysfunctional environments. Children often don’t understand how the decision of their parents, grandparents, and great grandparents make them suffer. Many times, the children think it’s their fault and blame themselves, but the key to gaining freedom from these cycles of dysfunction, is to see though them, and to see what your parents could not see, and change yourself so you do not push those habits onto others. This is where Christianity is very helpful, because it simplifies our relationships and allows us to see ourselves in relation to God instead of just to our parents. In understanding our relationship with God, we see that He is all good, all love, and all good will towards us, and He desires to use our sufferings as a tool to become like He is: full of life, light, love and truth. This is the whole purpose of Christian life, it is not about praying a prayer and getting a ticket to Heaven, but it is about working through our hang ups, dysfunctions, miscommunications, and lies that we believe about ourselves (most of which that comes from our families). So to stand before God, we have a clear relationship with others through Him, allows us to minimize the negative influence of our families and see purpose in our sufferings, and to know that there’s a purpose to life. 

Many times, Christian parents excuse themselves for bad behavior or bad decisions by saying that they did it for God, or because God told them to do this or that. This way, they shelter themselves from the consequences of their own actions, but this is not God, and it is not really ministry, it’s camouflage that’s used to perpetuate the dysfunction that parents learned as children. When one becomes a Christian, old habits do not die immediately and their dysfunction sometimes become worse, because it is so easy to blame their manipulation, anger, or greed on God. God becomes an accomplice for many sins, and children grow up simply believing that what their parents have always said is true. But, this is not true, and their parents oftentimes hide the truth behind a mask of religion. This is why there are so many toxic Christians who are literally worse than the people you meet outside of the Church. Pastors do not want to address these problems, because people will stop giving and stop coming to church. Leaders are supposed to be addressing these problems of deceit and dysfunction, but they are oftentimes the worst enablers. You see this a lot in many different denominations of Christianity. One should not believe that the leaders are necessarily good representations of the Christian life. 

For pastors children, the greatest difficulty is to resolve the contradiction between what their father says and what he actually does. Pastors try to project their best image to their followers because they are insecure and they want to be loved and accepted. The truth about Church is that it is very political, and any show of weakness can immediately lead to political danger, and pastors can lose their ministries and their source of income from extremely simple mistakes or misperceptions on the part of easily offended parishioners. This leads pastors to try to do “image control”, and while not intentionally trying to deceive anyone, they often have a big gap between what they say and their actual lives. Kids who grow up in these environments see the hypocrisy of their families, and this leads to a melt-down of faith in their late teens and early adult years. 

Pastors kids suffer from the biggest difficulties in youth and young adulthood because they have the extreme pressure to believe and be good examples of Christianity, and yet they have seen the worst sides of the Church, their own families, and of Christianity in general. This leads many pastors kids to reject the faith as fake or merely a political tool of manipulation. They are also targeted by petty and jealous members of the church who try to make a point of making their lives miserable. This leads to great bitterness on the part of these children towards the work that their fathers do. It feels like a no-win situation without perks or benefits and only draw-backs and sacrifices. Their parents often don’t make a lot of money for their troubles, and the children are supposed to happily live in poverty. If they complain, they are perceived to be selfish and greedy by Church members. If they don’t serve happily, people think they aren’t good Christians, which makes pastors children feel like what they do in Church is an act or a big performance. This makes the whole Church feel fake, because pastors kids know what’s going on beneath the surface. So much dysfunction, guilt, fear, and even lust are the real motivations of people doing things in Church, and pastor's kids can see right through the false fronts and God becomes hard to find. 

Because pastors kids have been raised in a spiritually charged environment, and have often seen the sacramental work of the Church (Baptisms, the Lords Supper, Marriages, Baby Dedications, Deaths and Burials), without properly preparing themselves through confession of sins, prayer and fasting, they are prime targets for demonic activity. The Bible says that to take the Lord’s Supper without confessing your sins, you open yourself up to demonic forces. Most of the Satanists and occultists of the last 300 years have all been pastors kids, even the famous atheists such as Karl Marx and Fredrick Nietzsche, were all pastor’s kids. In this way, children who have grown up in the Church, dedicated to God, are often the ones who become the darkest, who serve evil and tormented by demonic oppression. The best way to insure against demonic oppression in your life is to always keep yourself clean before God. Confess your sins often, find good spiritual fathers and mothers, and realize that you can never keep your sins hidden or private. 

As for the feeling of being “closed off” because of past hurts. When we experience pain and suffering unwillingly, we shrink back in fear and close our eyes to the problems we face, hoping they will go away. When we close ourselves off and try to block out the pain, we easily descend into darkness. The brightest light can not be reflected by a covered mirror. God made us all to reflect his glory, but we have a will about whether or not we are open to it. If we shut our eyes, avoid pain, and try to shut out the challenges of life, we can not see, and god will not force open our eyes. This is why we need to confess our fear and brokenness to God, and try to open ourselves up again to Him, pushing past the pain and suffering we’ve experienced in the Church, and the bitterness we hold because of others’ bad decision. If we can forgive and move on, we can be the kind of Christians that our parents could only dream of producing in their ministry. We can have greater power in our future ministries because we will understand the ministry as a personal cross, a sacrifice for God, and not a platform for performance or a popularity contest. 

We learn the ministry by following our dads!

To get to your last question, in the Christian worldview, what is the purpose of life? God made us in His image so that we could be like Him. Why? Because God is the only unchanging and eternal existence. He is literally the standard for everything. He made us for a purpose beyond this universe, just like how the Angels were from the worlds before us, we are now being prepared in this crucible of suffering for something greater that God will make beyond this life and for the future. This is why we find meaning in pain, work for redemption and re-creation through the power of the Holy Spirit, and continue in faithfulness, regardless of the difficulties and set-backs that we face. This is how our painful experiences as pastor’s kids can result in great blessing, spiritual fruit, and a meaningful life in God. We can continue the legacies of our fathers in the flesh, our pastor dads, and fulfill the purposes of our Heavenly Father for our sanctification, and inherit a blessing far greater than anyone else can even imagine!

I will be praying for you and your family! May God bless you and help you find a direction and purpose as you move out and establish life on your own. We are always here for you, will pray for you, and will continue to do whatever we can to support you in your new life. May God help you to turn all of these past difficulties and traumas into blessings that will overflow and fill your life with love and sweetness, and make you a fit minister (officially or unofficially) in His Church!

In Christ, 

Bp Joseph Boyd

Ancient Church of the West