My spouse is also my pastor
During the pandemic, I’ve realized how much I rely on her as a proxy for my faith.
For the last two years I’ve lived with a pandemic pastor. I overheard my spouse’s daily huddles with her staff to learn new technology and plan or reimagine what worship and gathering mean. They experimented with regional zones and prerecorded videos and musical compilations, with Zoom conversations and baptisms in parks and drive-through impositions of ashes. While our home has always been focused on ministry, the pandemic turned it into a church office and sanctuary with seemingly few boundaries.
As I helped with cords and microphones or watched the service in one room while she preached in another, I noticed the tethers of my faith life, the ways church and community shaped me and held me in place, beginning to fray. I could feel each little thread pull from week to week. It was as if a river kept rising until the waters covered my feet. Like a flood eroding a riverbank, these waters began to expose the underlying structures and dependencies of my faith, those unseen pillars that sometimes keep us rooted to a place and a way of being.
In 20 years living with a pastor, I hadn’t realized just how much her presence mediated God to me in a sacramental way. I was coming to realize how my spouse’s ministry has been a way I’ve seen God using me and me participating with God. In the absence of a physical church community, it became clear that her ministry was more than an inspiration or a way for me to learn. I was leaning on her gifts and work as my own.
