However, my wife is not a pastor, she is a school teacher. She has her own friends and her own life apart from our parish. I cannot fathom how difficult the stresses, strains, challenges, and choices that need to be made in a clergy couple family, a family where both spouses serve as pastors. I don't have any clergy couple friends either so I do not know first-hand what life is like for them, but now, after reading Andrew and Mihee's book Yoked: Stories of a Clergy Couple in Marriage, Family, and Ministry (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2014) I have some insight. After reading this book I thought, wow, there is no way I could do what they do!
This book is a wonderful resource for couples who either are already in ministry or who are contemplating having a joint ministry. It's also good reading for any pastor in ministry since many of the stories which Andrew and Mihee include are apropos to ministry in general.
Yoked is divided into ten easy to read chapters:
Collision
Clout
Charisma
Caution
Combination
Cooperation
Re-Creation
Church on Sundays
Community
Calling
What is nice about this book is that for each chapter both Andrew and Mihee made their own contributions rather than one person writing one chapter and then alternating them. Thus we get their combined insights into the various parts of parish ministry. To make matters even more complicated they are in a mixed race marriage Mihee is Korean-American and has her own cultural, racial, lingual, and sociological background to bring into the mix. They also have three children too. After reading a few pages I kept thinking to myself, how do they manage with all of the responsibilities and challenges of parish ministry.
Without going into too much detail I can say that at the end, after all is said and done the reader comes away with a radical honest and truthful confession about how pastors struggle with their personal faults and foibles, with negotiating marriage and child-rearing, and the difficulty and joys of parish life. Much of what they say does not just reflect the life of a two pastor family but is really applicable to every pastor; the need for sabbath and rest, the need for connection and community, and the need for established boundaries.
I commend Andrew and Mihee for writing this book and hope that other pastors, whether they are married to a pastor or not will read this book and learn something from it.
For more information about Yoked click here
