Confessions of a Pastor’s Kid
I’ve been a PK my entire life. For some of you, PK means absolutely nothing. For others, you’ll recognize PK as an acronym for “preacher’s kid” or “pastor’s kid,” and think because you know what PK stands for, you know what being one means. And then for a very few, you know exactly what being a PK means — because you’re one too. Your childhood was filled with unique experiences. Some dinner table conversation could never be repeated. There were vacations you had to leave early because a parishioner was dying of cancer. Everyone in town knew exactly who you were, and held you to a completely different standard from all your peers. Moreover, you don’t just resonate with these experiences. You know that they shape the way you look at both yourself and the world. Most of all, you understand that PK isn’t a label or a title or even a role: it’s an identity.
Christmas, 1999: My brother, father, and I following the Christmas Eve service.
The biggest difference between pastors’ families and other families is this: the intensity of life is dialed up to 11 for us. You don’t simply manage the stresses of your life or even that of your friends. The cares of the entire community weigh on you and your family in a truly unique way. The needs of the community become a part of your daily life. Your family is the first to know when someone has died, when someone is struggling, when someone is angry, when someone is moving. It isn’t strange to open Christmas presents at 11pm on Christmas Day or that your birthday has to fit in and around the Holy Week schedule. I never felt bitter or questioned these things: that was simply our life.
It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that the intensity of life as a ministry family only increased when the shutdowns started. Our family didn’t just carry our own worry of the pandemic — we carried it for the congregation. The church ran out of our home. We streamed Evening Prayer daily from our living room. My brother, mother, and I ran Sunday School Facebook Live. We all chipped in to make the Sunday morning online services happen. Between these services, calls with members of the congregation, emails with diocesan and community leaders, Holy Week, and funerals, my father didn’t get a day off from when the pandemic started until deep into the summer. He didn’t even get a day off when his own mother passed away from COVID in April. This is the kind of life a pastor, and their family, is called to. The call to priesthood - for pastors and their spouses and families - isn’t a professional vocation. It is a call to a new and different life, and that call never goes away.
While most of this blog seems to circle around the ministry of my father and its effect on my childhood, I should mention that my mother’s ministry for the church and our family is critical. Clergy wives and their sacrifices are so often overlooked, and deserve a blog post of their own! I adore my mother, and constantly I am learning more and more from her. So as I continue, it is important that you know that without my mother, her patience and her own selfless ministry, we would not be the ministry family that we are.
When I moved back home after living in England to save money and figure out my next step, it wasn’t at all strange to be a part of a ministry family again. I didn’t blink at visiting the church grandmas with my mother or organizing family events like our annual Advent Party, Nativity Pageant, or Easter Egg Hunt. As a PK, it was second nature. So, if you had asked me whether I would still feel like a PK after I got married, I probably would have said ‘of course not.’ Honestly, though, I hadn’t thought about it. Then I ceased to be Amelia Brown and became Amelia Jantzi. Last week I got a text from a friend that her mother-in-law, a member of our congregation, had been diagnosed with COVID. My first thought, following deep sorrow for my friend, was that my father needed to know. He would want to pray for her, and to call the hospital to check on her. He needed to know who else in the parish may have come into contact with her, especially if they were planning to attend our in-person service that Sunday. In that moment I realized two things: 1) just how fast a disease like COVID can take over a community, and 2) that I would always be a PK, in how I thought and felt and acted. The life of ministry is ingrained on my soul.
Sitting on the front steps of Trinity Church, my second home.
While my experience of childhood as a PK was different from my peers in so many ways, I wouldn’t change it for the world. Ministry can be a thankless job, but it filled my life with abundance. I have a deep, rich faith developed from listening to the years of sermons and dinner table conversations about theology. The assortment of bishops, priests, and deacons in our diocese that my father worked with are like extended family. Each one is an aunt or uncle who has watched me grow up, each one adding to my faith in their own way. Being a PK guided my career path, and brought some of the most important people into my life, from my best friends to my husband. The church itself, with its sandstone walls that my brother and our friends would scale and the swingset we spent so many years playing on, is as familiar and beloved as my childhood home.
Being a PK gave me even more than these concrete relationships and experiences. It shaped me to my very core. At the heart of the ministry of priesthood is sacrifice. The Gospel of Mark says this: “And he sat down and called the twelve. And he said to them, “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.” Nothing so well describes this unique ministry, and the attitude of sacrifice and service shapes everything my father does in the church. The model his ministry gave me guides my actions still. As a child, I watched my father navigate his congregation through the theological debates that raged in the Episcopal Church in the late 2000s. The grace and wisdom with which he guided a community completely split in their views back to focusing on the cross resonates with me to this day. The call to the priesthood is a call to live as Christ for the community, “to live not to be served, but to serve.” Like my father I am not a fighter. I learned it was often better to listen than to speak, not to respond in anger but to act in grace. For my entire life, I watched my parents put aside themselves and live for others, and I try each day to do the same. Being a PK will never end for me. It isn’t just an identity. It’s my identity. It’s who I am and who I always will be.
