Visiting a different church every Sunday for a year, Part 2

In the early 1980s Neil and I and our three children had moved from southern Illinois to New Jersey, where Neil earned a divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. We joined the Presbyterian Church (USA), and for the next twenty-some years I was a member of the churches my husband pastored. I attended interfaith services now and then, and went to other churches for weddings or special events, but had rarely attended a different church on an ordinary Sunday morning. So in a way I had been a church insider for several decades, and I now suddenly found that I could be a church outsider – just another person sitting in the pews, not even a member. The idea pleased me.

I do not mean to imply for one second that being a pastor’s wife was some sort of terrible burden. On the contrary, the one nondenominational congregation and the three Presbyterian congregations my husband had served were alike in that they tried very hard NOT to impose expectations or unwritten duties on me. I wasn’t expected to play the piano, teach Sunday School, run the nursery, manage the Thanksgiving food drive, sing in the choir, organize rummage sales, host women’s Bible studies, entertain visiting missionaries, dress soberly, or decorate the fellowship hall for church dinners. The churches Neil pastored made it clear that they had hired him, not me. I was free to participate in whatever church activities I chose, just like any other member. I did end up doing some of those things, but certainly did no more than any other active church member, and far less than many others in the congregation. In this, as in all things, I was a very ordinary pastor’s wife.

The congregations were also ordinary in that they were generally kind and forgiving and tolerant, with a few (a very few) exceptions. The stereotype of the gossipy, backbiting, nosy church member didn’t seem to be a reflection of reality as I knew it.

Of course, each congregation had its own set of problems, and its own peculiar constellation of personalities that sometimes rubbed against one another in unhappy ways – what group of human beings doesn’t experience that? From what I knew of other worlds (academia and business), the imperfections of church members seemed about the same as the imperfections of any other group of people trying to get through life together. I was much more often impressed by acts of kindness and love than by acts of pettiness or meanness among the people I had known in these churches.

However, in spite of the fact that I liked these churches, I wanted to see other ones, and now had the perfect opportunity to visit other churches to my heart’s content. Perhaps I wouldn’t like being a stranger every Sunday. Going to a new church every week would be inviting discomfort into my life – but who wants to be comfortably Christian, anyway?