Episcopal Press and News
Clerical Couples Discuss Ministries
Episcopal News Service. August 7, 1986 [86174]
STONY POINT, N.Y. (DPS, Aug. 7) -- Couples from 20 states and Canada came together in late June for the National Episcopal Clergy Couples Conference here. The 41 couples represented approximately one quarter of the Episcopal couples where both spouses are ordained; they came from 28 dioceses from Maine to Hawaii. Such a conference had not been held since 1978, when a much smaller group had met at General Theological Seminary.
Some conferees were recently married, others were grandparents. Some were recently ordained, while others -- especially some of the men -- had been ordained for quite some time. They were almost evenly divided among those who worked in two different parishes; those who worked in the same parish; those who had one spouse in a parish and the other in another form of ministry; and those where one was parish-based and the other was a student, non-stipendiary or not working in a ministry position. Many had met in seminary, while another group had become a clergy couple when the wife of a priest went to seminary and sought ordination. Two couples represented two denominations in their marriage.
When he spoke to the conferees on the second evening of the Conference, Presiding Bishop Edmond L. Browning commended them for initiating such an event. It was an "exciting" development for him in the life of the Church, he said. A four-couple organizing committee had worked for two years for the Conference. It was sponsored by the Church Deployment Office and received major funding from Trinity Parish, New York and the Lilly Fund. Many bishops offered financial aid for clergy couples in their dioceses to attend.
Both the major addresses and the informal conversation dealt with what is unique professionally and theologically about such a marriage, as well as what it shared with two-career couples and other clergy families. The couples talked about concerns for deployment and moving jobs at the same time, time with children not compromised by Church work, and the dynamics of working together and separately.
The Rev. Mel and the Rev. Barbara Schlachter, co-rectors of St. Margaret's Episcopal Church, Staatsburg, N.Y. gave the keynote address on "The Spiritual Integration of Marriage and Ministry." They spoke of clergy couples being an apt symbol for God restoring in our time the original covenant of equality, identity and intimacy between male and female. They elaborated on both possibilities and pitfalls in this "dual vocation." "Clergy couples are subject to two sets of vows," said the Schlachters, "and the challenge is to give them equal weight in our lives rather than have one dominate the other. It is the difference between a monastic model for priesthood and one coming out of marriage or householding."
A panel of four couples from around the country discussed different job configurations -- part-time, full-time, same church, different churches and so forth. William Thompson, executive director of the Church Deployment Office, offered practical suggestions for using the placement process and computer in his office. The Rev. Jim Proud, a lawyer and priest in New York City, spoke with some of the conferees about the canonical implications of, say, the couples presently sharing rector positions. He believed that the clergy couples should continue to accumulate and document their experiences in various ministry styles, since canonical change followed rather than preceded new realities in the Church's life and ministry.
The Rev. Roy Oswald of the Alban Institute in Washington, D.C. led the entire third day with a discussion of the results of a special nationwide study commissioned by the Church Deployment Office and performed by the Alban Institute in 1986, of the Episcopal clergy couples and couples with one spouse ordained and the other in professional lay ministry. The study sought data about everything from how other clergy and bishops perceive the couple, to how marriage is affected by this dual ministry (and vice versa), to the effects on the "double PK's" -- children of clergy couples.
Oswald summed up much of the results by saying that "There are a lot of advantages" to being a clergy couple. "At the Alban Institute, we are continually aware of how lonely is ministry...someone else knows what you are going through" when you are in a clergy couple. Moreover, these couples are "modeling wholeness" by their "shared goals and purposes, devotion to God and a shared journey and the two working out the meaning of that."
The 38 children attending, from infants to teens, seemed none the worse for their special status. Special programs were held for them, including a day of acting life stories with The Playback Theatre, and two days of arts, play and clowning led by High Pockets the Clown.
The final day saw the couples committing themselves to continued reflection and action. Taking the word to the Church about the possibilities of clergy couples was high on the list of priorities. Promoting deployment concerns, continuing the theological reflection and beginning a newsletter were some of the other future considerations. The organizing committee was enlarged so that it might foster regional gatherings, keep up the ever-enlarging list of clergy couples, and perhaps look to another such national conference in three to five years.