Here’s the funny thing.  I’ve been trained as a Director of Christian Education (DCE).  In fact, I have all of the ok’s from the church to be commissioned, but I just have never been called by a church, so I haven’t officially been commissioned (it’s one of those bureaucratic types of things, I know it’s for good order and all of that, but I digress).  I’ve taken classes and been in countless discussions about the need for better communication between pastors and other church workers.  I’m fully aware of how different the education is for both sides on team ministry, and even varies between the schools that instruct the workers.  So why is it that in this blog I, by and large, ignore the other workers’ spouses?

I don’t have any immediate answers to that question, but I’m trying to work on this.  I think part of it is that until recently, my husband was pretty much “it.”  Nobody else at the church, no other called workers, just a couple of part time people, one of whom was me.  And now we’re at a larger church with a called DCE and a couple of retired pastors and I have to keep reminding myself that I’m not the only one experiencing these kinds of things.

I have a few dear friends who are married to DCE’s, in fact.  One of them reads this blog.  Another has been doing the “church worker wife” thing since her husband’s internship when we all went to college together.  I guess part of the reason that I don’t write about other workers or their spouses (I’m also fully aware that being married to a worker sometimes means that the wife works for the church and the husband is on the perimeter) is because I don’t know what it’s like for them.  I would imagine that on top of the difficulties of working with members, there is also the difficulty of working with a pastor who may or may not see things from the same perspective.  I’ve been there, being the youth worker under a pastor that I didn’t always see eye to eye with.  But I don’t know what it would be like to be the spouse of someone who experiences that.  Maybe I should ask my husband what it was like for him during that time.

Of course, the other piece to this is that men and women come at situations differently.  When there’s a problem, women like to talk it out.  Men like to fix it and move on.  We’re just different in that way.  So I think for the time being, I’ll stick to the wife perspective and let someone else write about their own experiences.