Nobody applies for the job of pastor’s kid. It arrives with the moving boxes — a new town, a new school, and a congregation of a few hundred people who all feel entitled to an opinion on your haircut.
We say the pastor is called. We act like the whole family was drafted.
The expectations are unwritten but absolute: sit in the front row, volunteer for everything, never date anyone questionable, never question anything publicly, and for heaven’s sake smile during the sermon — your father wrote it.
And then we wonder why so many PKs walk away from church the moment they can. It wasn’t the theology that broke them. It was being turned into a sermon illustration with a curfew.
Here’s what we forget: pastor’s kids are not church property. They are children. They get to doubt, rebel, be ordinary, be bored during business meetings like everyone else. Their faith — if it comes — has to be theirs, not a family business they were conscripted into.
If your church has a pastoral family, here’s a radical idea: let the kids be kids. Don’t report their behavior to their parents like a neighborhood watch. Don’t make them the standard every other teen is measured against. Pray for them the way you’d want someone to pray for yours — which is to say, like they’re people.
The church doesn’t need perfect pastor’s kids. It needs to stop breaking the ones it has.
Head over to Adventist Today for current events, analysis, and opinion on all things Adventist.
