Before I was interested in pastors’ wives,¹ I was interested in pastors. Specifically, I got nerd-sniped by church planting, the evangelical domestic missionary system that furthers its members most sacred quest (introducing more people to Jesus) while honoring their need for independence. The resulting system resembles nothing so much as Silicon Valley startup culture, where young, charismatic, ambitious men fundraise from the community (and especially former founders) in order to start churches that have a 90% chance of failure but a 1% chance of astronomical success.²

Like startup founders, church planters have a robust podcast ecosystem. I spent dozens, if not hundreds, of hours listening to them talk with each other. One frequent topic was how hard planting was on their wives and children. Planters work the hours of a surgeon with the pay scale of, aspirationally, a teacher. Wives are often called upon to contribute a great deal of their own time to the church. But what most interested me was the amount of work that was required of pastors’ wives that could not be acknowledged as such.

Pastors’ wives, especially at new and small churches, wear a lot of hats. On any given day they might stuff envelopes, run A/V equipment at a service, or compile the monthly books. People being what they are, this work often doesn’t receive as much acknowledgment as it deserves, but it is usually acknowledgeable as work in the abstract, in the sense that everyone is fine saying that the tasks took effort and were done to achieve a result, not for joy of the process (although they’ll still expect you to iron 25 angel costumes with no notice and instant turnaround).

But some of the expectations of a pastor’s wife come with a meta-expectation that the task be done out of sincere love and be rejuvenating rather than tiring. Greeting people after services is not supposed to be work the way stuffing envelopes is; it’s supposed to spring out of the joy of meeting new souls and hopefully bringing them to Jesus. She doesn’t have to attend four church events a week, she gets to (and it reflects badly on her relationship with God if she feels otherwise). She’s not a social worker helping a client, she’s a friend honored that you trust her with your secrets. Asking for these tasks to be acknowledged as effortful-but-worth-it, and not enjoyable for their own sake, ruins their emotional impact. And because a pastor’s wife’s (unpaid) job is to create that emotional impact, this would make her a failure at that job. The social work of a pastor’s wife is not just unacknowledged by the congregation, it’s unacknowledgeable.

Pastors’ wives aren’t the only people facing this problem; there’s a lot of feminist theory on invisible and emotional labor. And every parent has an appreciative role to play on Mother’s Day or Father’s Day regardless of how much damage their two-year-old did in the process of making them breakfast in bed.

The unacknowledgeable work demanded of pastors’ wives is the large-print, easy-to-read version of a problem that constantly annoys me.³ To understand this work, I went down a second rabbit hole of pastor-wife podcasts,⁴ written material, and four interviews with women from nondenominational churches.⁵

There is no hard data on this, but based on my original podcast survey, church-planting pastors were sometimes cradle Christians but often came to Jesus in high school or even college. In contrast, pastors’ wives⁶ (at least those who go on podcasts) seem to be almost universally cradle Christians, and a disproportionate number are the daughters of pastors.

From my listening, a common story emerges: A pastor’s wife most likely met her husband in high school, possibly at Vacation Bible School, and married in or shortly after college. He probably knew he wanted to be a pastor, and she probably knew she wanted to be a pastor’s wife, often since before she knew she wanted to marry him in particular. If a woman feels called to ministry within evangelical Christianity, wife is the primary path offered to her.⁷ There is a separate demographic of pastors who don’t feel the call until middle age, whose wives are considerably less enthusiastic, but they don’t go on podcasts about it.

In a small 2017 survey, 55% of surveyed pastors’ wives⁸ worked outside the home and church, and the number would be higher if you excluded the mothers of very young children. Almost all PWs want children, but most in this survey stop at two or three. According to Olivia, the wife of a pastor of a large southern nondenominational church, pastors’ family sizes are often limited by financial constraints. Finances are one reason pastors’ wives so often work outside the church, but many view their work, often in education and medicine, as a calling and ministry,⁹ not just supplemental income.

Olivia enters every supermarket on alert. Like a gregarious Terminator, she continuously scans her peripheral vision for anyone hinting they might know her. At the suggestion of recognition or eye contact, she locks eyes and smiles warmly.

She does this because she knows of other pastors’ wives who missed eye contact from a parishioner, maybe even frowned because of something heavy on her mind, and later found out the parishioner went home hurt and angry that the pastor’s wife was ignoring her. (At least she wasn’t accused, as others have been, of being demon-possessed by someone who didn’t like her 1,000-yard stare at the gym.) Not only has she hurt that woman’s feelings, but if she misses enough of these opportunities, she's guaranteed that someone will decide she’s stuck up and uncaring and everyone in church needs to hear about it. Even people who know a PW lost a parent four days earlier will chastise them for crying during services — but they’d better be unremittingly sad after a pregnancy loss, when experiencing any joy at all would be inappropriate.¹⁰

The demands of friendship go beyond brunch and painting each other’s nails. Sometimes what people really need is therapy, but they don’t have a therapist; they have you.¹¹ This is hard enough for pastors, who might have a semester of counseling training from seminary. Wives rarely have even that. This leaves them potentially lacking both in the straightforward skills of helping people and the subtler skills of protecting themselves while doing so.

Okay, so pastors' wives are required to be everyone’s friend and confidant. That sounds like hell to me, a grade A introvert, but many people thrive on having as many friends as possible, and a role that lets them speedrun emotional intimacy is a blessing, not a burden.¹²

However, true friendship requires reciprocity, and this is mostly denied to pastors’ wives.

She is expected to have the church be her primary social outlet, but every church member is a little bit her husband’s boss. Complaining about marital problems more severe than her husband’s former difficulty putting away his socks (but he’s much better now) undermines him and endangers his position in the church. Pastors have been fired because their wives complained to the wrong person(’s wife). Many wives on many podcasts acknowledge the difficulty of raising kids with a partner who works such long and erratic hours, far away from family,¹³ but it was only after talking to Mike Riggs, the grandson of a long-serving pastor, that I learned of his grandmother’s hatred of the way certain female congregants overvalued her husband’s attention and the structural difficulty her husband had turning them away.

Not everyone needs reciprocity in their friendships; some people thrive being the Giving Tree, in which case the hurt comes when the recipient stops letting you see the fruit of your work. Families leave churches for lots of reasons — doctrinal disputes, an out-of-state job, needing a bigger program for their children than your tiny church can provide. Or maybe your husband’s role is cut for budgetary reasons, and the congregation is too embarrassed to face you. If any of these happen, the default outcome is that you never hear from the women you helped again.¹⁴

Three decades ago, Margaret spent five years as the wife of a pastor at a church with 50 to 80 members, three of whom invested in helping her while she was there — and one of whom continued to socialize with her after she initiated a divorce.

All of this leaves the pastor’s wife constantly pouring her heart out into people who don’t refill her. If she is lucky, she will have childhood friends she can rely on and be a part of a strong peer-support group for PWs.¹⁵ There, she can complain about unresolved marital problems, critical parishioners, and her own struggles with faith without worrying she’ll hear about it next Sunday.

No mom lives free of mommy-war judgment, but many moms can reassure themselves that it’s not personal and the judges can’t hurt them. Not so for pastors’ wives. The entire congregation is noticing your toddler’s post-service zoomies, and some of them are absolutely sure you and possibly the elder board need to hear about it. You might hope this would stop as the kids grow up and move away, but no, parishioners view your adult daughter’s family planning as fair game. You not only need to hear their opinions but must do so gracefully, because responding with anger or even annoyance reflects poorly on you and your husband.

The social demands on pastors’ wives don’t end with being everyone’s one-way friend. If a PW is lucky enough to have true close friends, especially if they’re in her church, she needs to keep it on the down-low because other women in the congregation will get angry they weren’t included. Carrie Pankratz, the wife of a nondenominational pastor in Utah, refrains from posting innocuous pictures of girls’ brunch on social media to prevent jealousy.

In the PW podcast world, discussions of financial difficulties are common. According to Olivia, the goal of most churches is to pay their lead pastor like a local teacher, but many can’t afford even that. If you are somehow able to afford an extravagant lifestyle, you’d better refrain, because something as innocuous as a family of five buying a used minivan can be viewed as showing off. What podcasts don’t talk about, but pastor’s grandson Mike Riggs and ex-PW Margaret did, is that looking too poor is also cause for judgment. It can make you look unskilled at budgeting or perhaps disfavored by God.¹⁶ Margaret’s husband wouldn’t let her apply for the food stamps they qualified for because it might make the church feel bad about underpaying him. Hope your family is healthy, because illness is also evidence of God’s disfavor.

Sometimes the pressure is not from judgment, but just reality. Families with young children won’t attend your church if you don’t have a children’s ministry. Running a children’s ministry takes a competent, trustworthy person. You might not enjoy running Sunday school, but do you hate it so much that you’re willing to let your church fail over it?

This is how Allison — whose husband is the lead pastor at an independent church of roughly 200 attendees — wound up becoming the finance chair at her husband’s church, despite her own disinterest and a glaring conflict of interest. The alternative was to risk the church dying due to the inability to fill the role. Allison is eagerly awaiting her husband’s retirement. But until that day, the church is important to her husband, and she would rather volunteer than let the church fail.

Multiple friends I discussed the question with guessed that being a pastor’s wife was desirable because it conveyed a lot of status. Mike confirms that this was a source of satisfaction for his grandmother (whose husband retired in 1995), but Margaret confirms that even three decades ago, the role came with more demands than respect.

When I look at the role as it stands today, all I can think is “there has got to be an easier way.” Being a culturally white pastor’s wife endows a woman with a lot of trust and attention, but these mostly bring more work and expectations. To my mind, status is supposed to protect you from other people’s demands, not create more.

When the women in question speak in public, the most common reason given for becoming a pastor’s wife is that “it advances God’s plan” or “God called me to it.” I think irreligious people often underestimate what a strong reason this can be — similarly, I keep using the word “unacknowledged” when, from their perspective, the only being who truly matters is tracking every moment. And since evangelicalism, particularly the Southern Baptist Convention, mostly closed nonmatrimonial paths to ministry for women in the ’90s and early aughts, pastor’s wife is the role to apply for if you want to invest in a domestic church.

Some women truly love the work. Olivia described being a pastor’s wife as having “a front-row seat to God’s work.” She didn’t have to take a maladjusted young woman into her home or bail her out of jail; she got to, and her reward is seeing that woman grow and thrive and pay it forward as a foster parent to teen moms. Margaret quit the job of pastor’s wife (via divorce) after six years but spent the next 30 loving being a social worker. There were many things she disliked about being a pastor’s wife, including being taken for granted, but the multitude of opportunities to support others was not the problem.

There is, of course, the question of how sincere these answers are. My cop-out answer is that there certainly are women for whom these are their true reasons — Margaret has no congregation to impress and three decades of evidence that she genuinely enjoys social work — but it’s impossible to know what percentage, because other answers would be unacceptable and imperil their husband’s position. If the unacknowledgeability didn’t protect itself, it wouldn’t stay unacknowledgeable.