Church Planter's Wife

When you think "pastor's wife", what pops in your head? For me it was always some weird June Cleaver/ Ann of Green Gables type image. Granted, I didn't ever actually meet a pastors wife until college when I started following Jesus, and even then I was at a traditional Southern Baptist Church and our pastor was pushing 70, which didn't really help my stereotype much. So naturally when I met Jeremy I told him no way did I ever want to be a pastors wife. I mean, I felt called to ministry, not to sitting at home while my husband did all the real hands on stuff! I wanted to be in the thick of it, serving and doing something that really mattered. This posed a problem, since Jeremy was in seminary preparing to be a pastor at the time...

Luckily, he probed further before running for the hills, and helped me to see what a narrow and incorrect view I had of what it meant to be married to a pastor. He gently explained to me that being a pastor's wife could be whatever I wanted it to be, that there was no mold I would need to fit into. That, along with the Lord working on my heart, helped me to warm up to the idea, and by the time we were engaged I had embraced the idea that I would soon be a pastors wife.

After we were married for a few years, Jeremy began to feel called to plant a church, which just means starting a church from the ground up. For those of you who aren't familiar with this, let me tell you it's a whole other ball game. We moved to Austin to get trained for a few years, and then moved to Norman Oklahoma about a year and a half ago to start Providence Road. No staff, no money, and only a small handful of people. And just me and Jeremy (and more importantly the Lord of course) to make it all happen. What's that? You said you wanted the "real hand's on stuff"? You want to be "in the thick of it"? Well, here you go.

So what does my life look like as a church planters wife? Well, when you begin with a staff of one, and that one is your husband, you kind of have (ahem, I mean get) to do a little bit of everything. We had no money, so we got to fundraise together. We had no accountant, so I learned how to keep track of donors and donations. We weren't technically an official church at first, so I did hours of paperwork and filing with the government so we could be a 501(c)(3), among other legal registrations. We had no building at first, so for the first year we met in our house, which meant extra cleaning both before and after we gathered. We wanted to create an atmosphere of community and family, so I cooked. A lot. This hasn't changed. We have people in our home constantly. I help with the nursery on sundays. I help set up and tear down each week. I do a bit of graphic design for business cards and such. I hang out with girls. Jeremy and I counsel couples together. Do you get the picture? Hands. On. Ministry.

So there you have it. I can't tell you what a church planter's wife looks like, because it's different for everyone, and even for me it's different every day. So far it's been crazy hard, but equally amazing and fulfilling. If this whole idea of church planting intrigues you, stick around. You'll hear a lot about it here.


Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
(Ephesians 3:20-21 ESV)