by Rev. Kristen Levens
There are certain questions that sound simple until you try to answer them.
“Where are you from?” “What do you do?” “Tell me about your family.”
I have learned that the last one is the hardest. Not because I don’t have a family. I do. My family is a huge part of my life. However, the word family carries so much more weight than a list of names and relationships can hold.
Family is the people who know the version of you that existed before you became a pastor. They remember you before the collar, before the ordination, before anyone called you Reverend or Pastor.
They remember the awkward teenager. The college student who didn’t know what she was doing. The person who made mistakes. The person who hadn’t yet learned how to preach, or lead a meeting, or sit with someone who was dying.
There is something both comforting and uncomfortable about being known beyond our vocation and our job.
Ministry has a way of making us into public figures. We stand in front of rooms and tell stories. We preach about grace. We baptize babies. We preside at weddings. We sit beside hospital beds and gravesides. We become the person other people call when something has gone terribly wrong—or wonderfully right.
And then we go home and become a daughter, a sister, a spouse, a mom, a friend—just us. Maybe we find that transition to be a relief after a hard day, or maybe it makes the day even harder.
Sometimes I think about the ways ministry has changed my understanding of family. I have learned that the people I love do not always (or often) understand the path I chose, the calling I have. I have learned that being a pastor means missing birthdays, holidays, family dinners, calm weekends because you live far away from your family or you have an important church event that takes you away or someone is in crisis. I have learned that sometimes the people closest to you can be the ones who most need you to put down the pastoral identity and simply be present as yourself.
I’ve also learned that family can be where some of our deepest wounds live. We don’t talk about that very much in church. We talk about family as though it is automatically synonymous with love, safety, belonging, and home.
We preach about honoring our mothers and fathers. We celebrate families. We pray for families. We build ministries around families.
And meanwhile, some of the people sitting in our pews are quietly grieving the family they have, the family they lost, or the family they never had. Some are sitting beside people they love but cannot safely be themselves around. Some are estranged from parents or siblings. Some have lost a spouse or a child. Some are longing for children. Some have found more belonging among friends than among relatives. Some have found it in the church, and some have been hurt by the church’s insistence that it should be their family.
I know something about the complicated places we encounter. As I write this, I am healing from and reflecting on what it means to shake off the dust and leave a complicated place.
Maybe you know about complicated places, too. One of the things I love about being part of a community of young clergywomen is that we don’t have to pretend these places don’t exist.
We can admit that family is beautiful and exhausting. We can name the times that it sustains us and frustrates us. We can love people deeply and still need boundaries. We can be grateful for where we come from and still choose something different. And perhaps most importantly, we can admit that there is no single right way to make a family.
The older I get, the less interested I am in the white picket fence version of family. I am more interested in the people who show up. The friend who knows when you need dinner and when you need to be left alone. The sibling who can make you laugh at exactly the wrong moment. The grandmother whose faith still lives in your bones. The partner who knows that “I have a church thing” can mean anything from a three-hour meeting to a funeral that will change you.
Maybe that is family, too. Not necessarily the people who share our blood but the people with whom we share our lives, the people who have witnessed us becoming, the people who stay.
As clergywomen, we spend so much of our lives caring for other people’s families. We bless their marriages. We baptize their children. We bury their loved ones. We walk into the complicated spaces. This issue is an invitation to turn some of that attention back toward ourselves.
This issue will invite you to ask: Who is my family now? Who has helped me become who I am? Who makes me feel at home? Where am I still carrying old expectations about what family is supposed to look like?
I don’t have tidy answers to these questions, and I suspect you won’t either. However, I also suspect that it’s important for us to remember that faith does not often have tidy answers either. Most often it has to do with learning to make room—for complexity, for difference, for grief, for joy, for the people we expected to be family, and the people who surprised us by becoming family.
So this issue is for all of us. Whether you come from a big, loud, complicated family or one that fits around a small table. Whether your family is given or chosen. This issue is for those whose families are fractured, those who are creating families, those who are grieving them, those who found a family when they weren’t expecting to find anything, and those who are still on the hunt for one.
Maybe the good news is not that family is always easy but that we don’t have to do this life alone.
So, as you reflect on the word family and feel whatever it brings up for you—joy, ache, laughter, grief, complicated holidays, ignored phone calls, missing someone. I hope this issue feels like it’s for you.
Perhaps somewhere along the way you will find the subtle glimpse of grace that you need to remember that you don’t have to have a perfect family to be a person who knows how to love. You don’t have to have a conventional family to belong.
And maybe you’ll remember that we as clergy are a kind of family, too. Messy. Imperfect. Still becoming. But here in this calling together, and may that give you peace.
Rev. Kristen Levens
YCWI Board Chair and Author/Editor for Fidelia Magazine
Rev. Kristen Levens lives on her family’s ancestral land in North Carolina and is a PC(USA) pastor training to be a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor. When she is not pastoring, you can find her cooking, canning, jamming, and snuggling her mini poodle, Cassie.
