A Day in the Life of a Church Planter Wife

This is part two of a post by Beth Whitworth.

A church planting wife/mother always feels the impact of how this might affect her children. Will they resent the ministry? Will this lifestyle cause them to grow bitter towards church?

I found that if you develop the relationship with Christ and He is real to you, your children will see that you are following a person that you love, not a duty or religion. Your relationship with Jesus will spill over into your relationship with your spouse and children. Their significance will be secure by the way you put them in the right priority and they, too, will grow in a relationship with Christ. When this happens, you will be able to help them to see that God is interested in their lives and can use the experiences they face for their good.

As I look back I can see where my children are stronger in their friendship because, at times, the only friend that they had to talk to was each other. They are able to find their way around new places and don’t fear getting lost. They also have a real example of how God leads you and speaks to you. He is caring and active in your future even if you aren’t aware of it.

Our oldest is now serving as a children’s minister in her church. After her first year in school, our youngest daughter came home from college and wanted to transfer schools. She decided to save some finances and get her degree at the local college in Buffalo. After several months of getting to know a young man on our worship team, they went out on a date. A year later he proposed and four months after that, he answered God’s call to full-time Christian ministry.

We even have a great opportunity to help our grandchildren understand how to have a relationship with Jesus whom they cannot see because even though they don’t see us, they can talk to us and we love each other.

I’m thankful that when God called us to plant the church, He gave me the strength to say, “Yes, Lord!” Not only have we seen a great movement by Him and lives transformed, I have witnessed my obedience to Him have consequences that are more for my children’s future, than for my own.

Coming up… One church planting wife’s story of God’s provision.

The following post was written by Beth Whitworth. Beth has her own blog for church planter wives at http://cpwives.blogspot.com.

The Impact on Your Children (Part One)

It was a warm June day and the u-haul was packed with the household belongings and being driven by my husband. I was following in our car also filled with our belongings as we drove to New York to plant a church. We were about halfway there when the tears began to flow down my cheeks. On the radio the song by Phil Collins “You’ll be in my Heart” began to play. My oldest daughter had given me the single a few days before we said goodbye. The call to plant this church was the first time in our lives that God sent me and my husband to a new ministry alone. Our oldest daughter had married two years prior and we had a one-year-old granddaughter. Our youngest girl was headed off to college and wanted to continue in her job so that she could continue to work before leaving in the fall for Virgina. She made arrangements to live with her sister through the summer. That left us driving away from them instead of having them in the backseat going with us.

By the third measure of the song, I found myself driving beside the u-haul and flagging down my hubby to pull into a rest area because I could no longer see through the tears to safely continue driving. We got out of the vehicles and I sat down on a grassy bank and sobbed. Making the decision to follow God’s call and move away from our kids was a very heavy one for me. We had been in ministry a long time and our children had always been a part of it. Now, once again, they were being affected, but this time we wouldn’t be together to work through our feelings and changes that we were facing.

(Part Two Coming Soon!)

Questions: How has being the wife of a church planter affected you as a mother? How do your kids handle being church planter kids? What have been the challenges for them and how have you helped them work through those?