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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/18/us/more-married-couples-are-leading-houses-of-worship.html?_r=0

 

USA - MORE MARRIED COUPLES, SAME-SEX & STRAIGHT, ARE SHARING THE JOB OF PASTOR

 

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Heather Rion Starr, left, and Cathy Rion Starr are co-minsters at the Unitarian Society of Hartford. The two pastors met in 2010 and married in 2012. They also have a young daughter, Robin. CreditSteven Smith for The New York Times

 

By Mark Oppenheimer – April 17, 2015

 

HARTFORD — Cathy Rion Starr and Heather Rion Starr, the ministers of the Unitarian Society of Hartford since last summer, were reminiscing recently about a conversation early in their friendship, before they had become either romantic partners or co-workers.

“We had some colleagues in common, who were a same-sex couple serving a congregation in California,” Heather Rion Starr said on Tuesday in the office they share at the church. “And I think I said something about, ‘So-and-so and so-and-so are starting a co-ministry — what do you think about that?’ And you said, ‘Oh I would never want to do that. I would never want to spend that much time with someone.’ ”

“And now here we are,” Cathy Rion Starr said of the church, which will hold the couple’s installation ceremony on Sunday.

The Rion Starrs, who met in 2010 and married in 2012, are in their late 30s and have a young daughter, Robin. In the liberal Unitarian Universalist denomination, their gender identities do not single them out. What puts them in the avant-garde of the ministry is that they share the job of pastor.

The phenomenon of married couples’ leading churches together has been driven by a desire to work in the same city, and by the emergence of more women as pastors. In branches of the Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian churches, in Congregationalism, and in most streams of Judaism, women make up a substantial, in some cases equal, number of seminarians. Having more female pastors has led to more heterosexual pastor couples, and growing acceptance of homosexuality has meant more same-sex pastor couples as well.

“It’s becoming more common, but it’s still a new thing,” said Phil Blackburn, who serves as pastor with his wife, Tasha, at the First Presbyterian Church in Fort Smith, Ark. “People kept wanting to know who’d be in charge. It was a process trying to find churches who could see beyond the potential complications and see the value in having us.”

Of course, there have always been couples running churches — it is just that one used to be called the minister and the other the minister’s wife. The wife may have worked just as hard, and held a kind of exalted status, but she lacked a clerical title and a salary. That is still the case in many evangelical churches, although even there, the old ways are changing.

Husband and wife teams became common in the 1980s at many Protestant megachurches, said Kate Bowler, a Duke University historian who is writing a book on co-pastoring couples. Before the 1970s, she said, family life was expected to be sacrificed for evangelical work.

But by the Reagan era, Professor Bowler said, the family became the showpiece. Religious broadcasters like Joel Osteen now give prominent roles to their partners — his wife, Victoria, is a co-pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston.

“Husband and wife teams sanctify the woman, but in the proper sphere,” Professor Bowler said. “It’s a perpetual debate of whether women should lean in or opt out, and this solves the problem by putting them onstage in a publicly subordinate but complementary role.”

While some pastors — and the churches that hire them — have been skeptical of the couple arrangement at first, anecdotal evidence suggests that it can succeed.

Before Mr. Blackburn entered the seminary, his home pastor gave him one bit of advice: “Don’t date in seminary.” But the couple started dating during their first year of seminary and got married shortly after graduation.

For a time, the couple worked in separate churches, but that arrangement proved hard on their family life. “It became increasingly difficult after eight years to be in two separate churches,” Mr. Blackburn said. “We knew as a family we wanted to be in one church.”

At their current church, the Blackburns have worked to ensure that they are treated as equals.

“We’ve been real intentional about the gender issues in our ministry,” Mr. Blackburn said. “That’s the reason Tasha got the senior pastor’s office, so they’d be sure not to see her as my assistant.”

John Elford is the senior pastor of University United Methodist Church in Austin, Tex. His wife, Linda, now works at a different church in the city, but when their children were still at home they discovered co-pastoring after holding pulpits in different cities.

“We had worked for five years apart, in two different congregations,” Mr. Elford said. The problem, he said, is that the children were involved in his wife’s church, “so I didn’t get to see them in Christmas plays or in church life.”

After deciding to look for work together, they found co-pastorships at two different churches over 14 years.

Couples who share ministerial duties tend to divide responsibilities. One minister might focus on pastoral counseling, while the other spends time on liturgy or music. Sometimes one works more with the young, the other with the old.

“We really like it,” said Karen Kriger Bogard, of the rabbinical job she shares with her husband, Daniel, at Anshai Emeth, a Reform temple in Peoria, Ill. “I think basically what we did was both started by taking the parts of jobs we really like. My husband does all the adult ed and the Saturday morning text study.” Her focus, she said, includes children’s programming and bar and bat mitzvah preparation.

For megachurch preachers like the Osteens, sharing the pulpit means sharing celebrity. At other churches, like the one in Hartford, which is small and can afford only one full-time minister’s salary, sharing the pulpit means less money than if the Rion Starrs had separate jobs, but a unified sense of purpose.

“By being co-ministers,” Cathy Rion Starr said, “we get to fully share in the ministry, in our parenting — we get to both do it all.”

That includes taking the same work home with them at the end of the day, an occupational disadvantage all the couples pointed to.

“Because we are both really engaged with work and passionate about it,” Heather Rion Starr said, “sometimes we are like, ‘Let’s stop talking about work, we have to focus on laundry and the dishes, and save this for tomorrow.’ So ‘Let’s table this’ is not an uncommon household phrase.”