Proclaimer Blog
The working wife
I was at the recent PT Summer Wives conference, invited along as a speaker. We had a panel question time on wide-ranging issues of ministry, and the perennial question arose of whether or not a pastor’s wife ought to do paid work out of the home. There are of course strongly argued views both ways on this, so we wanted to pick our way through it carefully.
One helpful way in which the question was framed was this: aren’t we in our constituency in danger of promoting a 1950s cultural model of the housewife (main job: cook and clean, and make sure house and kids are spick and span and dinner is ready for hubbie’s return home), and pretending it’s biblical?
A good question. There is no doubt that danger is real, and we may well at times have fallen into it. As is often pointed out, the wife of noble character in Prov 31 is rather more like a home-based businesswoman than a 1950s housewife, and the ‘busyness at home’ which older women are teach to younger women (Titus 2.5) is very likely to be much more akin to that, than akin to a post-Industrial-Revolution cultural model of house-wifery. That itself doesn’t answer the question about pastors’ wives going out of the home to earn money, but it certainly shows that easy answers won’t do.
I wonder if it is especially in marriage-roles and family relationships that we are likely to slip unawares into largely cultural rather than biblical patterns without noticing, precisely because such things seem so ‘natural’ to us. It is really only those who believe that Scripture is the living voice of God who can gain a true perspective on themselves and their culture from outside, which is a great mercy and a great challenge.