Living in a Glass Fishbowl

For most of us church worker kids, living in the holy spotlight brings its own challenges

Photo by pixelshot on Canva Pro

---

Note: The story of my faith journey, church trauma, and spiritual abuse is inextricably linked to the stories of my parents and sisters, but this is my story. Their experiences, memories, and hurt are separate from my own and I do not speak for them. Details are also their own and not mine to share, and so I keep the details where they matter only to my own experiences.

While my dad has spent most of my life involved in church work, as a small child there was little pressure to act or be seen a certain way. I was always a well-behaved kid, fulfilling most oldest child stereotypes throughout my childhood and adolescence. My aim was always to please and do what was expected of me, so much so that I distinctly remember the first (and only) time I got my name on the board during the years that we lived in Detroit.

Then we moved to Illinois. My dad moved from being just another high school teacher in the mix of many to the principal of our small Lutheran school. He wasn’t just a principal. He was also my principal. I instinctively knew that my behavior, my grades, my friendships would reflect on my father. And when I started to hear complaints from my friends and classmates about him, his “faults” as a principal also reflected on me. I loved my dad. I wanted to defend him, and suddenly I was caught between the friendships I wanted to keep developing and loyalty to my father. This became even more complicated when he resigned his position and a year later, we moved to Wyoming.

Once we were in Wyoming, there was the pressure of both being the picture-perfect daughter in addition to my desire to see my father succeed after the difficulties in Illinois. Swallowing my own griefs and difficulties was a way to protect my parents as they tried to figure out how they fit into a new church community. So, without complaining, I went to a school where I didn’t feel safe. I went to a Lutheran school for where I felt like I was trapped in a system that didn’t want me to flourish as a student or a person. I did all of the youth activities available to me because that was the place where I found community and I did so without question.

I remember the first time I expressed the pressures of being a church worker’s kid to my mom. I was trying to explain to her why, when we moved to Michigan my junior year of high school, I felt so much pressure. My mom grew up on a farm with parents who had “normal” jobs. I couldn’t blame her for not understanding, and at the time she had little comfort to give her eldest daughter as I tried to navigate my position in a new church where I didn’t feel at home.

Because of this pressure to be an example for people who attend our churches, because of the need to show that ministry carries over from vocation as a professional minister to the vocation as parent, the fishbowl life of church worker kids is either ignored or treated as a joke. People remember that the preacher’s daughter in Footloose was sexually promiscuous and loved to dance, but she fell into a simple trope that didn’t mirror the behaviors of most church workers’ kids that I knew. Even when we watched 7th Heaven as a family in the late 90s, the family drama of the kids in Reverend Camden’s family was either overly dramatic or too simplistic, failing to deal with many of the real-life difficulties church work families face.

But with more of us having honest conversations about church trauma and faith deconstruction and reconstruction, these are some of the biggest problems that I see facing my fellow church workers’ kids, in both the past and the present.