By Mike Yaconelli

A two-week Caribbean vacation for him and his wife was just the thing, thought the veteran youth minister. It had been a long time since the two of them had been alone. The vacation would be a welcome break, a second honeymoon—no kids, no interruptions, no schedules, no responsibilities.

It became a nightmare.

For the first three days, his wife refused to speak to him; refused even to acknowledge his presence. Finally she exploded—years of resentment and bitterness gushed out in a flood of accusation, frustration, and disillusionment. A marriage the youth worker thought was in good shape was actually in shambles, and the honeymoon became a painful process of trying to put the pieces together. He was surprised and shocked.

He shouldn’t have been.

Lots of youth workers have unhappy marriages, unfortunately, and my friend’s story was painfully similar to the stories of hundreds of other youth workers. The question, of course, is "Why?" Why does youth ministry take such a toll on marriages? I wish I knew. I don’t. But after 26 years in the ministry, I have some hunches.

Unhappy marriages, first of all, are not the exclusive domain of those in youth ministry. The institution of marriage is in trouble, period. It used to be that the church was a harbor, a haven from the world, unaffected by social pressures, safe from worldly forces. That isn’t true anymore. Marriages within the church are as susceptible to divorce as those without.

The trouble is, ministry—especially youth ministry—creates even more difficulty for a marriage. The difficulties often start with two problems that, strangely enough, have nothing to do with youth work—age and children. Most youth workers are either newly married or have just started their families. These two factors, combined with the demands of youth work, can radically affect a marriage.

Immature? I’m a Dedicated Youth Pastor!

Most youth workers are in their 20s (many in their early 20s) and, if married, newly married. This means that the difficult pressures of youth (immaturity, adjustment to a spouse, increased responsibility) are magnified by the built-in pressures of youth work (long hours, constant interruptions, no privacy, changes in plans, late-night activities).

The essence of youth, of course, is immaturity—which, to be sure, is not monopolized by just the young. Yet the perverse nature of immaturity makes it difficult for especially young youth workers to admit their immaturity. And that can be serious. Let’s take a look at some characteristics of immaturity common in many youth workers.

Overconfidence.

Immature youth workers know everything. They have life under control. Their marriage will last forever. Problems? They can be worked out simply enough.

Right.

When I first started working for Campus Life, I was gone every night, up early each morning meeting kids, and involved every weekend in rallies. My salary was absolutely minimum and inevitably late—sometimes more than a month late. Such circumstances obviously caused a great deal of stress in my wife. To which I was oblivious. After all, I was doing God’s work. My wife would get over her anger, I convinced myself, if we just sat down and discussed things. Five years into the game when I finally got around to sitting down with her and discussing things, it was too late. I was shocked that a few hours of conversation couldn’t undo five years of damage.

Isolation.

Young youth workers generally believe they need no help from others. They are the ones everyone else is seeking help from. They are the ones thrown into the arena of adolescent culture, required to deal with divorce, parents, sexual abuse, incest, depression, marital problems, suicide. (I was 23 sans seminary training when I began working in my first church youth group. Within my first three weeks I counseled a potential suicide, a runaway because of abuse, and juvenile hall resident—she was so ugly that even her parents had rejected her.) Not only are we totally unprepared for these problems, but the very nature of youth work—especially the isolation from the mainstream of the church—creates the illusion that we are qualified to handle them. You can imagine how difficult it is for youth workers to admit that their own marriage is in trouble, and to track down someone they can trust for help.

Defensiveness.

Because our work is so much a part of us, we tend to be defensive about it. And the young are especially prone to defensiveness. (It stems both from our being newly trained and from our insufficient experience to see that life isn’t quite as black and white as we thought.) When we’re defensive, we resist community, we resist outside advice, we refuse to submit to others for help. We insist on working out problems on our own.

Overconfidence, isolation, and defensiveness, they are all marks of immaturity, and can all get in the way of a marriage maturing—and it’s in the early years of a marriage that irreparable damage can be done. Mistakes made in these early years will return to haunt us in the later years. It’s easy, for example, for a wife who put up with her husband’s long hours of ministry in the beginning to demand, years later, a chance to go back to school and begin her own career at the expense of his. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that desire as long as it hasn’t grown from bitterness, resentment, or anger.

The experience of a friend underlines this. After years of bouncing from ministry to ministry, he was hired by a large church with a handsome salary and generous benefits. Finally, he thought, he’d be able to provide for his family and be home on a regular basis. Although the job required relocation, he accepted a contract and announced the good news to this family. His wife refused to move and his children were upset. He already had wreaked so much damage in his family, always believing the delusion that some day everything would be forgotten. It wasn’t. They eventually divorced.

Postpartum Pressures

Immaturity doesn’t pose the only difficulty for a youth worker’s marriage. Children can aggravate a marriage, too. Although couples are waiting longer now to have children, chances are still that in the first five years of marriage most couple will decide to have children. Most couples aren’t prepared for a baby. It shouldn’t surprise us. We live in a society that still believes that education answers all problems, be they problems of marriage, AIDS, or contraception—despite education’s poor track record in most issued. Though they may indeed know more about having a baby than any previous generation, they are seldom prepared for a baby’s emotional impact on their relationship.

When a friend told me his wife was expecting their first, I risked sounding like an old man and suggested he prepare himself for the radical changes ahead. He nodded, gave me a smile that suggested I go do something useful with myself, and pointed out the dozens of childbirth classes he had attended. I visited his home a few weeks after the baby was born. The tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife. He late admitted how unprepared he and his wife had been for the realities of a new baby.

Although it’s true that women are usually better prepared than men, neither have any idea of the pressure a newborn brings to a family. It starts during pregnancy when the wife begins thinking more of the coming baby than of her husband—its needs precede the needs of all others, including her husband’s. As the pregnancy progresses, their sex life cools off. She requires more sleep, more trips to the bathroom, more affirmation. Many men suddenly find themselves unprepared to meet their wives’ needs.

When the baby finally arrives, neither wife nor husband is prepared for the demolition of their schedules. He comes home from work and cannot understand why nothing’s been accomplished. The house is just as he left it in the morning—and she’s still in her robe. What’s she been doing all day, he wonders. What have I done today, she wonders—the baby gets every ounce of her attention; it dominates everything. Her husband gets virtually no attention; he feels neglected.

After three months or so the husband can’t understand why life can’t get back to normal. "We have a ski trip coming up in a couple weeks," he mentions casually to his wife.

"Oh, honey," she replies, "there’s no way I can go. Do you have to go?"

"Do I have to go? Are you kidding? Of course I have to go—and so do you. Just bring the baby along—it’ll be no problem at all. We’ll get some of the high-school girls to babysit." This well-meaning husband forgets that the cozy 10-by-10 cabin that adequately housed him and his wife last winter is impossible quarters for a baby, crib, swing, bassinet, toys, diapers, and carload of an infant’s miscellaneous necessities. He forgets that baby schedules don’t coincide with camp schedules. He forgets that his wife is nursing the baby—so babysitters are out. He forgets how difficult it is to keep a baby warm at 8,000 feet. So next year, when his wife laughs hysterically when he suggests that they all go to ski camp, he’ll understand. In fact, he’ll secretly hope she’ll say no just to save him the hassle of a baby at the mountains.

Life in a Fishbowl

Beyond the cultural forces plotting against families, working for a church—and especially with youth—creates a set of its own unique problems. And it’s these we need to recognize.

Face it—a church staff lives in a fishbowl. They are required not only to function professionally, but to lead "godly lives." We are expected to model exemplary life-styles. Now if we worked for Dow Chemical, our life-style would matter little to Dow (although this is changing in some corporations). But in a church we are expected to perform both on and off the job. Our personal and family life is constantly subjected to the microscopic scrutiny of the congregation. Congregations expect their ministers to have their lives and marriages together. If ministers don’t have their lives together, runs the spoken or unspoken assumption, how can they help us? The assumption easily forces us in youth ministry to deal with a problem in secret if there’s a chance it can stay secret.

So under the carpet get swept the nagging difficulties until an "appropriate" time—which means that postponed problems usually never get dealt with, at least constructively. A youth worker friend of mine and her new husband were both on the same church’s youth staff. Their marriage was trouble from the beginning. Because they felt obliged to their church and youth group, they continued ignoring their problem, waiting for the "right" time to work it out—which, sadly, came a year down the road after irreparable damage had been done. Why didn’t’ they go to their own church leadership for help? Perhaps because, although churches profess a desire to help their staff, they structurally force their employees underground—along with their problems.

A fishbowl existence isn’t the only pressure on youth workers’ marriages. There’s also the confusion of employers. Who do we work for, anyway? Not just for a church, but for God. That gets complicated. Among other things, that means every issue in our marriages becomes a spiritual issue. So now we have to decide not only what is right for us, but what’s right for our ministry. Too often "what God wants me to do" cancels out whatever we may have felt to be right for our marriages. If my wife is gone all the time, that’s no good—but if she’s gone all the time serving God, well, now, that’s another story altogether. How do you tell your wife she’s working too much for God? How, when your husband’s been called to fix a parishioner’s toilet, do you tell him to stay home and fix your toilet?

The flexible hours of youth work may become another pressure. Rather than use our irregular working schedule to advantage (by, for example, creating a flexible schedule that keeps us home during mornings or afternoons on days we have evening meetings), we use it to our disadvantage by working all hours. True, kids are free before school, after school, and at evenings—which means that the hours the kids aren’t available are hours we could spend with our families.

Few youth-worker types can take time off like this because they feel guilty, like they’re cheating their employers—and many employer-pastors reinforce the feeling. Trouble is, youth work is not a nine-to-five job. It requires flexible hours and flexible schedules. Yet most churches are reluctant to give their youth workers that kind of freedom. I have always believed that good youth workers are never found in the office, but with the kids—but most churches seem to equate absence form the office with irresponsibility.

Sad to say, churches are concerned more about the professional duties of youth workers than about their marriages. Because the Church is both a living organism as well as an institution, there’s always going to be a similar tension in our treatment of church workers. Are they employees or co-laborers in the faith? The more the church sees itself as an institution, the more it will require external, observable results—and the less it will concern itself with the personal needs of the youth worker. So although many churches profess concern about marriage, they do not practically act as though a youth worker’s marriage is the church’s responsibility. For some reason, many churches seem blind to the fact that the requirements for a successful youth program usually grind against the requirements for a solid marriage.

I’m not suggesting that the church is totally responsible for a youth worker’s marriage. But I am convinced that the church has a more significant role to play than it’s playing. it should do all it can to protect and nourish a youth worker’s marriage.

Marriage Ought To Get in the Way

When Paul said that marriage gets in the way of ministry, he wasn’t kidding. And this poses a fourth dilemma in youth work: Marriage does get in the way—and it should. Paul’s comments are used too often as a rationale for suggesting that marriage shouldn’t interfere with ministry. But Paul was saying exactly what he meant to say—marriage, if it is for real, will always get in the way of ministry. That’s the price we pay when we get married. The price isn’t all that high if we really love our spouses. We ought to look forward to time with them. There ought to be lots of times when the ministry, the youth group, even our own children have to wait—because we have decided to cultivate time with our spouses. If we’re in love, then husband or wife comes first. We cannot let a ministry get in the way of a marriage. When we assume the responsibilities of marriage, God will always favor the marriage above the ministry.

Finally, the inability to say no can hobble a youth worker’s marriage.

There we were. Pitiful sight. A roomful of veteran youth workers lamenting our schedules. We couldn’t believe how many meetings we had scheduled in the coming weeks. For the last few years we had promised ourselves that we were going to slow down, spend more time with our families—and every year we ended up with schedules worse than the year before. We could all see that the other guys in the room had tackled too much, but our schedule was necessary. "Why do we do this to ourselves?" I asked myself. "Why can’t we refuse adding any more to our schedules? Why can’t I cancel the meetings I’ve accepted unwisely?"

The answer’s easy—I don’t want to. I say I want to stop the merry-go-round, but I really don’t. Yet learning to say no is a most practical way of saving a marriage. Apparently we all feel indispensable, we all need the activity more than we need our families. When will we learn?

A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Pepsi, and Thou

Here’s what a score of years in youth work has taught me about fending off marital heartache and inviting long, strong marriages.

Rediscover romance. We’ve become such a sex-oriented culture that we’ve forgotten the art of romance. It’s not only for newlyweds. I’ve found that love notes, flowers, romantic interludes in hotels, poetry, and continual I-love-you’s help keep my marriage fresh and keep us from harboring any resentment or bitterness toward each other. "Creeping separateness" is what author Sheldon Vanauken terms the disease that kills romance. The busier we get, the more we allow our schedules to keep us away from each other, the easier it is to quit working at our marriage and stop communicating altogether. My wife and I have made it a given in our marriage that when I am on the road, we talk together on the phone at least three times a day. We need to keep in touch with each other daily no matter where I am.

And romance includes sex. I am convinced that a couple’s sexual relationship is a good thermometer of their marriage. You cannot have sex regularly without getting rid of resentment or bitterness that has crept in. My wife and I celebrate a day of decadence a couple of times each year. When our five children and our schedules begin to take their toll on our relationship, we send the kids off to school, rent a local motel room between 9 and 5, bring our novels, and spend the day unwinding, talking, sleeping, reading, making love. Needless to say, when the day is over, we’re very close—and ready to handle our families and our schedules again.

Clean the air. My father said that he owed the longevity of his marriage to his and my mother’s taking the Bible seriously when it said, "Do not let the sun go down on your anger." So clear the air before you go to bed. In the intense world of a youth worker, a husband and wife must go to bed as one, with a sense of unity about the past day and the coming one.

Start working on the problem now. No matter how difficult a marriage is, it only gets more difficult the longer it’s ignored. If it’s bad today, it’ll be worse tomorrow. Instead of letting our activity calendar dictate when to work on a marriage, perhaps we should let our marriage dictate our activity calendar.

Be willing to do what it takes. If your marriage is in trouble, be willing to do almost anything to salvage it. The sooner you start, the better. Too often we apologize for our mistakes in the past, promise to change in the future—and then assume the apology and promise are carte blanche to continue making the same mistakes again.

I’m a great one for guilt. If there’s guilt lying around anywhere, I’ll pick it up. So it’s easy for me to admit my faults, to accept blame. My problem is that once I’ve accepted the guilt, it’s difficult for me to change. But change I must—now—when, for instance, my wife complains I’m gone too much. I need to take her criticism seriously.

Be willing to take emergency steps. We live like our schedules are written in stone and nothing short of threatened divorce can change it. But if your explain your predicament to those who have to cover for you, they’ll usually understand.

Be careful you don’t make your family pay. I recall—not fondly—many times when I canceled a booking in order to be with my family, and then let them know how much I had given up just to be with them. I might as well have kept the booking. And don’t make them pay for your irresponsibility, either. Ever had to change family plans, not because of a conflict, but because you simply forgot to tell them about the meeting until the very night of the meeting? They shouldn’t have to bail you out of a predicament you got yourself into. Accept the responsibility for your mistake. Cancel the meeting. Or get someon else to cover for you so you can be with your family as you had planned.

Don’t expect miracles. Years of problems cannot be erased in an hour conversation. In fact, I don’t think people really change very much at all. For example, I’m a procrastinator, I will always be a procrastinator. I can learn how to control my problem—that is, I can learn how to procrastinate less—but I will always be a procrastinator. Procrastination is not just an appendage to my personality: it is my personality.

So I postpone deadlines and projects until my back is up against the wall. The truth is, though, I do my best work under pressure. Some things I just cannot do unless I have put it off so long that I finally have no choice but to do it. Procrastination, like most faults, does have its positive side, however. Suppose your mother kept an immaculate home, so spotless you never worried about bringing your friends in unannounced. But the negative side of a Mrs. Clean may be an obsession with cleanliness that drives the family crazy. I don’t believe you can have a clean house without a mother who has a passion for cleanliness.

My wife was attracted to me, an incurable romantic, by my emotional impulsiveness—the surprise flowers, the love notes, the special dinners I fix for her. I wear my feeling on my sleeve. I cry in front of her. She like all those things. With the passion and impulsiveness, though, she gets the disorganization and lack of discipline. They all come with me. She may want me to be more organized, but she knows that if I was really organized I wouldn’t be the person she married. I knew a youth worker who was so incredibly organized, he would schedule sex with his wife—date and time on his calendar. Organized, yes...but, uh, a little weak on the passion.

Communicate with your church.

Sounds basic, I know. Yet many youth workers are actually afraid of their employers. Afraid of losing their jobs. I recently sat down with a youth worker who inherited a very activity-oriented program. Not being an activity-oriented person himself, he felt the program needed drastic overhauling. When I suggested he meet with the church board and explain his dilemma, there was a long silence. He finally said, "But they might not like that, and I’d lose my job." I knew he wouldn’t say a word to his board.

And he’s not alone. There are a lot of youth workers who are afraid to tell their church, their pastors, their boards what they really feel about youth work and marriage and time at the office and time at home. I’m amazed by how many complain about their churches’ expectations, yet never communicate to the churches what they believe are decent expectations. The church won’t change if it doesn’t know what to change.

Admit that the problem may not be you. It took me years to realize that the problem in my first youth working job was not me, but my employer. He demanded 24 hours of work a day from me, and nothing less satisfied him. First I blamed my wife, then I blamed myself—then I realized my boss was a workaholic and wasn’t going to change. So I quit. It was the best decision I ever made. The struggle in your marriage may similarly be centered neither in your spouse nor you, but in the pastor you work for, or the board, or the church in general. It doesn’t mean your pastor is not a godly man, a good man—just a man impossible to work for.

More often than not couples do not fight about causes, but about symptoms. One youth worker’s wife was unhappy, so he began cutting back on his hours at church only to find that it didn’t matter how much he was home—that wasn’t the problem. the problem turned out to be that his wife wanted to go back to school and didn’t believe he supported her decision. His work was an easy target—but it wasn’t the correct one. Another youth worker found it impossible to continue her work, not because it was church work but because her husband didn’t want her working at all. The husband had a problem totally unrelated to youth work. Another returned home from a youth workers’ convention to find a note on the door, his belongings on the porch, and the locks changed. We all rallied to his support and tried often to talk to his wife. When she finally talked with us, we discovered that the problem was not this job—the problem was that he liked to fool around with other women.

Youth work has its hazards. It’s like any ministry, demanding long hours, lots of interruptions, little privacy. But it has its rewards, too—changed lives, the satisfaction of helping someone in need, new relationships, grateful people. A troubled marriage affects all we do and sooner or later makes ministry impossible. That’s why it’s important to do what we can to keep our marriages alive and well.

Postscript:
This was a very difficult article for me to write, for I am divorced and remarried. I ask myself, "What right do I have to say anything about marriage to anyone?" The answer is, of course, that I don't. The only reason I could write this was by realizing that this isn't an article about marriage, but about youth-workism. It's an article about addiction to the ministry and what it does to us—all of us. And about that I can talk with authority, just as an alcoholic can speak about alcoholism with authority.

The above author bio was current as of the date this article was published.

© 1999 CCM Communications
Permission is granted to distribute Youthworker articles to other youth workers within your church, but may not be re-published (print or electronic) without permission