COMMUNITY OF SPICE a newsletter for clergy spouses by clergy spouses

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What is it like for your children?
 
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PK questionnaire
Below are the questions we asked PK's (Preacher's Kids) from around the world.  Most of the responses were not from subscribers.
  1. How old are you?
  2. What is the denomination in which you grew up?
  3. Do you still count yourself as a part of that denomination?
  4. Which parent is ordained and what was your age when s/he was ordained?
  5. How often did you attend church as a child?
  6. If you are married, did you marry someone involved in the church?
  7. Was that a consideration when you looked for a spouse?
  8. Do you attend church, now?
  9. How often?
  10. If you don't attend now, do you believe that having children will change that (or did having children change your involvement in the church)? 
  11. If you're not active in church now, what do you see as some of the reasons?
    12.  
    In regards to church attendance:
  12. What will you do (or do you do) differently with your children than your parents did with you?
  13. What did your parents do well?
  14. What do you wish your parents had done differently?
  15. What did parishioners, parishes, dioceses do well?
  16. What do you wish parishioners, parishes, dioceses had done differently?

47 year old, female, Episcopal Church

1.-3.  I am 47 and female.  Episcopalian.  No.  I married a Lutheran and to compromise, we joined the United Church of Christ.

4.-5.  My father was ordained.  We were 1-2 years old at the time.   I attended church every week when the choir was singing (I was in junior, then adult choir), pretty much, and less often in the summer.

6.-11.  I married in the Episcopal church I grew up in.  In looking for a spouse, spirituality was important, not religiosity.  I attend about 2 times a month, as I am shopping around for a church to join in the town to where my family just moved.

12.-16.  My parents did not force us to go to church - but it was the norm.  There was no question that I would go through confirmation and be confirmed when I was growing up, but with my 16 year old daughter last year, I did require her to go through the UCC confirmation classes, but left it up to her about whether she chose to be 'affirmed' in her spiritual journey by the church, rather than being 'confirmed' as a UCC member by the church.  On the religion - spirituality continuum, I have moved to being much more spiritual than religious, and that is where I hope my children will end up.

Because my dad's full-time job was as a professor, and he only had a tiny one-room church where he was mostly active on Sundays, I did not really see myself as a true PK, because that was not a label that others associated with me.  I saw myself more as a professor's kid.  You could ask other PK's about their level of identification with being a PK and how much others also identified them as a PK, and treated them differently as a result.


1505 Deerfield Drive
Oshkosh, WI 54904
Karen D. Powers
Publisher and Senior Editor

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