Brian Irvine, married to a Church of England vicar, maintains a wiki community for clergy husbands at cucumbersandwiches.org. In one of his posts, he makes a series of recommendations for how to deal with some of the practical issues involved in living in a parsonage.
The one that really resonated with me was the one about the phone. Bottom line: the minister has his or her own phone number. If you want to reduce the money you spend on this, try Lingo or one of the other VOIP companies. But his point about the minister being able to answer the phone on days off is well taken. My husband calls this his “sanctuary” time. He absolutely needs to know that he can disassociate himself completely from the congregation one day a week. His personal number has voice mail if people need to leave a message.
Which leads me to my point — people treating the minister’s partner as his or her personal secretary. Whether it is in person, on the phone or other contact, people are prone to asking me to “just let ***** know that…” As a novice ministerial spouse I went along with this. Why not? It’s just being helpful, right? Wrong.
If I accept the responsibility for taking a message, it comes right back at me if it gets lost or mistranslated. People can often use a third person to deliver a difficult message — I don’t want to be that person. Above all, whatever he is doing is none of my business. The content of the message may be confidential, and I don’t want to know about it.
So what do I do now? I have a single, all-purpose answer for anyone who wants me to give my husband a message — feel free to adapt and use as needed:
“You know, wife-mail is just not as reliable as voice mail! Could you call him and leave him a message on his phone instead? He does check that regularly.”
Done.
