Wendy McCready works with Flowers for the Pastor’s Wife – a helpful digital platform for encouraging the small church pastor’s wife.
My name is Wendy McCready. And I live in Alma, Ontario, population 300. So my husband is the pastor of Alma Bible Church, which has an attendance of about 150.
My ministry journey, I would say it really goes back to my teenage years where I first started volunteering at the camp I grew up going to as a child. I also was able to minister at camps in the state of Michigan throughout my summers, when I was a student at Moody Bible Institute. While I was at Moody, I was able to minister with the women’s choir, I sang with that group. And we did a number of missions trips overseas, and we took tours throughout the United States. We would usually pick an area and kind of like go out east and have a whole two weeks where we would stay in little churches all throughout. So it was actually during that time that God really put in my heart to be involved in small church and rural ministry. . . . And by the time I was finished at my time at Moody I had my degree, I was working on was a Bachelors of education through them and with a focus on youth ministry, but really felt God was calling me to be a pastor’s wife.
To share about the mission of Flowers [Flowers for the Pastor’s Wife], as we affectionately shorten it to, is to share my story as a pastor’s wife in a small town or a small church. By the time I’d been a pastor’s wife for just a few years, I had learned pretty quickly that being a pastor’s wife can be a very lonely place. . . . I realized this is not just my naivety, this is just the reality of ministry, especially in a small town context. Church politics gets messy no matter where you are, of course, but I think for small town, pastors, wives, you don’t have anywhere to turn to confide in anybody.
I had this desire to really see more done for pastors wives. I believe it was April in 2016. After one of the sessions at the [RHMA] conference, because it’s held every year in April, we [Denna Busenitz and Wendy] literally kind of ran into each other in the foyer of the church where the conference was being hosted. And it just was one of those moments where I knew God had orchestrated our meeting. Because our conversation was all about five minutes, . . . and we just said, We need something more for pastors wives. And Denna, her vision was to do something along the lines of a blog or some kind of writing ministry. And so we exchanged contact information at the time, and decided that we would just pray about where God would have this go. And it was kind of I wouldn’t say on the back burner, but really just for about six to eight months or so we just kind of kept in touch occasionally prayed about what God would have us to do. And then as time went on, God brought another pastor’s wife in our path that likes to write. And then we had somebody that was interested or willing to help us build a website, graphics people. And God just started to put together this team of women. Almost all of who are whom are pastors wives themselves.
God brought all those pieces together so that by September 2017, we were able to post our first blog and launch our website. And so together done and I direct this Flowers ministry with our team of over 10 pastors wives, now I’m think we’re up to about 14 or 15, now on our team. And we purposely set it up that way, for a number of different reasons. We all are busy women who do not have a lot of extra time on our hands. But we do need that support. And we felt that this way, if we were able to get enough people on the team, there wouldn’t be a huge amount of pressure on one person.
And we’ve now been putting blogs up since 2017. So we also have a private Facebook group, or a community Facebook group that you have to register as a pastor’s wife to be a part of it. And that gives us a safe place where we’ve been able to do reading groups where we’ve studied books together, and a place for us to put up prayer requests for people. So they have a connecting place to share things that they maybe can’t safely share in other places. We also have been able to publish a couple of digital products over the years. And then just recently, I actually have right here. This is our recent publication. It’s called Love Joy and Faithfulness, a 90 day devotional for the pastor’s wife. And it is basically just a compilation of writings from our first three years of our blog.
It is very difficult as a pastor’s wife, to separate yourself from your role. And I think it’s difficult for people to do that as well. . . . We have different backgrounds, different personalities, different giftings. So we can’t really be put in a box. . . . She may not do all the things you think she should do, because that is not where she fits. That’s not her gifting. So I think that that’s another way they can flourish is to have the support of their husband, and definitely to have the support of the people and just being who God has created them to be regardless of what they sort of suppose that expectations are of that role.
Part of the reason I want to be in the workplace is because my husband is in the church all of the time. And it’s very easy to lose sight of why we do what we do. Again, it’s easy to get that in grown mindset and to forget that, oh, yeah, there are lost people right out our doors. Well, I don’t get to avoid that. Because every day I’m working with people who are very lost and who need Christ.
We found that learning to define the church by our relationships with one another that can transcend whether or not we’re meeting in the same time in place, I think, was something that we tried to challenge ourselves with and encourage our people with as well, because I think that now that we can meet together again, it certainly makes you appreciate it better. And it helps you to think about your reasons for doing it rather than just showing up because it’s the thing to do, or it’s your social event for the week.