When The Pastor Controls The Meals
Sundays after church were my favorite times when I knew I could go home and catch a breather from the bustle and noise of exposure to a crowded church of people, loud singing and booming voices, glaringly bright lights, and various aromas that were not always so pleasant. Otherwise, when it was our family’s turn to host the pastor coming to our home for a Sunday meal, I hated the at-home time after church.
Periodically, different families in the church would host the pastor for a Sunday meal. The church I attended had gone through three pastors during my childhood with two that I did particularly like because of the condescending way that they spoke to people. Nevertheless, hosting the pastor for a Sunday meal was considered a big deal. The pastor was hosted by almost every family in the church on a rotating basis. This was the time when good cooking was less than debatable when the pastor did not like the prepared food placed before him.
Traditionally, in my family, my mother always prepared Sunday meals, and she was actually a really great cook. [Although I would grow less trusting of the meals she prepared after I left home for college. More on that another time.] Although I did not keep up with a schedule of the pastor’s visits for Sunday dinner, I always knew when the time came for his visits because of the special foods my mother prepared that only seemed to be served when we had visitors.
My mother spared no expense when it came to presenting show-stopping meals. Everything was grand, and my father could not have been more proud because a good Sunday meal for the pastor carried gossip a long way. If the food was less than savory, other church members were going to know about it. I think this is why families would get excited about the pastor’s visits. This was their chance to shine in front of him and be designated as a home where the pastor knew he could find good food.
Of course, taste is subjective. What might be good to one person, may not be good to another. Sometimes my mother would prepare foods from a menu that was given to the women of the church based on foods that the pastor liked to eat. I always wondered why it really matter when it was not his food. I always thought the pastor should be glad someone is feeding him free food. When I did not like something that was prepared for me, I most often had no choice but to eat it because complaining was useless. Yet, here is a man who does not cook for himself on Sundays and gets to have a menu created for him based on what he liked to eat.
I know. I know. He was the pastor of the church bringing spiritual nourishment to parched and hungry spiritual beings. Not to be rude or to offend, but I just did not see it that way when I was growing up. Even as a child, I recognized when a preached message lulled me into a state of boredom, and I understood spiritual things better than most people gave me credit for even as a child. I had a major learning curve in that area thanks to my home environment. [More on that in another post too]. My dad said that we were individually responsible for nourishing ourselves … that we had to spend time with God by reading the Word, praying, and learning all that we could to be spiritually strong.
So, I would reason that if these things that my dad said were the case, I wondered why we bothered feeding the pastor when we had to learn for ourselves. Besides, the pastor was receiving a salary. I am not sure how nice the salary was for him, but I do not remember him having a regular job like my dad or the other men in the congregation. In fact, the pastor appeared to be doing quite financially well based on he material things that I saw that he had that my family could not readily afford, and he was being fed every Sunday in someone’s home for free. I actually wondered why he did not eat with his own family.
Nevertheless, I found these pastoral visits as nothing more than intrusions into my family’s life during a time when we had a sense of togetherness no matter how dysfunctional we were as a family. We always had meals together, and for whatever reason, even though I never really talked, I always felt some sense of a bond during this time. If we were eating together as a family, then we were okay. So when the pastor would show up for periodic Sunday meals, I found myself always annoyed by his visits.
For the most part, I never felt at home in my own home. I felt like the pastor’s visits were designed to let us know that he was in charge. I know that it is hospitable to serve the guest first, but it appeared that the pastor took delight in being served, eating more than his portion of servings, and sometimes denying us (the children) chances to feast on the best of the food. I saw him as greedy and even a bit disrespectful. I was often irritated by how my parents reacted to the pastor. They behaved as if they were kissing the pastor’s rear end just to serve him.
Each time the pastor showed up, something about his visits were always off to me. Besides there being random moments of gossip about other church members under the guise of prayerful concern, there were always moments when it appeared that the pastors spoke condescendingly to my parents as if to admonish them. If my mother’s cooking was not up to the pastor’s standards, there was often a comment about what could be done better to improve upon a dish. If my mother prepared something other than what the pastor desired on the original menu, then he would complain. This behavior always astounded me, and I could feel a deep anger arise within me. In fact, I felt anger on my mother’s behalf and wanted to defend her.
I thought, “How dare this man come to our home, eat our food, and insult the cook. If he did not like it, he did not have to eat it. He had to have liked it if he ate seconds. How ungrateful!” I thought the pastor behaved as if he were entitled to the food in my family’s home, entitled to making judgments upon my family, and entitled to subtly disrespecting my family even though we were hospitable to host and serve him. He had no regards on how long it took for my mother to prepare the food, and he also did not seem to care that he was eating for free without knowing our family’s financial struggles. Yet, this was my thinking as a child.
Whenever this pastor would leave, my siblings and me would complain among each other. I would always wait to hear if my dad complained about it too. When he did, my mother might chime in, but she would always fuss about it when my dad was not around. She would bounce things off of my siblings and me, and we would point things out to her. We would not do this with our dad though. It was an unspoken rule that we were not to discuss things that did not pertain to us especially around my dad.
At some point over the years, hosting the pastor for Sunday meals ceased up until the church hired a new pastor. For a time, my family was also blacklisted by the church [which is another blog post]. So for a few years, we did not host the pastor until a new one was hired by the church. The new pastor changed the trajectory of this hosting tradition [more on that later too]. So, my family was able to go back to the normal way of Sunday dinners for us which was far less stressful for all of us. Family meal time is meant to be enjoyable, and once we no longer hosted the pastor for meals, we could all breathe a sigh of great relief, eat our food, and even enjoy second servings.
Stay tuned for more stories to come.
My Voice Unchained 