Last July, Barnabas Piper came out with his fantastic book The Pastor’s Kid: Finding Your Own Faith and Identity. Barnabas writes, obviously, as a pastor’s kid. Unique to any other book on the subject is that the foreword is by his dad, pastor John Piper.
He is not writing this book as a memoir or some sort of tell-all which, he says, “would [not] be very interesting.” Instead, his aim in the book is to “raise awareness of the struggles of PKs and give voice to a group of people who are often well recognized but little known.” The book is drawn not simply from his own experience, but from emails and stories that other pastor’s kids have shared with him as well. As a result, the book is truly positioned to give a voice to PKs, undergirded by the fact that Barnabas is in a unique position to articulate that voice effectively, being a PK himself.
He writes for three audiences. First, he writes for PKs. Being a pastor’s kid is uniquely challenging. “The reality of being a sinner on display in a ministry family creates quite the spiritual and emotional Molotov cocktail.” At the same time, “being a PK can also be a profound blessing and provide wonderful grounding for a godly life.” So he writes “to give a voice to the PK who doesn’t know what to do with his challenges.”
Second, he writes for pastors. He wants pastors to be aware of the real depths of the struggle their kids face as PKs. “This is not a book to point an accusatory finger at the failures of pastors, although some will be death with, but to assist you in avoiding and remedying those failures.”
Third, he writes for the church. Why? Because “the congregation has more responsibility than it knows to care for and ease the burden of the pastor and his family.” Unfortunately, “too often the church has fostered a culture that puts enormous pressure on the pastor and his family.” He hopes that this book therefore “opens some eyes to things that need to change.”
Barnabas accomplishes his goals with great effectiveness. While he acknowledges that he can be hard on pastors at times, his aim is to heal. He accomplishes this because the dominant theme of the book is grace. He talks about his own need for grace and how grace is ultimately the solution to meeting the unique needs of PK’s in their pressure-cooker lives that are lived before a watching congregation that sometimes places a higher priority on spiritual showmanship and meeting man-made expectations than genuine authenticity.
The emphasis on grace is what makes this book so helpful. By reading this book, you learn not only more about the unique pressures of PKs and how to serve them better; you also learn about the grace of God generally — especially as it is manifest in tough situations. That is what makes this book useful and important to everyone, whether you are a PK or not, whether you are a pastor or not, or whether your pastor has kids growing up in the church or not.
One of my favorite parts of the book is the appendix: “Seven Rules for When You Meet a PK.” At root, the seven rules boil down to one thing: get to know a PK for who they are, and care about them for who they are, not because they are the pastor’s son or daughter. As the church keeps that in mind (which is really just a form of the Golden Rule), they will serve PKs, as well as their families, well.