More Couples Share Preaching Duties as Co-Pastors

For pastors Barbara Anderson, 47, and Mark Smutny, 48, of Pasadena Presbyterian Church, preaching together and living together come naturally as breathing.

“It’s the only thing we’ve ever known,” said Smutny, who met Anderson at Harvard Divinity School while they were students in 1979. They fell in love, married, and have been colleagues working side by side ever since. The pair have served four congregations in Ohio, New York and California in the last 22 years, distinguishing themselves as the longest-serving co-pastors in the 2.4-million-member Presbyterian Church USA.

Anderson and Smutny take turns preaching. They alternate moderating meetings of their church’s governing board. They collaborate on pastoral care, such as visiting the sick, conducting weddings and funerals. She handles the board of trustees and church finances and he oversees management of church facilities and fundraising

The arrangement has worked well for them, they say. Their two sons, ages 21 and 18, are “healthy and mature and seem to have no damage from their parents’ being clergy,” Smutny said. To which Anderson quickly added, “As far as we can tell.”

The couple are part of a small but increasing group of husband-wife clergy teams who choose to work at the same place in one of the most emotionally taxing professions.

“It’s a phenomenon that didn’t exist very much 10 years ago, but it’s slowly growing,” said the Rev. Ron Kernaghan, professor of pastoral theology at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.

With so many women going into the clergy -- about half in many Christian seminaries and rabbinical schools -- Kernaghan predicts there will be a lot more co-pastoring by married couples in the years to come.

In Southern California, church officials estimate about a dozen co-pastors serve in the United Methodist Church and Presbyterian Church USA, denominations known for encouraging women to go into ministry.

There are no couples working as rabbis in the same synagogue in the Los Angeles area, according to the Board of Rabbis of Southern California. Nationwide, there are two or three rabbinic couples who are co-rabbis or were in the past. But there are a good number of husband-and-wife rabbis who work separately in the area.

Local co-pastors say working at the same church has many more pluses than minuses.

“For us, one of the nice benefits is that the whole family is in the same church, so we aren’t having to move between two different churches,” said the Rev. Douglas Williams, who with his wife, the Rev. Cindy Williams, are co-pastors of University United Methodist Church in Irvine.

“I can’t imagine juggling two church schedules, plus two children [ages 12 and 8] and their schedules,” she said.

For the Williamses, the decision to co-pastor came 12 years ago following a suggestion from the bishop of the California-Pacific Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, the regional governing body of the nation’s second-largest Protestant denomination. They were serving different congregations in Los Angeles when the bishop approached them with the idea.

Co-pastor arrangements vary from two full-time positions to sharing one job and other combinations in between.

At St. Peter’s By The Sea Presbyterian Church in Rancho Palos Verdes, the Rev. Matthew Hoyt and his wife, the Rev. Melinda Hoyt, share a 1 1/4 associate co-pastor position.

For the Hoyts, an important consideration was having “significant time at home with the children.”

One problem, though, Hoyt said, is that church members sometimes treat them as though they both work full time.

“If I leave in the middle of the day ... and if I run into somebody at the grocery store, they’re like, ‘Well, you’re doing in an early day,’ he said. “It’s hard to remind people that I am a part-time employee.”

It also can be difficult to have a life separate from the church.

“We try not to talk about the church when we first wake up,” said Smutny of Pasadena Presbyterian.

“And we try not to talk about the church just before we go to bed,” Anderson said.

In Saratoga Springs, N.Y., rabbinic couple Linda Motzkin, 44, originally from Los Angeles, and husband Jonathan Rubenstein, 54, have shared a single rabbinate at the 180-household Temple Sinai since finishing rabbinical school in 1986.

“We had a 1-year-old daughter and we were excited about the opportunity to share our domestic and professional responsibilities equally, to be able to work as partners to fulfill the rewarding roles of parents and spiritual leaders of a community,” Motzkin said. They are believed to be the first co-rabbi couple in the nation.

Rabbi Mark S. Diamond, head of the 270-member Board of Rabbis of Southern California, says a rabbinic couple in the same congregation can feel extra pressures.

Congregants may wonder, “Why is the rabbi’s son or daughter not attending services regularly? Why is the rabbi’s son not the leader of the youth group?” he said.

Rabbi Jonathan Klein, 35, of the Hillel Foundation at USC, and his wife, Rabbi Zoe Klein, 33, of Temple Isaiah in Los Angeles, negotiated the challenges by taking different rabbinic paths.

Like any dual career family, their biggest challenge is finding enough time to spend with each other and their children, Jonathan Klein said.

But, the rewards are great, too, said Rabbi Zoe Klein. The family can be a “mitzvah machine” -- an instrument to fulfill God’s commandments, she said. “Our children [ages 2 and 4] can bring joy to people just by their fresh faces in a way that my husband and I with all our eloquent words never could,” she said.

One thing these couples seem to share is that the husbands tend to be feminists who respect their wives and their work.

At Pasadena Presbyterian, for example, Anderson’s name is listed ahead of her husband’s. That’s intentional.

“It helps people overcome biases naturally present in our culture,” she said.

Andrew Gutierrez, an elder at Pasadena Presbyterian, says having a husband-wife team has been a boon to the church.

“You get their undivided attention,” he said, because the couple are committed to the same workplace.

“When you have multiple ministers, they can have friction,” he said.

But when pastors are married to each other, they’re able to work out their differences. The combined gifts of a man and a woman also help unify various age and ethnic groups, he added.

“You’d be amazed how well they’re able to meld all these different groups in one congregation,” Gutierrez said.