Pastors’ husbands: Coping with 24 hours on call

Wallace Reed, husband of the Rev. Sandra Reed, pastor of the Bar Harbor Congregational Church, and Ted Fletcher, husband of the Rev. Ann Kidder, rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Southwest Harbor, acknowledge that the demands on them are likely not as severe as on their female counterparts years ago.

Wally, as his wife calls him, was an active member of his wife’s first church before she arrived as a youth minister. “I have always felt a commitment to the church I belonged to,” Reed says, “and today it is no different.”

Reed, 57, and originally from Skowhegan, is a deacon in his wife’s church and sees the support he gives her in her work as similar to the support she gave him during his days in the military. When he retired, Reed says, his commanding officer presented his wife with a certificate, thanking her for the valuable contribution she made to her husband’s career.

“The best professionals I know have a loving and understanding spouse,” he says.

A professor at Maine Maritime Academy in Castine, Reed says he is his wife’s “sounding board.” Because she is on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it is important that they each have their own identities and existences.

“We are really each other’s best friend,” Reed says.

A native of New York, Ted Fletcher, 41, has a more limited role in his wife’s parish, primarily because he has two small children, ages 5 and 6, and works full time as a lawyer, commuting five days a week to Bangor.

Fletcher has been married for nine years and says that time constraints and different schedules are definite downsides to being married to a minister. “Vacations take some negotiating,” he says.

And he sometimes feels that he has to be “a bit careful about standing out.”

Fletcher acknowledges that there are times when he feels a bit “voiceless, like a silent pillar.”

Fletcher sees an advantage to having known his wife as a minister before they were married. “In these days, with a particularly large number of older women finding their calling in the ministry, there are a lot of families having to make these adjustments,” Fletcher says.

Reed says he can’t remember the last time he and his wife took a vacation.

They were about to take one in early September last year. But after Sept. 11, his wife felt simply that she could not leave her flock.

Both men acknowledge that there is some lack of privacy in their roles. Yet, Reed says, understanding that his wife is often part of the most important and poignant times in a person’s life makes all the late-night and day-off phone calls seem less bothersome, and in most cases, understandable. And Fletcher says that the calls for the pastor to head out at late hours are relatively few.