A Retired Prophetpastor – John M. Miller
A bigamist is anyone who is married to two or more people at one time. At best, bigamy is a dicey situation for the three or more involved parties. At worst it is illegal, at least in most nations, except Muslim-dominated ones. Even there, the four-wife Sharia law of permission is very slowly either being frowned upon or has become culturally banned altogether.
In Christian cultures, the word “vocation” technically means “a calling from God.” Therefore, if anyone is a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick maker, and believes that it is God who gave the individual the skills and interest to excel at those pursuits, that person feels his or her occupation is truly a vocation.
A profession is a vocation that requires a certain degree of academic achievement. Initials after one’s name identify what the profession is: M.D., Ph.d, D.D.S., D.O., etc.
Through its two thousand years of existence, the Church of Jesus Christ in nearly all of its many branches has relied on clergy to be the leaders of its denominations, congregations, or religious communities, such as monasteries or convents.
Back when I was ordained sixty years ago, graduates of Presbyterian seminaries received a B.D,, a bachelor of divinity degree. Years ago it was decided clergy should be recognized as having more than a mere bachelor’s level degree. After all, we took three years beyond a four-year college degree, so they gave us the moniker M.Div. There was no automatic boost in salary, but at a minimum it sounded more elevated.
In the minds of the clergy, as well in the minds of the people the clergy serve, the vocational calling to be a pastor, district superintendent, bishop, cardinal, or pope is a unique kind of vocation from God. Furthermore, it implicitly seems to demand more of the clergy to be what we are than for anyone in any other vocation to be what they are, at least in certain widely recognized respects.
For a thousand years, we have been led to believe, Roman Catholics allowed married priests. Apparently there were not many of them, we are told, but it happened occasionally. For the last thousand years, there have been no married Catholic clergy.
By now you may be asking yourself, “Self, where is all this going, and how does it have anything to do with most Protestant clergy being bigamists?” Here’s how.
Since the Protestant Reformation, a heavy majority of Protestant clergy of all denominations have been married. Maybe it was a subconscious way for us to say to Catholic priests, “Nyah, nyah, nyah! We have the freedom to marry, but you don’t!”
Well, it’s a step forward for what Vatican II called “the separated brethren” (the Protestants) to allow their clergy to marry, but in doing so we have turned many Protestant parsons into bigamists. For the past five centuries, too many of us felt married to our spouses, but also married to our congregations or to other clerical positions.
I was ten or eleven years old when I felt called by God to be a minister. There was no lightning bolt such as nearly killed Luther, who, when he didn’t die, is purported to have exclaimed, head toward heaven (which to Luther was up), Lord, I will become a priest!” I don’t believe God sent a jagged electrical charge to get young Martin’s attention or to coerce him into holy orders; that’s not how God works.
My own vocational calling was of a much lower key. I was born into a Christian home, my parents were fine people who took all four of us boys to church, never once asking if we wanted to go, I genuinely liked church, and so I became a minister. I was involved in a religious vocation for sixty years until I retired six months ago.
I have been married twice. In both cases, to my regret I realized in retrospect that both of my wives frequently thought I acted as though I was married to the churches I served more than I was married to them. For the most part, I think they were right. I cannot say that dichotomy occurred because I knew from the time I was eleven until I emerged from seminary fifteen years later that I would become a parson, but that may have been the subconscious rationale.
I readily admit this, however; I felt as married in some ill-defined institutional way to the five splendid congregations I served through all those years as I did to the two splendid women to whom I was married through all sixty of those years. How any of them, churches or women, put up with me I will never understand.
All of this may be aberrant or abhorrent psychology, theology, or ecclesiology, but I am convinced that unless members of the clergy do not sense a bond with their congregations that is something like a marital bond, they cannot serve them, as the Presbyterians say, “decently and in order.” Nor can they, as the marriage service says, do it “in all love and honor …in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health, as long as” they both stay connected.
The Roman Catholics may have made what seemed like a wise decision when they decided married clergy was not a good idea. However, considering how disastrously Catholicism is being properly administered by far too few clergy in far too many places, I think they may need to recognize that it better to have married clergy who become ecclesiastical bigamists like the Protestants than to have celibate clergy who have the one relationship most married people have that they believe makes them whole as persons ---even with the two constantly stressed relationships that unintentionally entails.
P.S. – I don’t think it would ever have occurred to me write this essay until after I had retired. – July 18, 2025
John Miller is a retired minister who lives on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org, and he may reached personally at jmmiller2407hhi@gmail.com