The Married Minister
Dr. Michael A. G. Haykin’s little book, The Christian Lover: The Sweetness of Love and Marriage in the Letters of Believers, is a book Charlotte (my wife) and I have been recently reading. Haykin’s book reprints the love letters between prominent Christian couples.
In a letter to Sally Jones, Thomas Charles (1755-1814) records how John Newton (author of the hymn Amazing Grace) told him how marriage impacts a man for ministry. This particular letter is from 1780; they were married 3 years later. Let’s listen in…
I understand that you have marriage in view. . . . It always pleases me to hear that a minister is well married. There is something in domestic life that seems suited to improve our meetness for speaking to our people. The growing soul when doubled in wedlock, and multiplied in children, acquires a thousand new feelings and sensibilities of which the solitary bachelor is incapable, and these teach and dispose us to feel for others, and give us interest both in their pleasures and their pains. And this sympathizing temper is a happy talent for a minister to possess. It will give him a deeper place in the hearts of his people, than some more shining accomplishments.
And to Newton’s words, we say “Amen!”, because we know it to be true – our godly wives make us better men, better Christians, better pastors.
See Michael A. G. Haykin with Victoria J. Haykin, The Christian Lover: The Sweetness of Love and Marriage in the Letters of Believers (Orlando, FL: Reformation Trust, 2009), 58-59.
