Diverse Perspectives of Clergy Wives: Navigating the Challenges and Rewards of Ministry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Clergy wives occupy a unique informal role in the clergy and congregational system, though limited attention has been given to their experiences. This article aims to bring insight into the understudied experiences of clergy wives and fill gaps in knowledge about clergy wives’ roles and perspectives. Drawing on archival data of 549 clergy wives from the United States and Canada, collected October 2021 to January 2022, this article extends current knowledge about clergy wives’ sense of calling, the roles they have, the challenges they face, and the resources that support their well-being and resilience. Findings reveal a range of perspectives on calling, including a sense of calling to support their husband and be the primary person managing the children and home, while others expressed an individual sense of calling, and others a joint calling. Regarding their ministry role, many shared about filling ministry needs, while others saw their role as an involved member using their unique gifts. The primary challenges faced by clergy wives included unrealistic expectations and criticism, financial pressure, loneliness/isolation, and desire for recognition and support. Supports that clergy wives accessed for their well-being and resilience included spiritual resources, boundaries, and other resources.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".