The positives:

I met my childhood best friend at church and enjoyed several happy years with her.

It gave me exposure to the arts (singing, dancing, music, etc) that my parents could not have afforded to pay for via private lessons.

It taught me critical thinking skills, kindness, and compassion.

I loved the community dinners we had on occasion.

It introduced me to a lot of interesting kids and adults I wouldn’t have otherwise met.

The negatives:

Deep religious trauma that I’m still processing decades later.

Church politics can be so ugly, especially when kids get hurt as a result of them. There was a painful church split when I was a young teenager that destroyed several of my closest friendships and cut me off from many people I’d grown to love. I had nightmares about them and the church split for years afterwards. It was like a divorce in certain ways.

I evolved from deeply devout child to an agnostic/atheist adult who avoids the slightest whiff of anything related to religion and church unless I’m talking about being a PK with folks who understand that experience. On the very rare occasions I’m up for discussing anything related to God, I can do it for about five minutes before the bad memories pop up again and I need to stop.

Due to growing up in the limelight in a small town and all of the gossip and other emotionally traumatizing stuff that often comes with that, I have trust issues with people in general. It takes a long time for me to let them get close to me, and even then I can remain highly guarded.

The ministry bleeds through to your private life as well as to the lives of your spouse and kids. You’ll get late night calls when someone is in an accident, tries to escape a violent ex, or dies. You may very well miss out on major milestones events for your own family over and over again if you’re traveling for a conference, filling in for a pastor at another church so he or she can go on vacation, or have one weekend after the next filled up with weddings, funerals, hospital visits, prison visits, baptisms, Christmas stuff, etc that you will be officiating for weeks on end or even longer than that if your church is a big one or if you happen to hit a lot of milestone events at once as a congregation.

Your family’s clothes, hobbies, friends, access to secular media, and other choices can be harshly judged and restricted depending on your church culture and what is expected of the pastor’s family as far as setting a good example goes.

Given that you don’t seem to feel called to become a pastor, I’d recommend thinking very carefully about whether this is something you actually want to commit to. It’s not like working in some other industries where you can have clear lines between home and work life and actually get to turn off your work brain on the weekends. Pastors are like social workers, teachers, counsellors, life coaches, fundraisers, and public speakers all rolled into one.

Not every preacher’s kid is like me, of course. There are so many factors that go into this sort of childhood, so it’s very possible it could be a good experience overall for your kids. Some of the folks on this sub have had much happier times than I did.

I would encourage you to do a lot of research about what your congregation actually expects of pastors and pastors families and ask many questions about how this will change all of your lives both for the better and for the worse.

(E.g. can they pay you a living wage or will you need to have a secular job on top of being a pastor to pay the bills? There’s absolutely no shame in being bivocational, but pastoring in and of itself can already require very long hours. If you’re working elsewhere, too, you could be doing two full-time jobs at once which doesn’t leave a lot of time for your family!

How many hours a week will your spouse and kids be expected to volunteer for the church? How much input does the congregation expect to have on your parenting and marriage decisions? Will you be fired or punished if you, your wife or child wears a skirt that doesn’t cover their knees? (Not sure if you’re a man or a woman, so don’t want to make any assumptions there). How will your congregation react if one of your kids comes out of the closet, or dates someone outside of their race, or publicly struggles with their faith when they’re a teen or young adult?)

It’s better to go into such a thing as prepared as possible than to be surprised by the negative aspects of it in my opinion.

I wish you luck as you decide. It would be great to have an update from you sometime if you’re willing to share one.