Pastors’ Wives as Partners: An Appropriate Model for Church-Based Health Promotion

Abstract

Church communities are increasingly recognized as promising venues to reach African Americans regarding health matters. The church has been a pillar of strength and empowerment in the African American community since slavery, acting as the center for education, business, political activism, and religious exhortation.1 Because church pastors are respected gatekeepers, they are particularly well-suited for organizing and stimulating change among African Americans. Thus, it is essential to engage pastors in health disparities research efforts. Engagement of pastors alone, however, without recognizing the significant influence of pastors’ wives, may result in missed opportunities for intervention with African Americans, especially women. The role of the pastor’s wife in the African American church has remained unrecognized despite the severity of health disparities among African American women, and further, the centrality of pastors’ wives as change agents. In this paper,we present a church-based educational intervention, Project Sisters in the Spirit (SIS). Following a mixed-methods design, Project SIS was implemented to assess (1) the feasibility of a scripture-based educational intervention aimed at improving breast cancer screening among African American women, including lay church women and both pastors’ and deacons’ wives, and (2) the receptivity of lay church women to pastors’ and deacons’ wives as lay health educators. Findings suggest that engagement of and partnership with the pastor’s wife may be the appropriate model for church-based health promotion among African American women.