Baker, that sounds right or at least plausible.
And now an anecdote from my childhood.
I grew up in a fairly substantial, and rapidly growing, suburban United Methodist Church. The United Methodist Church is divided geographically into conferences. Each Conference has a Bishop. The short version of how pastors are assigned to congregations is that the Bishop tells each pastor where he or she will be serving for the coming year. (As I understand it, today, the pastor and the congregation get some feedback to the process.)
Anyway, a little over twenty years ago, I attended the church I grew up in. We had two pastors, Pastor A and Pastor B. Pastor A was the senior pastor, lived in the parsonage, had a wife and two daughters. And is largely irrelevant to this thread.
Pastor B was female, had had a son while serving as the assistant pastor at our church, and was married to Pastor C, who served at a different church. We almost never saw him, for obvious reasons. I’m sure his parishoners almost never saw her.
Anyway, Pastor B was given her own church. And to replace her, we were given Pastor D AND Pastor E. Pastor E worked half-time with us, and half-time with the local Hmong community, and in fact became the first Hmong to be ordained in the UMC, as I recall it. I think we paid far more than half his salary. But he’s also irrelevant.
Pastor D was female, married to a Doctor. They had moved into our area from out of state and therefore out of conference. (Our state and our conference were more or less the same. Some states have several conferences, and I think there are states which only make up part of a conference). As I understand it, the Bishop and his committee were perfectly willing to assign Pastor D to a local congregation, especially as an assistant pastor, but were a little reluctant to let her transfer her membership from whatever conference she came from to our conference. They were concerned that she would only be in the area for a short time, and move again because of her husband’s job.
Pastor D (and husband) were seriously annoyed. They were a two-career household, and had moved more than once in pursuit of better opportunities for him and for her. I believe Pastor D served as assistant pastor at our church for about 5 years, and caused a bit of controversy when she had a baby. After baby was born, Pastor D spent about six months working half-time. The controversy came when Pastor A went on vacation, and the bullitin directed us to to contact Pastor D MWF 9-12, TTh 12-9, and contact Pastor F (a retired minister who was friends with our congregation) for emergencies during other hours. On the one hand, my mother approved of this setting of boundaries, to enforce the working half-time thing. On the other hand, there was something not quite right about doing so. Pastors don’t get to pick and choose their hours.
A couple of years post-baby, Pastor D and husband uprooted themselves again and moved east, and rumor had it that this was in part due to a desire to find a conference where Pastor D’s career aspirations would be taken seriously.
At that point, Pastor G and Pastor H were assigned to the church I grew up in. They are married to each other. And Pastor A continued to serve there as well.