"When I came over to say hello, the lady introduced me to her family, saying, 'This is Nick. He's the preacher's wife. I mean, he's the preacher's husband,'" he said.
Nick Mansuetto said the woman was embarrassed and apologetic, but he thought she had nothing to be embarrassed about or to apologize for.
"I thought it was hysterical," he said.
So did his wife, but Johnna Mansuetto also thought it would be good fodder for her next message from the pulpit.
"I told the story as a way to get it out there that Perryville Christian did have its first female pastor and, along with her, its first male 'preacher's wife,'" she said.
"I saw it as an opportunity to use a humorous anecdote as a way to break down any divisions or concerns about the new situation this historic church had found itself in," she said.
But the story went beyond the walls of the church and into the community, the couple said.
"Other pastors in town heard the story I told from the pulpit and talked about it, and people all over town soon were talking about it," said Johnna Mansuetto.
There has been so much talk, in fact, that Nick Mansuetto realized he had no choice but to adopt what everybody was calling him as a nickname.
"People call me the 'preacher's wife' on the street, and I don't know how times I have answered the phone and the person on the other end says, 'Is this the preacher's wife?'" he said.
"Now I go by the nickname, and so does my car," he said, adding that he had the "Preacher's Wife" vanity plate specially made in October.
The vanity plate and the story behind it are an example of the couple's sense of humor. They said that sense of humor is something that brought them together in the first place and has kept them together in a modern marriage between two hard-working, goal-oriented people.
Both raised Catholic
Johnna Mansuetto grew up in a small western Maryland town where she was raised in a Catholic family. As a young woman, she considered becoming a nun.
After Mansuetto graduated from West Virginia University, a nun who was influential in her life took her and other young women who were pondering becoming a nun to visit a Catholic order in Louisville.
"She wanted me to see what convent life was like," said Mansuetto. "I decided I was not going to live with a group of women for the rest of my life."
But Mansuetto's first career was strongly linked to the Catholic Church. She worked for a diocesan social services agency in eastern West Virginia and eventually became a regional director for the agency.
It was while she was living in Wheeling, W.Va., that she met a native of that city. Career-wise, they were about as different as night and day.
While her career was involved with faith-based social services, Nick Mansuetto's was devoted to computer science and business. After getting a computer systems and business degree from WVU, he went to work as a computer programmer for a company in Wheeling.
At least they did have their religion in common. He, too, was a cradle Catholic. They also shared a sense of community service, as well as a sense of humor.
The couple married in 1994 and over the next 13 years moved to Elkins, W.Va.; Pittsburgh; Florida; and Virginia, following Nick Mansuetto up his own career ladder.
It was during these years that the couple decided they wanted to convert to a new denomination, and that new church provided the opportunity for Johnna Mansuetto to finally figure out what her religious calling was going to be.
As Nick Mansuetto tells it, the couple "stumbled upon" a small Disciples of Christ congregation in a Pittsburgh suburb.
"We had started going to a huge Catholic Church that was somewhat impersonal," he said. "We weren't disenchanted with being Catholics, but we decided to look for a smaller church and found it in a Disciples congregation of 30 to 35 members that was meeting in a converted theater."
