Friends With the Flock: The Difficulty and Necessity of Building Friendships With Those You Are Called to Lead (Part 1)
I had a conversation with a neighbor the other day that has been replaying in my head ever since. He was - somewhat disarmingly - sharing that he was finding it difficult to make and keep deep friendships in his 40’s. I was surprised by his candor but drawn in by his vulnerability and willingness to share openly with me. If you are struggling to imagine such a tender scene between grown men in the Texan suburbs, it may be helpful to know that my neighbor is also an immigrant, also from South Africa, and also from the same neighborhood in Johannesburg that I grew up in. I know, the providence of it all stuns us too.
There is a near instant feeling of relative safety with someone who understands where you are from, who has walked on the street where you grew up, who has worn the same school uniform, lived with the same hopes, and been haunted by some of the same ghosts of history and the part we played in writing it. He and I are very different people, with different world views, different politics, different religious convictions and different life passions, but we are both from the same place. A bond of geography, of history, of shared space and overlapping time.
A friendship.
He then said something with the offhanded informality that comes from the security of a strongly held presumption.
He said, “Anyway, you won’t relate to any of this. You are surrounded by people who all want to be your friend.”
I must have looked bemused because he then quickly added that he presumed that my scenario brought some complications too.
It does, and I have been thinking about it ever since.
Pastoring is quite a lonely vocation albeit one where you are constantly loving and being loved by people, often many of them, but with the undeniable feeling that there is a gap between you and them, a separation of sorts, one that you are not comfortable with even though you know that it is one that all too often often you yourself have built and protected through some caricature of what a pastor actually is and the roll we are supposed to play as we live amongst a people.
Now, lest this be interpreted as a whine-fest, I want to be clear.
I love my job. I love the people I get to serve. I love sharing my life with them. It is massively rewarding and worth any of the small costs that it demands. Sue and I often reflect on how blessed we are in and through the people of the congregations we have been in. It is an embarrassment of riches, to be sure. In addition, pastoring in the suburbs of the US isn’t actually a very hard job and it is an immense privilege to do it. Most people I know who aren’t pastors have significantly harder tasks than I do.
AND …
Being a pastor has been brutal on many of my friendships, and I don’t think I am alone in that feeling. When I started to look around at lives of other pastors that I respected, I noticed something in the pattern of their close friendships, where they had any. Their deep friendships were usually shared with fellow pastors and ministry partners, or with people who didn’t go to their church. Most often, pastors seem to have fellow pastors as their closest friends. This is fraught with its own risk as their commonality is actually their vocation and experience shows that those friendships don’t tend to survive when the vocational bond is broken.
When I expressed some of this difficulty to a pastor mentor of mine, he told me that I really needed friends who had no vested interest in what I do. That was profound, and sadly defeatist, but I think there is value in the comment.
Why? Well below are some of the obstacles that I see in terms of being good, mutually beneficial, friends with people you are trying to shepherd in a church. I am busy writing a follow up post on how to overcome each of these obstacles as best as I can, because I believe that pastors must. I am vehemently opposed to the sort of pastoral engagement that separates an under shepherd from the flock in his care, locked away in green rooms or corner offices, and protected by outrageous fences of scheduling. Those fences don’t just keep people out. They also keep the lonely in.
All Christians are called to lives of sacrificial friendship and a pastor ought to lead by example in that space, so please don’t read any of this as an excuse for backing away from being a good friend. This is simply me trying to explain why I think I have struggled so much and why, perhaps, so many find it difficult because there are some real and significant barriers to friendship baked into the pastoral vocation, ones that must be overcome, lest we continue to be a lonely bunch.
Below are 13 things that operated as obstacles in my endeavors to be friends with the flock.
Your schedules won’t align well
I know full well that Sundays are only a part of proper spiritual formation in the lives of Christians, and I also know that Sundays are significant days of energy expense in the lives of a pastor. We spend hours preparing for them, we are very busy during them, and then we are exhausted after them. Now again, everyone works hard, and so this isn’t a complaint, but I have found that the Sunday to Sunday rhythm of a pastor’s life makes regular connections with friends difficult. The number of great dinners that Sue and I have left early on a Saturday night are legion, and cumulatively damaging to friendships, and the fact that my mind was full of sermon while I was there hardly helped and most certainly hurt. My Friday sabbaths which don’t align with free time for almost anyone else don’t help much either. Add to the fact that you will rightly feel a need to be present for your church members which will mean that you are significantly less available to old friends, and you can see why some of these friendships formed around the essential ingredients of shared time and participative tradition can struggle.
A lot of your work will be under scrutiny and critique
So much of the work of the pastor is public and open to critique. This is right and good, but it is hard to be critiqued at work by your friends. I don’t get to offer lunch time commentary of my friends who work at investment banks, and I imagine it would cause some insecurity if I did. “I don’t know, something was just off with Ted today. He wasn’t at his best in that board meeting, and his email management was really terrible. And what was with that outfit?”
I can clearly remember standing in our kitchen and being berated by a friend in our church for a recent email that we had sent to the church. It was one of the most disorienting friendship discussions I have ever had. It felt like a performance review. I hated it.
You will get ghosted a ton
As a pastor, you tend to enter into people’s lives in the deep end. It is usually something significant that results in you being drawn into their orbit. A loss, a gain, a wedding, a funeral, a divorce, or a divorce they’re trying to avoid. This means that there is an instant intimacy that feels like a friendship, but often isn’t. You are a service provider, you just don’t know that.
You think that perhaps you are a friend trying to help.
Then people get better, or they get worse, and the phone stops ringing, or they leave the church and you’re left wondering how you failed that particular relationship. Sometimes you did, and often you didn’t, but now you are treading water in the deep end of people’s messes once they have made it safely to shore or decided they didn’t want to be saved.
There is a gap between the pulpit and your living room
Most pastors love the stage, and the way we have centered the pulpit in liturgy and church life means that if we are victims of anything then we are only victims of our own design and desires. I know that. And yet, the pulpit is a place where pastors (if they are faithful) share their real lives and their real journeys with God in a way that makes them feel known and knowable. And yet (again) there must be a gap, although it shouldn’t be large, between the man in the pulpit and the man in his own living room, or at a diner booth, or on the side of his kid’s sports field. I know many will resist this and say that this is hypocrisy, but there is an appropriate, discernible difference between how I present myself in the pulpit and how I do in most of my informal life. I am quiet out of the pulpit and that wouldn’t work in it. I read from notes in the pulpit, notes of words that are deeply considered and agonizingly edited, but that wouldn’t be a good mode of engagement in regular conversations where I can tend to say unfiltered things that are altogether less precise than I would like.
The pulpit robs you of the ability to make a first impression. You walk into every possible friendship opportunity with congregants with them already knowing lots about you and already having suppositions about how you will and ought to be. I usually disappoint those suppositions. I can feel it happening. Ross in the pulpit seems like a fun hang. Ross at home in sweats is really less so.
Sometimes it will feel like your preaching is directed at them … sometimes it will be
I have hurt friends with this. I hate that. I am sorry. Sometimes I have used my observations about idols, insecurities, sins and doubts in the lives of my friends and preached to them on Sunday. That is a legitimate thing to do if you haven’t been a coward and have first pastored your friends through those same things without the protection of a platform and a pulpit and your booming Sunday voice.
The flip side is that I have had friends accuse me of doing this when I haven’t been. I have had friends who don’t want to confront their own sin even though I have tried to get them to, and so when the Scriptures call them to the same thing that I have been trying to call them to then they have felt like I was targeting them when I wasn’t.
It is hard to preach to your friends.
It is even harder to be preached to by a friend.
You’ll want to protect your family from expectations
There is a reason that the pastor’s kid trope rings true. They grow up under a weird microscope of expectation. I work hard to protect my family from this which means that sometimes I withdraw them too far from the undeniable blessing of church life. It’s a balance, and I haven’t found it yet. I want their faith to be their own. I want their failings to be their own too. I want them to figure it out in a community, a real one.
Failure feels fatal
Churches must be places where it is okay to not be okay, where it is okay to fail because we are totally persuaded of the power of grace to cover us. But how does that work in a job that has character requirements that cannot be broken, and where even small failures may result in loss of vocation and employment? People want to know that their pastor sins as it makes them human and relatable. They just prefer that those sins are small and sanitary and socially acceptable sins. Pastors must be human, but just not too human.
You will have to pastor them and they won’t always want that
“Are you being my pastor or my friend?”
My hurting friend asked me this through tears and the clenched teeth of an accusation that showed that the two roles were mutually exclusive in his mind. Sometimes pastors need to call people away from folly, away from patterns of idolatry and sin. Friends ought to do that too, but most friendships aren’t robust enough to endure it.
Money might get weird
Maybe this one is unique to me as I minister in a context where many people are wealthy or on their way to being wealthy. It is impossible to keep up as a pastor, and it would be inappropriate and ungodly to try, to be honest, but that does bring about a very peculiar dynamic. It feels self-serving to call for generosity when part of that will pay your salary. It feels like jealousy to question if maybe your friends are trying to serve God and money as you see their list of possessions increase. Sometimes it is.
At the very least it is a strange dynamic when your friends pay your salary and want to know what that salary is (and if it is appropriate) in the financial reporting of the church.
Disagreement over church will feel personal and very difficult for them to navigate
One of the toughest times I had with one of my dearest friends was when he passionately disagreed with a future direction of our church at a member’s meeting. I was so grateful that he was so invested, and I was thankful for the pushback as a sign of church health and plurality. But it was hard as a friend. He was essentially saying that the direction that I thought the Lord was leading us in was not the right direction. It felt personal. It kind of was and it kind of wasn’t. That is what makes it hard.
I feel for my friends in this dynamic. It must be very difficult to stand up and disagree with your friend and pastor. It takes guts. I was glad he did it. More painful by far have been the friends who have left the church over disagreement that they didn’t want to voice to me but felt very free to voice to others, including their new church community. I don’t think people will ever know how painful it is for a pastor when a friend leaves the church. Some do it for good reasons, some for trivial ones. It hurts every time and feels like a real friendship loss.
You can’t give the same amount of yourself to everyone
Friendship takes time and a good pastor is available to his congregation. You run out of math on that at some point and can end up with hundreds of inch deep friendships and no time for any real ones. I have some thoughts on how to deal with this which I will write in the follow up.
Pastoral burden is unique, not in its weight, but in its shape
All people carry burdens. Pastors aren’t unique. But they also are.
To be a pastor is to sign up to care about the spiritual wellbeing of all the people in your church. That load, though not heavier than the one carried by a school teacher, or stay at home parent, or insurance salesman, is a load that has a different shape. It is a shape that chafes, and bruises, and bears down with constant weight. It is a shape that is a bit like a cross, I suppose. In 2 Corinthians, Paul spoke about the burden he felt through the constant concern he carried for all the churches. I feel some of that.
It is a privilege to carry that burden, and to know that Jesus really does all the heavy lifting, but it leaves scars nonetheless.
You know too much
What a unique privilege to be invited into the private details of people’s lives. It is one that should never be taken lightly and pastoral confidentiality should be a significant value for those entrusted with some of life’s most sensitive pieces of information. They are slices of real lives placed in our hands. But carrying them is hard in community. Sometimes you will really wish there was more you could say because you will know things that others won’t. Sometimes others will really wish you would say more because they know you know something they don’t. The number of times I have had to excuse myself from a conversation because I feared that the weight of knowledge was leaking through in my countenance is too many to number.
So where to now? I will write a follow up soon on how I am attempting to counter each of these obstacles, because they must be countered. Some have noticed that I address the congregation as “friends” in my letters and sermons. I do. And I mean it.
There are obstacles to friendship with the flock. But friendship must be pursued nonetheless.
“Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” - John 15:13
