One of the realities of pastoral ministry is that developing true, lasting friendships while serving in this role is exceptionally hard. While being a local church pastor inevitably requires that one develop a number of relationships, most of them I would not classify as true friendships. They were more in the category of cordial acquaintances or professional associates—utilitarian, functional relationships that formed because of the position I held rather than the person I was. When I resigned to accept another pastorate, most often the relationship largely evaporated. Out of the hundreds of relationships that Angie and I developed over the years, only a very few of them could be classified as true friendships—where the basis of our connection transcended the pastor/parishoner relationship. There are a number of people who I thought, when I departed from the church, that the relationship would continue and there would be an understood closeness. But most often that turned out not to be the case; there was a drifting apart to where the connection today falls into the minimal to non-existent range.
Don’t get me wrong—if I were to run into those people at an airport or we were to find ourselves, by some quirk of fate, vacationing on the same cruise ship for a week, we’d likely have enjoyable conversations marked by warmth and laughter. If they were to come to town or I were to travel to where they live, I could see us sharing a meal together and enjoying a nice evening out. But at the end of the day, the relationship would still stay in the acquaintance category—the conversation would be about surface issues and there would be a guarded feel to it. There is something about the pastoral role that makes true friendships difficult and contributes to the lingering feelings of loneliness that typically accompanies this calling. In a half dozen congregations over the course of three and a half decades, very few relationships have blossomed to where they can be classified as true friendships. Most people couldn’t see me, or relate to me, as “John;” I was always “Pastor John.”
Carey Nieuwhof, in his blog, recently addressed this phenomenon and said some things that made a great deal of sense to me. He said that when you hold a position of power in an organization, most people in the organization relate to you on the basis of your position rather than your personhood. Even if you approach things in a very collaborative and egalitarian manner and see yourself, and strive to conduct yourself, as a leader among equals, the fact remains that you still hold power by virtue of your position. Your words carry more weight. You have a level of influence that accompanies your position. And power does some really strange things to a relationship. The temptation is to not put yourself out there—to not demonstrate the vulnerability and do the things that engender meaningful relationships—so that you won’t feel the hurt and disappointment when they fade away.
In a local church setting many people—in fact, probably most people—cultivate relationship with you for reasons other than friendship. Maybe they have an agenda for what they believe the church should someday be or become and they believe alignment with you can help bring it about. Maybe they have something going on inside to where having a connection with the person “in charge” fills a deep psychological void, or emptiness, inside them. Chances are neither side knows it’s going on. But it is. While they use the word “friend” and the relationship resembles a real friendship in many ways, the fact remains it is always influenced by the power dynamic. When I say the wrong thing … or make an unpopular decision … or use my power in a way that doesn’t meet with their approval, the relationship feels the strain. In fact, in some instances, the relationship dissolved altogether. Some of these people “did a 180” and became the vocal leaders of a movement to have me reprimanded or ousted or, worse yet, cut me off totally and treated me like I didn’t exist—not answering phone calls, not replying to voice mails, not acknowledging emails or text messages. I realized that the connection they had with me as their pastor was a disposable commodity.
One of the weird things about relationships in pastoral ministry that made friendship elusive is that I couldn’t really talk to people about the kinds of things that friends typically converse about. For instance, I couldn’t talk to someone in the church about a problem I was having with a board member or a staff member who was driving me nuts. I couldn’t open up about doubts I was having about my ongoing effectiveness and whether my voice was growing stale. I couldn’t share about so-and-so being a gossip and the unrest and dissension their unhealthy chatter was creating in the congregation. It often left me feeling like I had no escape. One of the great things about Pastors & Spouses retreats over the years was that it created a safe place where I could share freely about some of these topics that were taboo or off-limits in my local church.
One of the things I’ve concluded is that a relationship can’t be truly classified as a friendship until the position changes. If a change in position alters or changes the relationship, then it wasn’t really a friendship even though, in many ways, it functioned like one. While it felt like a friendship and functioned like a friendship, it wasn’t really a friendship. For a genuine friendship endures when the position doesn’t. In some ways you don’t really know, as a pastor, who your friends are until something happens and they step back, creating distance in the relationship, or you no longer hold the position. For your friends are the people who are still connected to you when you have nothing left to offer them other than yourself.
As pastors, we’ve got to still cultivate and develop relationships. We can’t do what we do in a relational wasteland; we have to have people we’re connected to. But we must always understand that, as long as we’re in leadership, there will be a uniqueness to the relationship that makes true friendship hard. And if a relationship dissolves (and many will), at least we’ll know why it happened.