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How to be your Pastor's Friend
4 rules for navigating this unique friendship.
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Why is it that many of our pastors—the people we respect and admire most—lead lonely lives? And why do many lay leaders feel frustrated in their attempts to build a friendship with their pastor? On the one hand, there is a tendency in every congregation to canonize the pastor in a way that Catholics wisely reserve for those long dead. We don't often argue politics, complain about the schools, ask him (or her) to help fix our fence, or tell him our favorite jokes out of a misguided notion that these things (and our interest in them) are somehow beneath him. On the other hand, in many congregations the pastor is also the designated target of criticism. If the sermon is too long or the hymns are too new, if the denomination is too liberal or there is not enough parking, the pastor takes the heat. What's a friend?We all recognize that our pastors need people who will accept them and enjoy them as they are, without either awe or arrogance—in short, friends. And most of us would like to be friends with our pastor. But what exactly does it mean to be a friend? In a wonderful work entitled The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis writes, "Friendship arises out of mere companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden)." If Lewis is right, there is really nothing we can do to become close friends. We will either share a common interest and common vision of the world, or we won't. We can, however, choose to be friends to our pastors. During the past seven years I have enjoyed becoming good friends with my pastor. Our relationship has developed solely through the church; as a result, I find myself relating differently with him than I might with other people. Over this time, I have developed, unconsciously, some "rules" for being a friend to my pastor. Rule 1: Preserve confidentialityI make it a practice not to share with others things the pastor has shared with me. Unless we are willing to preserve our pastors' privately expressed opinions, we cannot be their good friends. Why? A friend is first of all someone with whom you can talk. If our pastors cannot be assured that we will keep confidences, they will not feel safe talking to us. Preserving confidence is part of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer means, in his classic work Life Together, when he talks about "the ministry of preserving another person's reputation." If you have enjoyed a private conversation with your pastor on a given subject, you may know more than he wants to make public. That information simply cannot be used in conversations with others. Clearly, there is a component of sacrifice in this. I have a hard time not sharing with others the things I discuss with my pastor. Most of the time, such knowledge is of minor, everyday things, no different than the things we talk about with anyone. But within the church, as with any group, inside information (no matter how trivial) is exciting. It presents the opportunity to build one's self up in the eyes of others. Such building comes, however, at the expense of eroding friendship. The only way I have found to resist this temptation is to steel myself to not talk about even the existence of many conversations. |             | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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