WHEN THE SEARCH COMMITTEE at my current church was considering my qualifications, they interviewed some parishioners at my former church. The committee was glad to hear that I was close to everyone equally and did not play favorites. Although the committee viewed this as a compliment, I am not sure it was. It merely said that I had mastered the illusion of intimacy. For some reasons I will probably never know, I was closer to fewer people there than I had been at any other church.
This phenomenon has been discussed at length in ministry publications such as Leadership Journal and others, but the truth is even more painful at mid-life:
lthough we have relationships with many in the church, we may be close to no one. This is compounded by the fact that most every person in the church feels as if he or she knows the pastor on some level. Many of us, by our use of personal illustrations in sermons, may give others the feeling that they know us personally. They do not. Some pastors, especially from my generation and older, may even have denied themselves close personal friendships in the church out of fear of being cliquish.
Now past fifty, I no longer want to be a mile wide and an inch deep in the sea of relationships. I have recognized the importance of having a few deep friendships because I find they make me an emotionally healthier person and thus a better pastor. When I talk with other ministers my age, I hear that the lack of real friendship is a common issue. I know a few pastors who have given up the illusion of intimacy that several shallow relationships create and have said, in effect, “I don’t care if I make somebody angry or that a minister is supposed to be friends with everyone. I need close friends.” Not only is having friends good for pastors but admitting the need for them is often as therapeutic as the relationships themselves.
I began to feel this thirst for deep friendships when I was in my forties. Earlier, I was too ambitious and goal-oriented to give priority to relationships. As time went on, however, I began to make a few close friends both inside and outside the church. The need for close friendships was driven home to me when a church acquaintance, about four years older than me, came to visit. I asked him how things were going.
“I’m lonely,” he said. “Basically, if I died now I don’t know who would be my pallbearers. I have business associates and family members, but …”
That was painful to hear. I thought about my friends: the truth is, if I have no one to carry my body when I die, it probably means no one is carrying me while I am alive. I sensed he was telling my story as well as his own. Since then, I have made more of a conscious effort to develop good friendships.
As we head into the mid- to late summer of life, earthly friendships, in addition to our friendship with God, are key to a life of fullness. Friendships may be something we never had much time for after college. But now our kids are grown and gone—or almost gone—and ostensibly we have more time. One way to fill that extra time is to invest it getting to know people more intimately. Throughout this book I warn about the temptation to decelerate from pastoral work in mid-life. That is not what I am advocating here. I am simply saying that healthy friendships are critical to making the second half of life better than the first.
Friendship barriers
Contrary to conventional wisdom, I am not sure ministers are any lonelier than any other segment of adults. Loneliness is a society-wide problem. I read once that lawyers and physicians think their professions are the most susceptible to loneliness. Pastors may face some unique obstacles to building friendships, but these are by no means insurmountable.
One barrier I struggle to clear is a natural suspicion of people who seem to want to be friends with me, particularly when I start a new pastorate. Someone once said, “Be careful of the person who meets you at the airport when you first arrive in town, offering to carry your luggage, because if you’re not careful, you will soon be carrying their bags.” Bruce Grubbs, who has written on the subject of moving to a new pastorate, says the first few people who come to you may be “stalking horses” for the rest of the congregation. They may come with a personal problem, but everyone else is watching to see how the new pastor handles it. I have found both of these scenarios to be accurate to some extent. The negative for the pastor is that such knowledge can lead to cynicism, which erects barriers to friendship. We may react guardedly when someone seems to make overtures of friendship. The real fear is of being “owned” by someone. But if we allow this fear to dominate us, we risk becoming loners.
Other barriers come through people’s perceptions of ministers. We generally interact with people for only short periods of time. Someone pops into our study with a quick question; we exchange a few words with some after church; we attend Sunday school functions once or twice a year and mingle; we take part in a parishioner’s daughter’s or son’s wedding. It is easy to fall into a pattern, therefore, of talking only about surface issues. As a result, some people may think there isn’t much substance to pastors, so they may treat pastors like an encyclopedia—something no one reads all the way through or for any length of time.
Part of this may be our own fault. We pastors do not always know how to ask good questions, and asking good questions is one door to friendship. Part of our calling is to answer questions people have, so we may not be sensitive to the fact that someone may simply want to chat about his or her own experiences.
Recently, after our midweek service, someone asked me four questions about my time at a conference I had attended in the Silicon Valley. His questions guided our entire conversation. It was not until I got into my car that I realized he had told me that he too had just been to a conference in the same part of the country. I did not have the vaguest idea why he was there because I had not asked him. Instead, I talked about my trip as if I were reporting on how I had spent my time there as his pastor. I thought we were connecting because I was answering his questions, but he had no doubt been waiting to tell me his story. His questions were his way of saying, “I’d like to tell you why I was out there.” I missed an opportunity to ask about something that was probably vitally important to him.
I am sure he thought, What a bore!
We pastors may appear boring to others outside our profession, but not because of the profession itself. The nature of church work can be all-consuming; too many of us talk only about church. This is probably because too many of us have no life outside the church, and therefore it can be hard to find points of commonality with other people.
Don’t rescue me
The time to nurture friendships is not during pain. Rarely have I made a lasting friendship with someone when I was really hurting. Once while undergoing some intense criticism, I felt sorry for myself and thought I needed someone with whom I could talk. A guy came up to me and said, essentially, “Hey, I’ve admired you from a distance. I think we think alike. Let me be your friend.” I was vulnerable—and I got taken. Things I told him in confidence came back to haunt me. I spent the next several months retrieving bits and pieces of information from people who had been hurt by the information he had divulged.
During a tough stretch of church work, we can bottle up our emotions and be tempted to vent to the first person who reaches out in friendship. The danger is that we may end up a victim or worse yet victimize someone else by drawing them close for the wrong reasons.
For troubled pastors, friends outside the church are usually better listeners or at least can provide more accurate and less biased feedback, since they do not have to filter everything through your role as their pastor. Professional counselors can also assist. A friend of mine has a quarterly checkup with a counselor. He discovered he can allow anger to build to the boiling point and then let it overflow into his most personal relationships. I am fortunate to have a psychiatrist friend with whom I meet every other month. The questions he asks me help me to stay in touch with my feelings. Our friendship developed after he heard me speak at a civic club meeting and dropped me a note gently disagreeing with some of my conclusions. I followed up on his comments and we have been talking ever since.
I spoke at a deacons’ retreat at a church in a different part of the state, and in my talk I quoted something from Wired magazine. A gentleman approached me afterward and said, “You read the same magazine I read.” We started chatting, and I liked him immediately. Some time later, he and his wife moved to our city and joined our church. My wife and I both sensed we had a lot in common with them, so we set out to develop a friendship. We liked them and invited them over. It was as simple as that.
The only other alternative is to sit at home feeling sorry for ourselves. Two mid-life ministers told me virtually the same story—that they had experienced a breakthrough in friendships when they accepted responsibility for their own loneliness. I mentioned in a previous chapter the importance of taking responsibility for our spirituality. The same applies in the area of friendships. It’s easy to drink deeply from the well of self-pity and assume that no one will be our friend because we are ministers. Often people think we are too busy, so they don’t invite us over for that reason. The way to combat this misconception is to invite them over to our house. I have never regretted taking the initiative in friendship, although not every contact worked out to be a lasting friendship. I do regret not always taking the opportunity to ask someone to lunch or a ball game.
The deep and true friendships are those we make one on one, over time. I understand the value of accountability groups, but these do not necessarily provide deep relationships. In accountability groups, men are usually seeking information for a specific purpose, and most come with the attitude, “Let’s get him through this and headed in the right direction.”
I have seen ministers’ groups that seek to provide both accountability and friendship, but they tend to break down. Within the profession, it can be difficult to make friends with others because there is a subtle temptation to rank other ministers as our teachers, our peers, or our students. In general, friendships with other ministers can be fragile. A sense of competition—woven into the fabric of a male soul—often steers us away from each other. This is unfortunate, because it has kept people on the same team from building relationships. And competition does not necessarily diminish with age. It is a spiritual issue directly related to pride. Confessing it and experiencing genuine humility does not only make us better ministers but opens the doors to friendships.
Also, because so many younger ministers move frequently, some may think. Why should I get to know another minister? He’ll only be moving away soon. By mid-life, career moves often slow down, and sometimes the doors to friendships with those in our religious neighborhood may be more open.
The key point is this: The best kinds of friendship are those that are more relaxed, fuller, less structured than relationships that develop in accountability groups or ministerial groups. The purpose should be the relationship itself, and not common issues that bind us together.
One for the road ahead
Recently I visited with a man who has truly finished well in ministry. Now in his late sixties, he is often sought after as a pulpit guest and interim minister. He described to me a younger man who, through moral improprieties, lost his church and probably will never pastor again. My friend said of the younger minister, “I watched him first disconnect from his friends, then his wife, and eventually his children. Somewhere along the way he became emotionally disconnected from God. But I have learned that no one stays disconnected from everyone. Ministry is allowing your connection with God to guide you in all other connections.”
Ministry is a life of connections. We are connected to God, to our family, to our church family, and to our friends. Often the desire to escape results in a disconnectedness in one or all of these areas. To stay connected, we need to consciously choose to keep in touch regularly with these relationships.
I have been blessed with a few close friendships. One began in my early thirties, shortly after I suffered an embarrassing incident at the church I was pastoring. I was moderating a business meeting, when I literally passed out. It was assumed it was due to stress, but at my age I was not about to admit to that. I worried about being perceived as weak. As it turned out, I had picked up a virus while on vacation. On my first Sunday back after recovering, I felt as if I had to explain myself continually: “No, I am not under stress, I had a virus.” I am quite sure the church got tired of hearing this.
I also visited a couple that were in our church on that first Sunday back. My contact was routine; I simply encouraged them to worship with us again. The fellow and I connected. I cannot explain beyond that how the relationship took off. Looking back, I think he may have been the only person I visited that week to whom I felt I did not have to explain my fainting fiasco, but in the weeks to come our friendship developed, and our wives became close friends, too.
That particular friendship opened some new areas in our lives. I have never been much of a golfer but I golf because he golfs. He is not a big basketball fan but he goes to games with me. We have been friends for eighteen years, and that through several moves. We keep up with each other’s lives, calling about every major career decision we make. His geographical distance from me has actually been helpful because he can be objective about a situation. He asks me questions I may not even know to ask myself and helps me without ever giving advice. Because he is not an accountability partner, he is not judging me or checking up on my integrity. He is just my friend. Recently we were together again and the conversation strengthened my soul. Yet our meetings do not contain the “didja” language. Did you read your Bible? Did you pray? Did you have impure thoughts?
Instead, we tell about our journey. Accountability groups keep us holy. Friends keep us sane. I need more sanity in the second half of life.
Copyright © 1998 Gary Fenton
