Can pastors be friends with their church members?
This piece by Aimee Byrd has been on my mind, as she examined the assumptions behind such a question. Is the pastoral relationship a professional one that requires careful boundaries, or is it something different?
But I stopped reading when I came to this sentence:
“Maybe the problem of spiritual abuses that we see among pastors and congregants is less an issue of professionalism and more an issue of knowing how to be a good friend.”
Is abuse in the church a result of pastors who don’t know how to have friends?
This isn’t the only explanation, but I’m convinced it’s part of the answer.
Here’s my thesis: Most evangelical churches function on a business model, with one pastor as leader/CEO (even if there are multiple pastors/elders). This isolates the pastor and prevents them from forming safe and genuine friendships, because there’s almost no way to differentiate their “job” from their “real life.” Over time, the strange dual relationships this creates will become unhealthy or abusive, whether from pastor to congregation or vice versa.
If we want safe churches and healthy pastors, we need to change our expectations for how they work.
To illustrate my point, I need to tell my story of church abuse from the friendship angle. We can call it “The Rise and Fall of a Friendship.”1
It starts in 2018, with Aimee’s book “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” That fall, my former pastor and I read the book together, along with one of my female friends. She and I were volunteer deacons; the plan was to discuss the book and work through questions of how men and women could better relate at our church.
I still have the old string of emails we sent back and forth (the Billy Graham rule was a huge topic of debate), but one line stuck out to me.
In his final email, the pastor wrote to us, “Grateful for you both. You encourage me and challenge me to be a better man and pastor. Don’t stop doing that.”
That’s the language of friendship. Or so I thought. I read it as an offer of trust, an invitation to accountability. He wanted to relate to us as peers, rather than as leader to volunteer, or professional clergy to layperson.
It seemed like a deliberate shift of relationship, and a new mindset for me. In many evangelical, program-focused churches, the relationship between pastor and congregant tends to be transactional. These can certainly be “friendly” relationships, but it’s hard to be friends with someone you only see to do business with. The unspoken assumptions are something like this:
Church member to pastor: I’ll attend your service, give my time and money, and in return I expect good worship experiences, inspiration, and personal growth.
Pastor to church member: I’ll provide you with spiritual education and a community where you and your family can make friends, and in return I expect a portion of your attention, money, time, and volunteer labor.
I didn’t want that kind of utilitarian relationship with my church or pastor. I wanted genuine affection, reciprocity, vulnerability — the “church family” we all long for. After that email, I felt encouraged that our pastor wanted the same.
This is the first in a three-part series on how the challenge of pastoral friendships points to deeper problems and dangers in our current church practices.
If you haven’t yet listened to The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, it will familiarize you with some of the issues we’ll cover in the future.