Love bombed?

The Rise and Fall of a Friendship, Part 2

This is part 2 of my series on friendship in the church. (Part 1 here.) I believe this is an important subject when it comes to “re-membering” the body of Christ, which suffers from divisions between pastors and church members, as well as between genders.

Fast forward a year. I’m now in charge of the newly formed women’s ministry, a volunteer role the pastor asked me to take. At his suggestion, we’re meeting once a month to discuss the ministry. Since I’m very unsure of myself as a leader, I appreciate his guidance and advice. I’m a little nervous about these meetings, but not because I’m talking to a man one-on-one. (The church has relaxed its observance of the Billy Graham rule: men and women can have work meetings, but always in public or in the office with the door open.)

Instead, I’m uneasy because of how I look up to the pastor. I admire his preaching and his leadership abilities, and I’m flattered that I’ve been chosen for personal attention. At the time, he was preaching every Sunday and had a second job as a leader within the nationwide church planting network we were part of. As a woman in male-led churches, I was used to pastors overlooking me. Now I was being called a “leader” by someone who must know what leadership is about. 

But as we keep meeting, I start feeling more comfortable, discovering we can get along well and seem to have things in common. We can even joke around with each other.

Then there's another shift. 

January 2020: We were taping an intro for a “women’s ministry cohort” to offer to the church planting network. We never finished the project.

At the end of one meeting, he asks if I would pray for him. Without mentioning names or any details, he says he’s working through conflict with someone in the church. 

Of course! I’m happy to be entrusted with the request. This seems to be exactly what he asked for in the email from a year prior: encouragement. 

A few days later, he texts with an update on the situation, and we have a few conversations about it as the months pass. He slips up at one point and mentions the names of the other parties in the conflict, but I trust that he trusts me.  

Finally comes the conversation I wish had never happened. 

We’re having a meeting with another person in the church, a difficult and tense discussion. And while trying to make a point to the other party, he says this:

“Joy is one of my dearest friends…”

Wait. What?

I’m stunned. I mean, I thought we were friendly …perhaps friend-like? But he’s saying one of his “dearest” friends?! 

It made me stop and reflect. 

I’d already noticed the pastor didn’t seem to have a lot of close friends in the church. He seemed to be rather distant relationally, and his schedule kept him busy, hard to reach.

But if he saw me as a friend, I needed to be careful and more intentional about how I related to him. I couldn’t keep “looking up” to someone who considered me a friend, a peer.  

So as I considered his confession, I determined that if he considered me a dear friend, that’s what I would become. 

And here’s where we need to pause the story to ask what’s happening. Because there are two ways to read this. 

There could be something good happening here. As Aimee wrote, “Even as someone who has been burned by spiritual abuse, there’s something in me that wants a pastor who can call me friend. Where there is reciprocity. Where I don’t feel like a client they are being paid to help, like a therapist, but who sees me like Jesus does. And Jesus calls us friends.” 

But look at it another way, there’s something sinister: “If we do encounter a congregation that functions to serve its pastor’s emotional demands, then we often find a narcissist in the minister’s role.” (From Scot McKnight’s comments about a book on pastoral burnout.) 

I’ve wondered if what I encountered could be considered “love bombing” — a term that actually has its origins in cult recruitment strategies. Love bombing works the way it sounds: throwing all kinds of affection and flattery at a target in order to attach them to yourself (or your group) and, in the process, build up your own self-image. 

The speed at which we moved from reading a book about friendship to “one of my dearest friends” was certainly unusual, as was how quickly he started sharing personal prayer requests. He showered me with compliments about my giftedness and value to the church over that time period, and in hindsight, there were other things he did that now appear overly familiar and even inappropriately affectionate.

Five years out from that meeting, though, I’m still trying to understand what really happened, and to discern what “should” happen between pastors and church members.

As Aimee said, I did want a pastor who could call me friend. I think I still do. But what would happen over the next few years has made me question if it ever was a “friendship” at all. 

Because – spoiler alert – the pastor did function in stereotypically narcissistic ways once he and I had conflict.

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Readers, what do YOU make of the story thus far? Have you seen or experienced a genuine, healthy friendship between a pastor and a church member? Should this be something we expect, or is it impossible?