The cracks in the foundation

The Rise and Fall of a Friendship, Part 3

I believe that friendship in the church (see Part 1 and Part 2 of the series) is an important subject when it comes to “re-membering” the body of Christ. Contemporary habits in the church encourage some members of the body to say to others, “I don’t need you,” whether because of gender or leader-follower distinctions.

In our last installment, we paused when the pastor declared me one of his dearest friends. 

This time, we’ll watch what happened afterwards, and why this was a friendship doomed to fail. 

The disaster on the way wasn’t just a result of the pastor’s unhealthiness — though that’s a significant reason — but also because the evangelical church-as-business model makes it nearly impossible for pastors to have authentic friendships. 

I still wonder: if he’d truly allowed me to be a friend — a peer he would listen to rather than a subordinate — would he have turned into the domineering leader he’s since become? 

Here’s how things went following that meeting in 2019. Having been declared a dear friend and invited to challenge him, I took the pastor at his word.

But in 2021, the cracks started to appear. 

Early that year, some divisive issues surfaced among the women at our church. (I won’t go into details here, but shared some of it in my Bodies Behind the Bus interviews.) 

The pastor initially gave me support, but within a month or two I realized something was terribly wrong. I remember vividly the first of many painful meetings where he seemed to see me as an enemy: while tears were running down my face, his face was expressionless as he observed me from across the room. 

He was trying to force me out of my volunteer role, but refused to explain why. I was willing to do what he asked, but needed to understand his motivation and clear the air between us. We were friends, after all, and that was more important to me than the details of my “work” at church.

But as I tried to reconcile with him, I became more and more confused. I found he’d lied to me a couple times. When I told him how much his behavior hurt me, I expected he would be grieved and want to make things right. Instead, he coldly said, “I’m sorry you feel that way.” 

It only got worse from there. 

I won’t address what I now recognize as domineering and emotionally abusive behavior, because I think that’s a separate issue. Whether or not he was healthy, we were stuck in a tangle of personal and professional relationships. 

Despite the fact he called me “one of his dearest friends,” there was a fundamental imbalance of power. He was the “lead pastor,” the visible spiritual authority who spoke from the pulpit every week.

Beyond this, he was functionally my boss: though I was a volunteer, I worked the hours equivalent to a part-time job and ran one of the largest ministries in the church. I reported to him, not the other way around. 

I may have been a friend, but I couldn’t be a peer. 

And this is where the pastor’s personal issues become irrelevant to the questions we’re exploring. Whether or not he was a narcissist, I believe the “church-as-business” model inevitably creates narcissistic relationships, reproducing something unhealthy despite our best intentions. 

When success and growth are the implicit goals of a church/business, as they are in most evangelical churches, relationships within the community become oriented towards those things. And this means a church’s image needs to be maintained, which includes the pastor’s image. And… image management is the essence of narcissism. 

When I refer to image management, this is more than maintaining a facade of success. It means the pastor must be able to see himself as the spiritual and professional leader, set apart from the rest of the church. 

For me to say “you’ve hurt me” — and to point out that he lied — was a threat to his image as “lead pastor.”  Image management prevented him from seeing my statements as that of a friend seeking reconciliation. Instead, he interpreted them as criticism of his work performance and an attack on his character. Here are a few ways he responded:

• He became defensive and evaded my questions.

• He said I was expressing “disappointment” in his leadership.

• He challenged me to bring charges against him — to file a formal complaint for church discipline. 

• When I suggested he was tired and possibly feeling lonely, burned out from the pressures of Covid and 2020, he said I was trying to emotionally manipulate him.

• He claimed, after several months, that he had “erred, but not sinned.”

Again, some of these were the result of his unhealthiness. But even though he’d called me a friend, conflict was revealing the barriers to actually practicing friendship. He could not seem to see our interactions outside of a leader/subordinate or professional-to-client framework. 

To truly be a friend, he would have to stop being a “leader” and submit to me in some sense — to see my opinions and perspective as equally valid as his own. He would have to listen to me as much as I listened to him. 

Unfortunately, that would never happen. 

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I hope to wrap up this series with one final installment. In Part 4, my goal is to compare what our “friendship” could have been with what actually happened, while zooming out to link my story to bigger themes in the church.