No one told me how lonely a place the pulpit can be.
In most congregational settings, it is the place where the most eyes are locked, for the most amount of time, on a singular person. The people have gathered, the Word of God must be proclaimed. This is not the time for a panel or a discussion. God doesn’t call preachers for dialogue, but proclamation. The text may provide the content and the Spirit the power, but preaching is a one man job.
Neither is the pulpit the easiest place to “win friends and influence people.” Right preaching is the kind of preaching that faithfully speaks the gospel even if the time comes when “people will not endure sound teaching (2 Tim 4:3).” An inability to endure sound teaching also implies an inability to endure sound teachers. Lonely messages make lonely messengers. Even in the healthiest congregations, while church members may thank you humbly for a patient rebuke, they are unlikely to invite you over to dinner to hear more about it. Preaching may provide you with the right kind of honor and confidence before God, but it rarely provides you friends.
We’ve all seen the Barna studies(1). Pastors are lonely folk, martyr-hero types who would rather go down with the ship than ask for help in preventing shipwreck. There is a kind of hidden weight to pastoral ministry, particularly the public ministry of the word, that most people cannot understand or bear. Andy Crouch describes it well in his book “Strong and Weak”:
The drama of leadership is hidden vulnerability… This is what it is to be a leader: to bear the risks that only you can see, while continuing to exercise authority everyone else can see… Revealing this [hidden vulnerability] will at best distract, and at worst paralyze, the community we are responsible for, robbing them of their opportunity for real flourishing… We must bear vulnerability that others cannot see, and sometimes will never see. Hidden vulnerability is the price of leadership.(2)
On one hand, the members of your church know you quite well. From time to time you share vignettes of your personal life in the pulpit. Your children and spouse are noticed and observed, likely more than you or they might prefer. And as you open up the glory of Christ to the church on Sunday, you are often showing them an intimate picture into your spiritual life, since no good preaching happens without a transformation of the preacher. You are known broadly, which can give the false impression to yourself and others that you are known deeply.
This is because the kinds of vulnerabilities pastors and preachers bear cannot be exposed from the stage. While the pulpit is a place of vulnerability, it is not the place to unburden yourself of the weight of responsibility. But if there is no outlet for your hidden vulnerability, it will come out, often in a way that unnecessarily burdens the very people you are trying to care for.
Very early in my ministry I was thrust into leadership far too young after the sudden and shocking transition of the former pastor, and felt particularly lonely in my calling. I leaned into my “everyman” persona, hoping that the congregation could learn to trust me as they saw themselves in me. I still remember a meeting at a member’s house where what they needed was a gentle rebuke of their fear and some confident encouragement for the future. But what I gave them was my own sob story, commiserating their own burdens with more of my own. I shared my hidden vulnerability with them, hoping to gain some relational capital.
Little did I know that once I left, they set to work. In the next few weeks I received email after email from them, full of suggested courses of actions for the leadership problems I faced. Seeing their pastor so unconfident in their time of need, they were led to believe that the responsibility to care for the church must be theirs. Unknowingly, I had invited them into a weight they were neither called to or equipped to bear, and a problem which they had no authority to solve. Instead of turning them to Christ, the bearer of their burdens, I heaped a burden on them that eventually led to distrust of others in the church and relational pain for them. Within a few months, they had withdrawn their membership.
So where do preachers turn with the hidden vulnerability of their position? The same place everyone does: those who can both understand their situation and yet not feel any burden of responsibility to have to fix it.
In other words, preachers need friends.
Friends are rare, valuable, and worth fighting for because they don’t feel necessary. There is nothing utilitarian about a friend. A friend doesn’t want anything from you but to be with you. They aren’t demanding your excellence, requiring your best, or dependent on your well-being. A true friend is one who loves you just because they want to.
Unlike other kinds of relationships, friendship isn’t necessary to sustain life. Without romantic and familial love, no babies would be born into safe, loving homes. Without political and social relationships, we would be unable to structure any kind of society where basic needs are easily met. But without friendship, the world would still spin. It would function, but it would be a world of black and white, a world without flavor.
Friends are those with whom you can share your hidden vulnerability and your deep insecurity, who you can allow to see who you are outside of the pulpit. They are the ones who see your life not as a sermon or an example to model but simply as a gift to cherish.
Where does the preacher find friends like this? First, we should look for those who understand our work. Perhaps they are pastors or preachers themselves, or at least they understand the weight of public leadership. They have felt what you felt and your burns are not shocking or foreign to them. They can see past your public identity because it doesn’t impress them or intrigue them.
Second, we should look for those outside of our sphere of influence. It’s likely that the best of friends are not members of your church—or if they are, they are very mature, un-needy members. Their first thought should be for you, not for your church. You should be free to share with them openly and honestly, and even receive from them the “open rebuke” of a friend (Prov 27:5) without wondering if they will share this with someone under your care. This is why church networks, associations, and partnerships are necessary; if done with intentionality, they provide the relational context for these kinds of friendships to flourish.
Preachers can also ease the burden of hidden vulnerability by sharing their work in the pulpit with a plurality of pastors. After 7 years of preaching, I feel as if I am just now honing my craft, but by God’s grace I am preaching less, not more, than I used to. This opens me up to more relational vibrancy inside the church, as there is less pressure on church members to see me as “the preacher.”
In the end, the preacher must understand that friendship takes faith. Preachers must dare to believe that they are more than their title, that they can be loved for more than their work, and that at the end of every lonely Sunday afternoon they can rest well knowing that they are not simply servants of the risen Christ, but friends of Christ.
No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. — John 15:15
Why are we called friends of God? Because we know the ways of God, shown to us in the Son of God. To be called a friend of God is to be let into the family secrets, and one of those secrets is that God is always working his web of grace to stick us in friendship opportunities if we have our eyes open. He will not leave us without the flavor of life. If we ask him, he will send us friends.
For the Christian there are strictly speaking no chances. A secret master-of-ceremonies has always already been at work. The same Lord who said to the disciples, “You did not choose me, but I chose you” – that same Lord says to every group of Christian friends: ‘You did not choose each other, but I have chosen you for each other… At this feast it is He who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. It is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should, preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.’(3)
God is, as C.S. Lewis has said, the “secret master of ceremonies.” If we cannot trust his matchmaking, who can we trust?
- https:// www.barna.com/research/pastor-support-systems/
- Andy Crouch, Strong and Weak: Embracing a Life of Love, Risk and True Flourishing (InterVarsity Press, 2016), 130.
- C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), 89.