Musings on Friendship and Such

My clergy group had our monthly meeting today, and we got into a conversation about having friends. Friendship seems to be weird ground for many ministers. We move away from our already established friends and families to new communities where we generally only know congregants and other ministers. So, those are the people who become our friends. However, there is often weirdness about being friends with congregants; i.e., they are friends, but we are their pastors, so things get a little muddy, and we're never sure how vulnerable we can or should really be with them. Plus, there is the tendency to talk mostly about church-related things.

Then there are minister friends, who are great in that they relate well to the peculiarities of ministerial life, but again, it's too easy to slip into talking almost exclusively about church matters. Because we're often talking about church with both groups, and because some of the most valuable church-related 'business' often gets done in these less formal interactions, it becomes difficult to define when we're working and when we're just having social time.

For me, this sometimes leads to feelings of frustration or guilt. Frustration because I always feel like I'm working, and guilt because I then wonder if it's kind of rude or disloyal that I think of time with friends as working.

One obvious solution to this is to develop friendships with people who are neither congregants nor colleagues. Easier said than done, that. Like everyone, we only have so much time and energy. But this has been absolutely necessary for me to maintain what sanity I have, so I highly recommend it to other clergy. Get out of your house. Get out of the church. Get away from people with whom you work. Take a class, or join an organization, or just go somewhere and meet people who do not have the common reference point of the church.

Many of the clergy I know forget how to do this. I've thought about offering seminars. With field trips.

The other aspect of this that I wonder about is the boundaries we put on our relationships with congregants. We're told in seminary that it's good not to be too vulnerable with congregants, because they need to be able to see us in our pastoral role. I become less convinced of this as time goes on. It seems unnatural and unhealthy to put up walls with certain people in order to maintain authority. It keeps us isolated, and it reinforces this idea of the pastor as being more perfect or a better Christian than other people in the congregation, which is wholly untrue. Clearly it is good to be discerning about how transparent you are with people...but that's true in all relationships. Trust unfolds over time.

I'm not so sure that maintaining defined boundaries actually helps people see us in our pastoral role, unless the role you want them to see you in is that of the Infallible Person With All the Answers. Ew. I acted in a pastoral way toward friends and family long before I was officially a pastor; it's not like God presented this tendency to me at my ordination. My family, even my parents, were perfectly able to see me in my pastoral role at a family funeral, even though they have been well acquainted with 30 years or so of my shortcomings. And afterward, they were also able to see me as their daughter, sister, niece, whatever, despite the fact that I was the one wearing the robe and speaking the words of the funeral service.

Ultimately, I think all this is the product of normal human vacillating between wanting desperately to be truly known, and being terrified to be truly known. To that, I have no answers. Just a lot of thoughts.