Why Pastors have no friends explains why pastors keep their congregation at a distance instead of having some of the congregation as their close, personal friends.
Who am I?
I have been a pastor since 1986. I am also a missionary. During that time, I have changed my views on a lot of things over years of pastoring because of brutal experiences. While everybody’s experiences are different, I am presenting to you some of my observations and perhaps these can help some people, especially those starting out in the ministry. It is really hard to believe that in all the experiences I have had, other pastors haven’t had similar problems.
A Pastor is to be “Friendly”
One of the requirements of pastors according to 1 Timothy 3:3 is that a pastor is to be patient, and not to be a brawler. A brawler is a person who has a tendency to be always seeking conflict and contention with other people. We are supposed to contend for the faith once delivered to the saints, not content with the saints and everybody else that disagrees with us in whatever point, however so small. In the Spanish Bible, the word for patient is “friendly“. I understand that to be that the pastor is to be friendly with others. That is a requirement before a man can enter the ministry of pastor.
The problem is that many people who congregate in our churches use that friendship to get something for themselves. In other words, these people become the pastor’s friend with the goal in mind of controlling the thinking of the pastor, the spending of the money of the church, or to influence very much the pastor. They want to have their hands on the steering wheel of the church. Most pastors never realize this until things “break“, the pastor has to “shut down” that person and their influence, and do things how the pastor thinks best. This has happened many times in the past to me. I think most pastors realize what has happened all too late, but then they fall into the same trap again with new people without thinking.
I have meditated a lot over this, and as a pastor, I cannot do everything in the ministry myself, so I have to use what the Lord gives me. Probably most pastors wish that the Lord would have given them more servants, better educated servants, better moral example servants than what they actually have. Here I am going to be frank. Divorced people do not fulfill the requirements for being a pastor, nor assistant pastor. 1 Timothy 3, the requirement for pastor is a man of one woman. That clearly means that he does not have two women on earth in any relationship or “ex” relationship living that had exchanged vows of marriage with them. Moreover, that single woman that is their wife (the Bible admits no women pastors, because no woman can be “a man”) has a family relationship with the pastor, and the other requirement is that their children are in order. They are not even required to be saved, but orderly.
A long time ago, I worked construction with a man that was divorced. I doubted a lot of his business judgments. I talked with my pastor at that time who knew him. He advised me that people who get divorces famously make bad judgment calls and decisions in their lives for the rest of their lives. I think God’s wisdom also enters here on these requirements for Pastor.
As a pastor, I am not overbearing myself. But I have been “blessed” with these great friends of the pastor many a time, and these “friends“think their “close friendship and confidence that they have with the pastor” grant them the exception to the rules.
God lays out a moral principle that the transfer of morality from one human to another has to be done through teaching by a teacher who lives every single moral rule that he teaches. His words are only 50% of the teaching, and the other 50% is the live example he gives through his personal life.
The most obvious and greatest and most important example of this is the teaching and personal life of Jesus Christ. He showed us this principle in person.
1 Corinthians 16:15 I beseech you, brethren, (ye know the house of Stephanas, that it is the firstfruits of Achaia, and that they have addicted themselves to the ministry of the saints,) 1 Corinthians 16:16 That ye submit yourselves unto such, and to every one that helpeth with us, and laboureth.
Our submission to other humans in the church and ministry context is based on the moral qualities in that leader. If they don’t obviously live the principles they teach, they are hypocrites, and the only thing people learn from hypocrites is hypocrisy.
Hebreos 13:7 Remember them which have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the word of God: whose faith follow, considering the end of their conversation.
In other words, yes we are to learn from these leaders’ teaching, but at the same time, we understand that their teaching is actually what they personally believe and practice. You cannot teach morality yet not personally practice morality. What you get is only hypocrisy, saying something is a thing, and actually it is not what it pretends to be.
My point here is that Satan wants to insert “his own teachers of morality” into the church, and yes, some of these people can preach or teach a sermon much better than I can, but that is the whole point. We accept these informal leaders, preachers, and teachers, even though they do not have their lives in order. If the best preacher that you have ever heard in your life is a homosexual, what moral principles can you actually get from him, and is the entirety of his ministry a deception? Yes. You only learn hypocrisy. Supposedly, we can “hold Bible principles” with every personally obeying those principles. This is why TV evangelists and pastors and their “Internet churches” are a farce, a fraud, unbiblical. They want to influence and instruct yet not have their own lives held up to the scrutiny of personally living what they teach. This is also why the entire denominational structure of churches is wrong. Some guy, often not even a pastor in a local church, sits in some far away place and dictates what will be taught and what won’t be taught.
Here the focus, the intensely hot focus, is the “man on the ground“. A pastor of a local church has to have a relationship with his congregation in which he goes into their houses, he “befriends” his people, he visits them when sick, he counsels them when they have problems, and basically is God’s “man on the ground” to work with these people on a personal and up close way. I have no problem with big churches, but when the pastor cannot have this upclose and personal relationship with all of his people, the church is too big for my understanding. He is not fulfilling his obligation as pastor. I have seen big churches which have several assistant pastors, and between them, they divide the people amongst them, and each one has a more intimate relationship with the group he is responsible for. I think that can work here.
But returning to our topic, these “agents of Satan” will weasle their way into a position of influence and power with the Pastor. This is a back door thing. In other words, a pastor of a church will have deacons and maybe even other assistant pastors. But the power brokers go through no personal life checks. They have power in the church because they donate a lot of money to the church, or they are friends with the pastor. We observe the requirements for pastors (assistant pastors need to fulfill the requirements of pastor), and deacons. But whatever you call them, finance committee, trustees, etc. these people get power without having to pay the price of admission, which is that their lives have to be examples just as the pastor’s life must do.
Whereas we set a norm that those who are deacons or leaders in the church, those who handle the funds of the church counting money and such, or are teachers or preachers, they should attend every Sunday and also participate in the evangelism outreach of the church. Because they are the pastor’s friend, they want to be excepted from those standards, and still basically be an unpaid assistant pastor. They want to pull the pastor’s strings. They really do not even see themselves as an assistant pastor, but rather as “the pastor’s counselor“. That evil is what I am focusing on here.Proverbs 11:14 Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety. Job
Some pastors really rely on these friends in their church. In eating out, in fellowshipping and relaxing, these are the people that are always with the pastor. At some point, though, things either become such that the friend who is always making the decisions for the pastor (counseling him), or the pastor cuts off that influence, and the friend abandons the pastor and church and moves away to another church where they can have a strong influence.
Proverbs 11:14 Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safet.
So the wise pastor will seek wise counsel, but not allow these people who are manipulative to be his counselors. A wise counselor to me is somebody who could very easily be a pastor themself if God were to call that person into the pastorate. Unfortunately, those people are very rare. Most of them are pastors. But “know-it-alls” who are very generous in telling the pastor everything he is doing wrong, or in the more sutle way, make “suggestions” of how to make our church better, are a dime a dozen. I note that when people tell us that we need to throw away all the chairs in the sanctuary and buy new ones, #1 He has no personal experience to base his counsel on. That person has never gone through that process being involved and at the head of it, i.e. dealing with hestiation and rejection of the idea. #2 Leading means going personally in front, living and doing what that leader wants his followers to do. That person wants the church to do what his idea at the moment is. But most notably, he is not going to donate large amounts of money to get it done. If it cost $100,000, and he puts up $50,000 to start, amen, go for it. Take his advice and money. But when they want to spend other people’s at his discretion, no. #3 Owning a decision with your own life and reputation. You can tell this guy is no good when you do it, half the church leaves, and he suddenly disappears. He is not vocal if he is even attending the church anymore. But if you have an evangelism campaign and the church doubles in size, there he is again counseling the pastor.
I was in a church once, and the invitation that they gave me as a missionary was, “we are having severe financial problems, so there is no chance of support.” I went knowing that, but I was only asking prayer. What impressed me with their bad situation was that the church had like 800 people in it, with a big building, and they went into a building program. Once burdened with that debt, the church now had about 40 people, a lot of them elderly, and the mortague payments were killing them. The pastor that got them into that debt left the church, and those few were trying to recover. Their evangelism and church growth efforts were all failing because who wants to attend a church with a $10,000 a month mortague? I do not know how that situation ended. But I do see where these excellent “know-it-alls” killed that ministry. Their argument was, if we have a bigger and newer auditorium, we will have more people come. Rather than save that money when they were running 800 each week, they took the church into a road of debt, using Hollywood, Madison Avenue thinking, and it was a disgrace to the name of Christ.
One time we had a family come to our church, and after about a year, the “friend” was constantly trying to make me react to others in the church, that they were mistreating me, they were not doing enough for the pastor, etc. I should basically “run them off“. He then said that he and I would be the elders of the church and control everything together (basically, with an iron fist because we were the most spiritual ones in the church).
Since I started the church and had been pastor since its beginning, I simply asked him, “I started the church from scratch, visited door to door to get the people we have, explained the plan of salvation dozens and dozens of times, and paid all the expenses for about the first 5 years of our existence, where were you during all of that time?” (In fact, where has he ever gone through the same in his past?) The point I made was that I am the pastor, and I already have that authority because of my labors and exemplary life, and why should he be any part of the church leadership being a “Johnny-come-lately“? Even at that time, he wasn’t active in the evangelism of the church. When I rejected his ideas, he left the church in a huff.
So there is a break or chasm between people who want to be important in the church, yet they don’t pay the price which is faithfulness in the work of the Lord, they don’t have a good testimony and work tirelessly for the Lord. The qualifying element that makes them the best or the only choice for leadership is because “they are the pastor’s friend“. Their “value” is not because of what hard work they personally have done for the work of the Lord.
Wise pastors have to be careful about the people to whom they listen to as counselors. It is very dangerous to work without counselors, and it is equally dangerous to let people set themselves up as counselors just because they “are the pastor’s friend.”
I note that their friendship is only to a point. They want to give me personally money, buy me expensive things, etc. Take me on vacations, hunting trips, etc. That kind of things. But they don’t want to tithe that money and pass it through the finances of the church and see if the brethren want to give that money to pastor, as a church congregation gives what they receive to their pastor. The principle of taking donations, entering it into a common “pot” (Proverbs 1:14 beware when people exhort you to “let us all have one pursue”), and then the church as a group decides how to use that money is the way God has established for this to happen. There is great wisdom in that. Furthermore, they want me personally obligated to them alone, and not to the congregation. That is a key point. Either they want to be publicly recognized for their actions and gifts, or they want the pastor to be well aware of what they are doing so that they have “an inside track” with the pastor, and the pastor has to listen to them, or he will not receive these perks.
As a side note here, the finances in a church is extremely difficult especially when there are poor people present. They want even small amounts of “the common pot” to go to them. That is why pastors delegate the finances to some who would seem to be more immune to taking money out of the common pot for themselves. I understand that there should be some “listening” to people who donate heavily to the church. But I do have a very good view towards these people when in general, they are not buying off the pastor. It would seem to me that in a lot of situations, this is exactly what is happening, and those pastors preach what these big donors want to hear, not the message that God wants them to hear. They have sold their souls to the devil.
But I think that there should be personal donations to people who need help. When we think that our churches are small democracies, then the largest faction of the church decides where the “common pot” money of the church should go. As a pastor, I see that as being very difficult to generate compassion for our poorer brethren among the larger congregation. If things are inclined to encourage person donations from individuals to individuals without a common pot which would require a common consense before giving something, then things work better than way.
The Difference Appreciation and Pastor Worship
We all like to be appreciated for what we do, especially if we put a lot of effort in doing something in an excellent way. But we need to really think this through. Why does a pastor do what he does? I mean, whether his church appreciates him or not, whether they appreciate him a little or a lot, that really should not make any difference. We serve God by taking care of him children, so whether “his children” like us or not doesn’t really matter. We have to faithfully discharge our ministry in such a way was pleases God.
Colosenses 2:18 Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind,
The word “angel” is various translated in the Old Testament and New Testament, switching between an “angel” (a spiritual being), and a “messenger” like the angels of the churches in Revelation. If we understand that point, pastors are the messengers of God to bring God’s word to the congregation every week. A Christian will lose his rewards if he worships “angels” i.e. pastors. It bothers me that some pastors live for that worship and exaltation.
The life of a biblical pastor is very often a lonely life. We cannot let earthly “rewards” cause us to lose our heavenly rewards. When a pastor worries too much about his friendship with individuals in the congregation, that usually causes him to be careful not to offend anybody. That seriously cripples his ability to deal with sensitive topics.
The rule of thumb would seem to not preach on problems of rich people (like exalting having money) because those people are who will most increase your church’s income. Where is there any basis of not preaching on the sins of rich and influential people? Show me a passage!
Why Pastors have no friends