Pastors, friendship, and the limits of boundaries

“Does being my pastor mean you can’t be my friend?” a parishioner once asked.

I chose my words carefully. “I can be your friend so long as it doesn’t stop me from being your pastor.” What I was really trying to do was to distinguish between two understandings of the word friend: someone who could be trusted, relate, relax, and not always have to be talking about churchy stuff, as opposed to a person who could fill an idle evening, offer emotional support that a late spouse used to give, and impart insights not shared with others. Yes to the first; no to the second.

We talk a lot about boundaries, those of us who like to regard clergy as caring, passionate, privately needy, and short on self-knowledge. And so we should, if by so doing we decrease the burnout that comes from becoming addicted to ministry, the damage that ensues from relationships that mask self-deception, and the fury in the child of the manse whose parent yet again is interrupted at a crucial stage in a Monopoly game by a phone call that should have been entrusted to the everlasting arms of voicemail. Not long ago in a meeting a pastor spoke of a colleague who had “poor emotional hygiene”—a coinage that impressed the rest of us, though we were all rather frightened by a pastor so consummately aware of his own needs and so acute in diagnosing the shortcomings of others.