Should Pastors Develop Friendships With Members In Their Church?

While caution has historically been the rule, today’s pastors, including those with decades of experience, are making careful choices to develop close relationships with church members. Some say Millennials demand it.

A Baptist pastor and columnist recently wrote that becoming friends with members of his church was bumping up against his seminary training.

“The standard and dominant view is that the office of pastor has clearly defined boundaries and roles,” Kyle Childress said in a column for Faith & Leadership, an online leadership education journal published by Duke University.

“For example, I was trained both in seminary and in college that the pastor should never make friends within the congregation,” said Childress, pastor of Austin Heights Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, Texas. “Having friends, in this view, is fraught with peril at every turn: the dangers of showing favoritism or having cliques within the church, the temptation to break confidences, the undermining of pastoral authority and so on.”

He was also instructed that a pastor’s friendship is with God because ordination imposes “a holy distance” between the minister and the congregation.

“Maybe so,” he said. But then Childress added: “Maybe not.”

The answer is “definitely not” for some pastors, especially those of a younger generation or pastors of Millennials who expect little or no formalities between clergy and lay people, according to Baptist scholars who prepare seminarians for the pastorate.

And even pastors with decades of experience, and who led churches in areas where traditional roles dominated, say they fostered friendships within their congregations for most or all of their careers.

But there are yet others who disregarded such questions and who set out determined to blur, if not abolish, most or all distinctions between leaders and members.

Click here to read more.

SOURCE: Baptist News Global