(August 5) It keeps happening. Pastors are reappointed, sometimes to another congregation, sometimes to retirement. The old appointment has ended; the new is in effect. But they go back.

The rationales are quite various:

“Ms. Brown died. I’d been gone only three weeks, so the family called me. I told them, ‘You’ll have to ask the new pastor to invite me.’ So that’s what they did. I wouldn’t have gone back unless the new pastor had invited me.”

“Maria and Juan had been youth leaders. They pretty much stopped attending after I left. After about six months they decided to get married. They called me to do their wedding. ‘You’re like a father to us,’ they said. ‘Please come.’ So I did. After all, the new pastor didn’t really know them and we had been very close.”

“When I retired, all my friends were in the church where I had served. There was no place else we wanted to live, so we bought a condo near our friends. I didn’t attend the church for six months, but, of course, I kept seeing my friends. You can’t keep someone from doing that. Sure, they sometimes talked about the church and how they were having trouble with their new pastor. I felt for my friends. But I was careful to tell them I couldn’t do anything to help because I was retired.”

I doubt that any of the above pastors had bad intentions. They probably wanted what was best for their previous congregations. But …

A major caveat

Oh yes, there’s a major caveat. All three had a confusion of identity. All three made it more difficult for their successors to become pastors in the eyes of their congregations. All three interfered with the ministry of another pastor.

Each, as they entered into pastoral ministry, had attested to God’s call in their lives to that particular form of service. Each had been appointed to a congregation on the basis of the gifts, graces and skills that they brought. In carrying out their call in their appointments they gained the trust and respect of the congregations they served.

When we as pastors serve a congregation, however, we sometimes forget that the extent to which we are trusted and respected is the extent to which we have been faithful in the ministry to which we’ve been called and appointed. We forget that it has been God working through us and begin to think that it is we personally that the congregation has come to admire.

We forget that this affection has come because of what God has done through us in the lives of these people. And the more we forget that it has been God, not us, the less we tend to believe that anyone can ever replace us. It is when this happens that we feel compelled to go back after our appointment has changed, not trusting that God can work through others as God has worked through us.

2 more thoughts

Two more related thoughts:

The first of these is about pastors telling former parishioners, “You’ll need to tell your new pastor to invite me.” That puts the new pastor on the spot: Either the pastor says “no” and looks like an uncaring jerk, or “yes” and gets invited. In other words, it puts the new pastor in a no-win situation.

The former pastor is the only one who can say “no,” and the one who must say “no.” And the former pastor needs to say: “It was God working through me that became so important to you. And God will work through [this new pastor] as well.”

Another concern is around pastors developing personal friends in a congregation. Being “friendly” is an okay thing, and having casual, friendly relationships with many people in and out of the congregation is fine. But whenever a church member becomes a “close personal friend” of the pastor, he or she no longer has a pastor! They then have a good friend who is a pastor, but the pastor/parishioner relationship is superseded by the friend/friend relationship.

Of course, they need friends, just as pastors do. But they also need a pastor, and if you allow another relationship to supersede the pastoral relationship in their lives, they no longer have one.

We who are church leaders have not generally addressed this issue, except when the relationship becomes one of romantic involvement. But the dynamics are the same. In either case, the pastor/parishioner relationship is lost when the personal relationship takes over.

The loss of a pastor to the parishioner is just one downside of pastors becoming close personal friends with church members. Another is that when this happens, other church members inevitably begin to feel that there are “insiders” and “outsiders” in the congregation and that they must be the “outsiders.” Finally, pastors who have turned parishioners into personal friends inevitably feel justified in maintaining ongoing contact with their “friends.” So they phone, they e-mail, they visit, they return.

Pastors need friendships, yet pastors need to practice a clear boundary in the professional relationship. This will build God’s people in healthy relationship, and these mutual supports will enhance our covenantal community better. Pastors should have good and full lives, but never at the cost of depriving people who need a pastor of being the pastor to them that they need.