Fixing the 'senior pastor loneliness problem' - with Sheridan Voysey

The loneliest person in church may be the one standing at the pulpit.

Pastors spend their lives surrounded by people, but ministry can make real friendship strangely difficult.

Confidentiality, responsibility, expectations, perceived favouritism and the pressure to “have answers but not needs” can leave church leaders profoundly alone.

Sheridan Voysey says pastors don’t just need supervision, systems or resilience strategies. They need real friends: people they can talk to, depend on, grow with and enjoy. People who know the weight they are carrying. People they can call at 2am when everything has gone wrong.

Sheridan helps us think pastorally and practically about the lonely pastor, the friendship Jesus modelled and how churches can give leaders permission to be human. 

Transcript

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Why Pastors Feel Alone

0:08

The loneliest person in the church might be the one standing at the front. That's what Sheridan Boise says. It is the pastor's heart. It's Dominic Steele, and Sheridan is with us back in Australia from the UK. Pastors are surrounded by people, but we often lack real friends. Not because we don't like people, but because ministry makes friendship unusually complicated. Confidentiality, responsibility, accountability, and perceived favoritism all get in the way. Sheridan Voisey is a writer, speaker, broadcaster, and founder of the Friendship Lab, but now also Friendship Lab for Churches. He's authored eight books. Sheridan, let us start with the pastor's heart for the lonely pastor. And you quote the senior church leader saying, the most challenging thing about ministry is the loneliness. Why can we be, or how can we be surrounded by people and yet still be profoundly alone? Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's not unique to any leader. Leader has always leadership has always been known as being a lonely place. It's it's lonely at the top, as people say. But when we enter pastoral leadership, there are extra dynamics that work against it. Um and uh and my heart, and I just love the the the very title of this podcast, Dominic, my heart is to see those pastors strengthened in this area, to be able to kind of break through some of the barriers that we in the church have actually placed against them having good friendships, um, and that they themselves have have raised in terms of barriers, uh, and be able to have that rich experience of having a couple of people, you know, the the cord of three strands, it isn't broken. That's in the context of friendship, to have that, because if we do, if we have leaders who have got close friends, we know that they stay in ministry roughly about two times as long, uh, they're able to have greater resilience, um, greater compassion, and not be able to fall prey to the various temptations that come when we are isolated. We in the church have caused this. I think I just heard you say. Oh, I'm not gonna go and throw too much blame. But we when we get into some of the tensions of friendship for church leaders, what can happen is we can sometimes, as participants, as congregants, we can kind of say, Oh, if that pastor gets a little bit too close to that other person in church, am I missing out in some kind of way? Are they showing preference for that person above others when they really should be impartial to all? And this is not a new argument. Um, the monks in the monasteries, you know, in the 12th and 13th century, started to turn against friendship. They thought, really, we shouldn't be having two people kind of connecting up to the exclusion of the others. It should be all the brothers serving each other and then serving the world on behalf of that. Uh I think there is there is some strength to what they're saying. We don't want to be partial people who form cliques. Absolutely not. But it's absolutely okay for us to have those people for whom we find there's a heart connection, there is a camaraderie between us, there is a brotherhood in which we're able to keep each other serving serving the world well because our emotional, spiritual, even financial, physical needs are actually kind of met with in that friendship. I was about to say one of my friends that we're talking friendship here in Soak's Complex. Um, a guy I used to go on beach mission with 30 years ago, now a senior pastor has just committed suicide. Um and he's the fourth senior pastor in the last six months in Australia that I know of to have committed suicide. Now I don't want to kind of push into the individual circumstances and I don't know the details of the

Suicide Risk And Friendship Gaps

4:05

individual circumstances, but it does seem to me that what you're talking about in friendship and real friends for senior pastors who are lonely pushes into this space. Uh, very much so. I mean, all the research shows that if you've got a few close friends, you have got lower rates of anxiety, lower rates of depression, higher rates of meaning, higher rates of happiness, greater resilience, and again, greater resilience for ministry. Um, we know that the opposite, when you don't have those close relationships, you are far more prone to all of those maladies. And then you add on top of that, that's just the general population. You add on top of that the pressures of ministry. When you're wrestling, when you're staying up awake at night because of the marriage that's busting up in your congregation, or the young people you know that are wrestling with substance abuse or something, all of those pressures. And then you add on top of that maybe some board tensions. And maybe some people in the church who aren't particularly happy with your preaching. And before you know it, you've got a recipe for absolute disaster. You just have, and we just at Friendship Lab, we we just want everybody to have three, what we call a 2 a.m. friend. Somebody you can call at 2 a.m. when everything has gone wrong. You just have two to three of those people who you can just have that moment where you sit down, you sit in a cafe, you go for a drive, you go for a ride, you sit over a cup of tea, and you're able to just share without editing yourself what is going on for you. That is immensely, immensely empowering. That's what I want all pastors to have. I mean, I I had a guy at church last Sunday, and he uh first time at church, but um somehow he was quite profoundly impacted by the talk. Um and we talked afterwards, and actually he had run the suicide hotline within the last 36 hours, you know, and then had decided to come to church. And uh I said to him, I mean, I because I've been thinking about our discussion, and you you used this term 2am friend before. I said to him, I want you to

Building Your 2 A.M. Circle

6:20

call me before you do anything stupid, and I'm gonna put you in my favorites on my phone, because every other phone, I mean, everyone else, they get go to voicemail after 9 p.m., you know, but there's about 15 people who are in my favourites who can ring me after 9 p.m. And so I sat there with him and put him into the favorites um so that he knew that I was gonna count him as a 2 a.m. person, you know. Now, but you're actually talking about a 2 a.m. person for me as the senior leader. And how do you how do you broach that discussion with somebody of are we 2am friends? You know, yeah. That's a real it's a real uh tension. Um, and uh my friend and I, my friend DJ and I, who he he's a pastor, and uh we've had this conversation before because you don't sit down and say, Um, you know, are you in my A list and am I in your A-list, or you know, are you in my B list or am I in your C list, etc.? You don't have that conversation. We were joking around, and DJ said, um, you know, just so you know, just so you're really clear, you are in my A-list. And I said, Oh, DJ, thank you, mate. And you know what? You to me are a solid C. And it was it was one of those things where you don't really have those conversations. Unlike romance, we don't have those markers where along the way we say, okay, at this point, are we a thing? We're a thing. Okay, then later on you have an engagement, which is a symbolic marker of the relationship. Then later on, you actually have a marriage. Friendship has none of that, which is both a strength and a great weakness because we don't know where each other is standing. So rather than have that conversation, better still is you go and you do what you can to be a 2am friend to that other person and to have those. Let's just clarify what a friend is and then the the DNA of it, just so we're clear. Yeah. So at Friendship Lab, we talk about a friend being somebody I can talk to, depend on, grow with, and enjoy. And the more of those you have, the stronger the friendship. But here's the other aspect of it the DNA of friendship, and this is very key when we're talking to people in ministry, the DNA of friendship is that it's equal, mutual, and freely chosen. So what you are offering that young

What Friendship Really Is

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man who came to your church was what we would call agape love, you know, that sacrificial. You are making yourself available for him. It's not what we would say for everyone. You can't. You can't. It's not what we would call failure, that that equal, mutual, and freely chosen friendship, because it's not yet mutual. He's not yet in the place for you. And this is very key because we in church mess this up all the time and we misunderstand it because we are agape people. And so we somehow think that the people that we are serving are actually friends. Uh, or indeed we might be in a position of being served, but it's not friendship yet until it's equal, mutual, and freely chosen. You work on that, and then we can start to have those 2 a.m. friends that we really can call, that you can call at 2 a.m. when you're having your crisis moment. It's interesting. I mean, talk to me about senior pastors and birthdays. Um, because when you have a birthday and a birthday party as a senior pastor, you have to try and work out who am I inviting to my birthday party? You know, because I can't actually invite everyone from every church, from every congregation. And and I don't want there to be a message of You're in, you're out. Well, you well, you could I mean, I've not used that term A-list, B list, kind of the way you just did then. I I didn't I don't think in those categories. But for me, I had a significant birthday. And 15 2009, I was sued in the Supreme Court. And when I thought about recently who I wanted to celebrate with, I thought, oh, it was actually the people who stood by me during that difficult court case 15 years ago, and then were still in my life caring for me right now. So there's a not very articulate way of saying what I think. Not far off a two-way friend, right? Most days they stood by you. Yeah. And no doubt you for them. It's mutual, it's equal. And they were there through for the long haul throughout loyalty. Loyalty is essential and trust is essential to friendship. Yeah. And so when it comes to birthdays, absolutely, pastors are in a real bind. Um, so some pastors get away, they uh particularly with a large birthday, you might have a larger event that maybe everybody in the church is invited to. But then you are it is okay for you

Birthdays And The Invite Dilemma

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to have a smaller group that you have that are your 2 a.m. friends, or indeed the the outer outer level from that. It is okay, and I want to get the message through to congregations over the next 10 years, that we need to give the freedom to pastors to be able to have those smaller groups for their own well-being and for the sake of the church's well-being. There's a push in our circles at the moment to make professional supervision compulsory. Um, one uh psychologist friend was saying to me, she said, she said something like, Um, I know this flies against the conventional understanding, but um I wonder if we're paying people to have honest conversations that they would otherwise that actually, if they had real friends, we wouldn't need this. Almost certainly. Almost certainly. So we've done some research with Friendship Lab to show that uh, you know, there's this kind of idea around that men don't really want to talk about deep things or emotional things. Actually, we've found that that's not the case. And particularly younger men are wanting to have those more emotive conversations. But when they turn to their mates, their mates get a little bit awkward, not too sure how to handle it. And so that's when they talk turn to their female friends. I think that we need, uh, particularly as men, but as leaders, we need to have those places and that that safety and that welcome and invitation, that I can have that honest conversation with you. I I met with my friend yesterday, and we just had this whole day of being able to share where our souls were at. And you don't need to edit yourself. That's the key thing. Uh, that, you know, as one wonderful writer Dina Craig once said, you know, you want somebody in whom you can let it all out, both the wheat and the chaff together, knowing that the faithful

Do Friends Replace Supervision

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hand of that friend is going to separate the one from the other. Uh, that's what we want. Now, that requires vulnerability, that requires uh that we actually that requires some risk. And a lot of church leaders have been burnt by sharing something with somebody else, and then it's been passed on. So there's a lot of barriers that we need to overcome, but we need to have those people. Um I want to work through some of the categories you've talked about. Um, the tensions that make it more complex for pastors. Um openness versus confidentiality, that's a tension. Yep. So friendship requires openness. Friendship requires that when we sit down, uh, you know that I am I'm not, I don't need necessarily need to share everything, but you know you need to know that I'm gonna be open with you about where I'm at, and that I provide that open space for you to be open with where you're at, and that if we don't have that openness, well, our friendship hasn't yet gotten to the position of real intimacy. It's good, it's probably the early stages, but not the real intimacy. Leadership requires confidentiality. So what happens when there's a, and there's always a clash for the between these two for leaders, what happens when the thing that's keeping you up at night is actually uh an issue of such confidence? Um it might be a marriage that's breaking down, it might be somebody else in your leadership team that is going through something, um, it might be some sort of major uh safeguarding issue, and you can't share those details. And your friend knows that. So there's one of many tensions in which you will face as a leader. Now you can

Openness Versus Confidentiality

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negotiate that with a couple of couple of ways. One is recognizing friendship doesn't require total openness. It's okay to hold some things back. Many years ago, I was sitting in a lounge room like this, and somebody who's now become a very close friend said, um, started to talk about the dissolution of his first marriage. But he said, you know, I don't really want to go into that. And that was 1999. And all of these years later, I've never broached that with him because as a friend, wanting to honor his boundaries, I've never actually, I know that there are colleagues that he had who know more about that than I do, but it's okay. So it's okay to honor those those relationships and those boundaries. Um the second thing is to recognize that you can practice graduated openness. So over time, you share just a little bit about how you're doing. Oh, I'm really wrestling with time management this week. How are you doing that? Those little those little things that aren't too massive in your life, and then you trust see if they are trustworthy with those small things, and then you open up slowly over time and find out if they're trustworthy or not. That sounds difficult. I mean, yes, I'm struggling with time management. That sounds quite quite a simple one. Very early. Very early starting. Yeah. Whereas um uh not being sure what to do about a complex pastoral thing well actually lives are at stake and futures. That's a you could share that with a peer, you know, but with somebody who's not in the pastoral ministry, that would be a complex thing, I'm thinking. Very much. So this is the the third thing that you could do is you can share the weight, but not the details. You can actually say, Dominic, I'm dealing with an issue this week uh that is just far beyond me. I can't go into the details of it, it would break confidentiality for them. But I can let you know that I'm staying awake with this and I'm I'm praying about it, and I haven't heard from God yet about this. And you can talk about the weight of it on you emotionally. That is an act of vulnerability that then uh connects you with your friends. They feel like they've given, you've given them an opportunity to serve you, but they don't need to know the details. But you can share the emotional weight of it for you. Vulnerability and responsibility. Um we as pastors, the job description is have answers but don't have needs. How vulnerable can a pastor safely be? So friendship requires vulnerability that I share something of myself with you. If you have somebody who only ever listens to you,

Sharing The Weight Not Details

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which is lovely, um, but doesn't actually share personally, you haven't yet gotten to that equal and mutual space of friendship. And yet uh you do have that place where you are in a position of authority. People are you're a team leader, people are looking to you and hoping that you are going to be somebody who can lead us confidently through problems, challenges, or indeed into just new frontiers. This is a big tension because how much do you share your own challenges? You can overshare, and so suddenly, you know, people who are oversharing in the pulpit, and then suddenly the sermon kind of becomes about them and their needs, that's inappropriate. There's the other extreme where you have a pastor who never shares about their own personal weaknesses, and that also is damaging, I think, as well. The research on vulnerability is really interesting here. If you share actually a little bit about your own problems, challenges, and weaknesses, it actually builds greater rapport and greater trust in the people that are following you as a leader. But there is a ceiling. There comes a point where if you overshare too much, or if you're constantly sharing all the problems that you're having, then it erodes trust. So again, that graduated openness is very important, I think, when it comes to, in general, the relationship that you have with your congregation. We need to hear that you're wrestling. We need to hear how you are as human as we are, otherwise, we will always have this unhealthy idea that you're right up here spiritually and we're kind of right down here spiritually. Um, we are all level before the cross. And I need to know that you've wrestled with something, or maybe indeed right now are wrestling with something, so that I can feel I'm not alone in this. Okay, let's go and let's pray together about this. Um, but again, vulnerability with the right people, the people that you've been able to build that trust with

Vulnerability Without Oversharing

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over time, with that graduated um uh sharing, so that then you get to a point where you might have some folks in the church that you find I can trust them with this. I don't need to share the details of it, but I can trust them with this emotionally, and it's not going to go beyond that. Again, too many church leaders have been betrayed when they have shared something personally and then it's you know gone off through the vines. Um, we don't want to have that. You have to test those people to make sure that's the case. So we can manage this with that graduated openness, uh, but taking a few risks and um and developing those other people outside of our direct reports that are really important. We'll probably come back to this a little bit as well, Dominic, is just keep in mind as we're talking that for the church leader in particular, I like to talk about three zones of friendship. There's friendship within the church with congregants and team members, friendship beside the church, which is peers, but outside of reporting lines. So it might be other pastors in your denomination, might be pastors in other denominations or networks who are outside of reporting lines, and friends beyond church. These are friends through hobbies, through sports, through childhood and uh university and things like that. Friendships in each one of those three zones can be the way to really have

Three Zones Of Pastor Friendships

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those healthy relationships that we need. What about um the issue of acceptance and challenge? Um, in that um, as a pastor, you you do need to challenge people, you do need to correct sometimes, you need to discipline people. Um, can you can you can that person be a friend? This is where many people who have gone through theological college um in their pastoral training back in the day, and in some cases today, are actually told you cannot be friends with people in the church. I don't know if you heard that through your training. Well, I hear it through many. Yeah, I mean uh I've definitely heard that line. Um and I mean now I've been pastor of this church for 24 and a half years, and um uh actually the people who I've invested most of my adult life are part of our church, do you know? And so uh somehow that's not been my story for a while. Can you call them at 2 a.m. though? Yeah, I think so. Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do they know where your soul is at today? Well, I think so, because I'm thinking of a couple of people, um, probably five or so, that they actually have watched me through that court case and known me for eighteen kind of years and um heard some good sermons and some pretty bad ones. Right. That's the more minority, right there. Prepared to disagree with me sharply. Good. Good. Another good point, yeah, indeed. So this is the thing, right? Friendship is based

When Leadership Must Challenge Friends

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on acceptance that we accept each other with our flaws and everything else. Leadership requires requires actually a call to better behavior. So it might be if you're developing a friendship within somebody in your team. And what happens then if they're actually part of the problem in the church, creating a toxic culture? What happens, for instance, if they're applying for a role in the church that you know they're just not quite cut out for yet? What do you do in those situations? As a friend, you want to say, yeah, go, I want the best for you. As a leader, you've actually got to have those hard conversations. How do we manage that? This is one of the reasons why back in the day people said you cannot have those friendships because you have to be, um, you can't be equal and it can't be mutual. You actually have to have that, quote, professional distance, pastoral distance, so that you can have those conversations. I think we can still have those conversations by recognizing that caring critique is, of course, part of friendship. So it's okay for me to sit down with somebody, or indeed they sit down with me and actually say, just speaking as a friend, I just think the way that you're dealing with that criticism, I I wonder whether there's something we can we can pray through together there. Um so one is care and critique is part of friendship. So let's keep that place, uh keep that that that part in the uh in the conversation. The second one is to uh to clarify our roles. When we sit down, am I speaking to you as a friend or am I speaking to you as a leader? And that can be very helpful. I need to put my we've been friends for all these years. I need to put my leadership hat on now because that's my my role, right? It's my responsibility. And so we need to talk about the rosters. And we need to talk about the fact that, you know, other people have been filling in a little bit more than you have. I just need to raise this with you. You know I love you, but we need to have this conversation. That's one way that you can you can manage this tension. Yeah. Um if a pastor has close friends in the congregation, others might feel excluded. Um, how do you navigate that? Yeah. Yeah, a friend is someone I enjoy, but friendship by its very nature is preferential. I prefer this spending time with this person over that person. And yet leadership, especially in the gospel, is impartial. Um, we are to love the world and not have, quote, favourites. That is a real tension for leaders. Again, it's not one that can, I don't think, can be uh is impossible to overcome. Is if we create a culture within our churches that everybody is welcome and everybody is in, and we have those moments where we have the church camps, we have the the church weekends and everything, we have those dinners, we have those major birthday events for the pastor where everybody's invited. I believe that creates an like an umbrella in which then it's okay also for the pastor to be able to have that close group of people that he or she has that time with and can have those special moments with. But again, I this will be my job, not your job. My job over the next 10, you know, 15 years is I want to talk to congregations and say, give your pastor that freedom. He or she needs those people that he can call at 2 a.m., needs to have those people he can just take off the clerical collar, metaphorically speaking, and just be Dominic, and just be DJ, and just be Sam and just be Sheridan. Um because uh without that, he's not going to be in a good place to be able to both live uh or to serve our church. Let's just think, I'm just thinking about the Lord Jesus. Um uh, because obviously he was focused on a mission of seeking and saving the lost, uh, and he calls on us to take up our cross and follow him. Did he stop for friendship? Where did how does friendship fit in being so single-minded in his task? Uh right. Well, you've given me another two hours in that question right there, don't we? So we

Jesus And The Gift Of Friendship

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know in John 15, of course, the people that he's working with, his colleagues, if you like, he says, you know, you're not just my colleagues, you know, you're my friends. Um, but let me jump to some other relationships that we often preach about in the context of other things. But that is Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. These three siblings are not part of Jesus' twelve disciples. We don't see that they're part of the 72 disciples. They're not Jesus colleagues at all. They're his friends. If you go and take a fresh reading of the three episodes of Jesus' friendship with those three, you will be astounded at all of the elements talk to, depend on, grow with, and enjoy that are right there. So Luke 10, John 11, John 12. In each of those three episodes, we find Jesus in or around their house. He goes to their place. So there's this hospitality that is offered there. But he's not going to preach as such, no doubt that he's a man of the gospel, it always would have been. But he's he's there, it seems to be, in the context of friendship. Look at the conversation that Martha has with him. She expresses not just her devotion to him, she calls him Lord, but she expresses her frustration in him. Can't you see that my my sister is sitting there doing being lazy, listening to you while I'm mashing the potatoes? You know, why don't you tell her to help me? That is frustration. We don't hear that kind of tone of conversation from anybody else in the New Testament. All the other conversation is very deferential. Lord, will you come and heal my servant? Lord, would you come and heal me? It's all very deferential. There is a there's an honesty of conversation going on there. Keep on going into John 11. And you find that uh when Lazarus is sick, who who is Mary and Martha's 2 a.m. call? It's Jesus. They come to him. They don't even need to mention Lazarus' name. They say the one you love is sick. It also says in that chapter three times that Mary, Martha, and Lazarus are the people that Jesus loves. And now, again, taking the Apostle John out of the conversation because he applied it to himself, these are the only people in the New Testament where we're specifically told that Jesus loves them. Now, of course, he loves the world, but we're not talking agape here, we're talking affection. We're talking, he loves these that these are his friends. Uh depend on, grow, grow with. My goodness. When Jesus doesn't go directly to help them immediately, he stays where he is and he goes later. And by the time he gets to their place, Lazarus has died, he's been in the tomb for a few days. Um, Mary and Martha are disappointed. Mary won't even go out to see him initially, and when she does, she says, Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn't have died. And so we see this role reversal. Mary used to be the you know, devoted one on her knees listening to everything that Jesus says. Martha comes out, she says exactly the same thing, and then she adds, but I know that even now, God will give you whatever you ask. She's been the one who's grown and changed into faith. And then enjoy John 12. We find that uh after Lazarus' resurrection, Jesus is back in the siblings' flat. I can imagine a little flat, and um, and they're having a party, they're enjoying each other. And I don't think this is, you know, a quiet night in with soft jazz playing on the Bluetooth speaker. I think this is a Middle Eastern party with music and dancing and storytelling and wine and all kinds of things there. And then, of course, Mary brings out that precious uh jar of perfume. There's gifts involved, they are celebrating together. Love languages, yeah. Yeah, it's it's all there, but these are not Jesus' colleagues, they're his friends. So look at it through that lens again, and you will find that he had people that he could just be himself with. You're doing this thing friendship lab and friendship lab for churches. What's that the church one about? So a conservative estimate is that about 20% of people in our churches are significantly and regularly likely. The population as a whole, about 25%. So we're doing better than the population as a whole, but we've still got some work to do. Um so we have been piloting, and we're just about to release, I cannot wait for it to happen. Uh, friendship Lab for Churches takes our evidence-based course that we spent four years developing, and then it uh creates it basically like a Christianity explored for friendship. So you can uh you run it as a church, you've got a leader's

Friendship Lab For Churches Explained

30:45

guide, you've got all the uh the videos, the videos do the heavy lifting for you, and uh, and then you can run it as a missional outreach to your community, and while you're doing that, it also builds the connections within the church. We have found in the pilots, we've had a mega church in uh Calgary pilot this for us. We've had uh a couple of 300-member churches, a 30-member church. Uh, we've seen it across all the church sizes, and we have found a whole bunch of amazing things happen. A lady who had never made a friend in the church for 17 years finally made a friend. A lady who uh finished friendship lab immediately the following week went and got baptized because she then wanted to be a part of this faith and this community. Um, we have seen uh outreach happen. People who came in from the community to be part of Friendship Lab got a glimpse, got a taste of what Christian community can be like and said, I think I want to know what the source of this is, ended up doing an introductory faith course, coming to faith. Um we're very excited about this because we've got a need ourselves that if we kind of work with that, we can actually give some wonderful things. We've got great gifts to offer the world, Dominic. The church is the best solution, I believe, to the land in this crisis. We meet regularly, we bring a variety of different people together all the time, better than any other organization. Let's just get the skills in place and let's get the clear teaching in place so that we can work out what friendship is, what it isn't, and then uh both enjoy it within the church, but also offer it to the world. There's lots more to ask, but we're out of time. Sheridan Voisey has been my guest. He's a writer, speaker, broadcaster. He's the founder of Friendship Lab, and now Friendship Lab for churches. My name's Dominic Steele. You've been with us on the Pastor's Heart, and we will look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon.