Friendship of a Pastor

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

It is quite amazing the things you realize at a funeral. There we all were, almost three hundred friends and family members, all of us there to honor my father who had just passed away a couple of days earlier. They came from all over the Midwest. The older folks, representing his five full-time and several interim pastorates sitting in the front rows to hear better, were the most conspicuous.

We laid my father to rest, and in doing so, we were really laying to rest sixty years of faithful ministry. It was my task to eulogize him for the family. As I looked out over the mourners that day, and particularly those tired souls in the front rows, I couldn’t help but think of the kinds of relationships that were being represented there before me.

How had they perceived my father? There my father was before us, first, seen through the eyes of a wife, certainly the most intimate of the relationships being represented. And, then, there were the four grown boys, less intimate but equally loving. There were four daughters-in-law. How did daughters tethered to this man all these years out of marital pledge rather than blood kinship view this man and his life? There were plenty of nephews and nieces who largely saw him past his prime. There were only a few of his peers left who observed him in his prime—no siblings, but a few brother and sister-in-laws. And finally, with the exception of the church custodian and the ladies who served lunch that day, all of the rest sitting there saw this man through the lens of his ministry amongst them as their one time pastor.

Of this latter group, I couldn’t help thinking of one of dad’s most memorable sayings while I was growing up: “My best friends are ex-parishioners.” Certainly he never made this little adage public, but there was something in dad’s past that always made him wary of getting too close to those he served. Perhaps it was a piece of pastoral wisdom that he learned in his seminary days from the forties.

Whatever it was, in hindsight I think this self-imposed ministerial convention left my dad privately lonely. Publicly, no one would have guessed it. Dad was a big, gregarious man. Our home was a big, hospitable place. Our family life was cluttered with people from all walks of life. Dad’s life was filled with relationships, but at the end of the day, few of those relationships could easily fall under the category of friendship, narrowly defined. Most of his friends sat outside the church door, at least of the church he was currently serving. Only when he left a church would he express friendship openly to certain special people.

The wisdom of this little saying of dad’s can easily be disputed? Is it wise for pastors to nurture friendships within their own congregations? If not, are pastors, then, doomed to a life of solitude? Aside for his or her family, where else is the source of community for those who are to oversee community to come from? What was dad so fearful of? And, what advice should young pastors be given as they enter into a profession that is enormously challenging, potentially filled with conflict, and often lonely?

Mick Jagger, Choir Boy

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

The title is, as they say, a literal fact. While it might be hard to imagine, the Rolling Stones front man did indeed sing in the church choir in his youth. I learned this the other day while perusing According to the Rolling Stones while waiting for my son to finish his music lesson. The book also featured some rather endearing reflections from Jagger’s bandmate Keith Richards on his own early musical experiences. The young Stone-to-be apparently spent much of his boyhood surreptitiously searching for primitive rock-n-roll on his transistor radio. He would hear half of Heartbreak Hotel…the signal would fail…and he would be heartbroken himself, yearning to hear the rest of whatever was troubling Elvis.

Now, in light of their subsequent less-than-innocent behavior, it would be easy to laugh these memories off. We might conjure up images of a young robed Mick belting out Jumpin’ Jack Flash at St. Peter’s Evensong service, or raise questions as to what else Keith might have been up to behind his parents’ backs beyond illicit listening to Chuck Berry. But there is something touching about seeing these notorious rakes as at least semi-innocent youths discovering the joy of music. We are so accustomed to their bad-boy rock and roll image we forget that they started off as ordinary kids.

And it made me wonder if a part of God’s astounding ability to forgive lies in the persistence of his memory. Throughout the Old Testament, God rehearses the story of Israel, nowhere more pointedly than in Ezekiel 16 (a passage, as it happens, with imagery as graphic as anything the Stones came up with). It is all here: Israel’s humble origins, God’s grace in the Exodus, Israel’s relentless pursuit of foreign gods, and the devastating judgment that ensues. One might imagine that God would completely wash his hands of this sinful people, yet in the end he speaks a word of hope: “… yet I will remember my covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish for you an everlasting covenant” (Ezek. 16:60, ESV).

Grizzled veterans of various sorts often like to weigh in with the phrase, “I’ve seen it all.” Well, God really has seen it all. What is remarkable is that his relentless recall has not left him embittered and hopeless; rather it moves him to compassion as he remembers how things once were, and how they might be again. I imagine it would give him great Satisfaction to one day see Mick Jagger back in the church choir.