The upside of loneliness is that it puts me in touch with my own needs — my need of God, my need of love, my need of other people.
— Ben Patterson
We were gathered in my living room, and the committee meeting had just started when Cliff, one of our board members, took me aside and asked if we could talk privately. We went into my study. My desk lamp was the only light in the room, so a shadowy gloom surrounded us. As it turned out, the gloom was entirely appropriate to what Cliff had to say.
“I don’t believe in mincing words,” he began stiffly, “so I’ll just come out with it. I’m resigning from the board, and I’m taking my family out of the church.”
“Why?” I asked, stunned.
“You and I haven’t agreed on much since this church began,” Cliff continued. “We just keep stepping on each other’s toes. I need to be where I can support the pastor and the direction of the church. And you need to have people on your team who back your leadership. This is for your good as well as mine.”
That hurt. Cliff was the third layperson in the previous two weeks to resign from leadership. The first had given me the sandpaper side of his tongue on the way out. The second had been gracious. Cliff’s style was all business, blunt and to the point. Despite the differences in their styles, all three gave the same reason for resigning: me.
It was my first pastorate, and it was a new church development to boot. We didn’t even have a church building yet. I was green, I was scared, and I was exhausted. The fact was, we were all exhausted. It’s tough work trying to jump-start a church, and the laypeople involved were just as burned out as I was. As always when a new church is getting underway, there was tension — both creative tension and some that was not so creative.
Cliff walked out of my study and back to the living room, where the meeting was going on. I didn’t need to be in the meeting (my wife, Loretta, sat on that committee), so I stayed behind. I couldn’t go into the meeting and put on a joyful Christian face when everything I had worked for in the past two years was coming unraveled. I stood alone, in my study, staring into the gloom, feeling depressed and sorry for myself. I broke down and wept.
I felt completely alone. Sure, many people in the church loved and supported me, but I couldn’t think of one person in that fellowship who was a close friend. I didn’t have one person with whom I could safely, honestly be me, the real me — tears, fears, clay feet and all.
The Loneliness of Leadership
Everyone in leadership will experience loneliness. It comes with the territory. But must a leader remain lonely? No. We don’t have to surrender to loneliness. Loneliness is a curable condition.
In my experience, loneliness comes in two different forms: the loneliness of leadership and social loneliness. The first kind, the loneliness of leadership, comes to every individual who
• steps out ahead and scouts the trail,
• strides the bridge of the ship,
• occupies the corner office,
• wears the sandals of a prophet, or
• stands in the pulpit.
It’s the loneliness that can be fully appreciated only after you’ve sat behind the sign that reads the buck stops here.
Sometimes, the loneliness of leadership means I feel the heavy weight of decision making — a weight nobody else can carry for me. Sometimes the loneliness of leadership makes me wonder if somebody painted a bull’s eye on my forehead. Sometimes it even gives me a kind of glorious feeling, like, “Gee, here I am, battered and bleeding, sharing the sufferings of Christ; ain’t I wonderful?”
But usually, I find that the loneliness of leadership leaves me wondering, “Where did everybody go?” I experienced this feeling in a profound way during my last pastorate. It was a church I had served for fourteen years, and in that church I had many friends — people I count as close friends to this day.
Near the end of my ministry there, I began to feel strongly that the only hope for our society, for the worldwide Body of Christ, and for our own local church was for us to experience an awakening, an intervention, a supernatural work of God. I had lost all faith in programs and projects and all the usual things churches do in the name of Christian ministry. We needed something truly extraordinary to take place in the church. Even though I felt this awakening had to be God’s work, done in God’s own power, I was convinced (and I continue to be convinced) that Christians can do some things to prepare themselves for God’s intervention.
So in late 1987, I began to preach my vision of sustained corporate prayer throughout our church, as well as in concert with other churches. I preached on the history of revivals. I talked about the changes that had to be made in individual lives and individual churches before the Spirit of God could move and act. I said one of the preconditions for revival is that we acknowledge our desperate and impoverished state, our powerlessness and our sinfulness, so that we could truly appreciate the magnitude of God’s grace and power. Finally, I issued a call for our church to commit itself to an intense level of prayer.
The congregation shrugged.
It was the first time I had felt strong resistance to a series of messages in that church. I had run my God-given vision up the flagpole, and no one saluted. There was no hostility or opposition, but there were no huzzas either. When people hear a joke that falls flat, they laugh politely, but it’s clear that no one thinks it’s funny. That’s how people responded to my vision: politely but without enthusiasm. I sensed many were hoping I would get over this revival thing and get on to something else.
I don’t say this to disparage that church. It remains a fine church filled with dedicated Christians, and God is clearly doing a tremendous work there. My point might best be expressed with an analogy:
I was like a trail scout leading a wagon train of settlers across the prairie. I had called out, “Follow me! California’s this-a-way!” Then I set off on the westward trail, confident that the settlers would be right at my heels. After the first couple of miles I suddenly realized I was alone. I turned around and there, off in the distance where I left them, were the wagons still huddled inside the walls of Fort Courage. I was hiking the trail by myself.
That’s the loneliness of leadership.
The Ups and Downs of Leadership Loneliness
This kind of loneliness has its upside and its downside. Let’s take the downside first.
Such loneliness can easily make one feel detached from the people God called you to serve. When I make a decision or take a stand that nobody rallies around, it’s easy for me to mutter, “Well, I don’t need these people. My loyalty is to the kingdom of God, not to this local church.” It’s like the feeling Charlie Brown expressed in the Peanuts comic strip, “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.” As leaders, we are every bit as self-contradictory as Charlie when we fall into the trap of thinking, I love the kingdom of God. It’s the church I can’t stand.
The upside of this loneliness is that it puts me in touch with my own needs — my need of God, my need of love, my need of other people. After about a half-hour of wallowing in that trough of misery in my study, I sat down at my desk and picked up the phone. I dialed the number of a man who had always been a booster and an encourager to me. He answered on the first ring.
“Dale,” I said, “it’s Ben. I need to talk to somebody.”
He seemed surprised that his pastor would call him with a need. He also seemed pleased that he was the one I chose to call. “Sure, Pastor,” he said. “Come on over.”
I went out by the back door and drove to Dale’s house. I arrived feeling broken and a little embarrassed, but when Dale opened the door and shook my hand, I immediately felt the warmth of his welcome. Though I didn’t stay long, we had a good honest talk. He listened intently as I groaned about my situation.
That talk with Dale was a gift of God’s grace to me. It was the beginning of what has been one of the closest and best friendships of my life.
Loneliness forces me to go deeper with my friendships and deeper with God. When I find myself out on the trail wondering, Where did everybody go? it’s time to spend some time on my knees and in fellowship with people whose wisdom and caring I genuinely trust. Loneliness forces me to take a reality check: Am I out on the trail all alone because the settlers have lost their nerve or because the trail scout has lost his way?
Social Loneliness
The second kind of loneliness — what I call social loneliness — is quite simply the loneliness that comes when you feel you have no close friends, no one to share yourself with and relax with. That’s the condition I found myself in during my first pastorate, when I felt my ministry was coming unglued, when elders were abandoning ship. Sure, I had “friends” — people with whom I was more or less “simpatico,” people who were cordial and supportive of my ministry. But I didn’t have tested-under-fire friends I could count on to be
• safe
• unshockable
• reliable
• honest
• gentle (when needed)
• tough (when called for)
That kind of friend is hard to find. Sometimes you have to seek them out. Sometimes, by the grace of God, they come to you.
I’ve already mentioned briefly how, early in my present pastorate, two men came to me and said, “Ben, we want to make you an offer, and you can respond to it any way you choose. We want to stand with you and uphold your work. We’re ready to pray with you and meet with you. We’re ready to roll up our sleeves and get dirt under our fingernails. If there’s anything we can do to support you and encourage you, just say the word, and we’ll do it.”
I was skeptical at first. Over the years, I had heard many similar statements. Sometimes such a speech means, “We want to be in control,” or, “We want to be in the inner circle, next to the pastor.” So I went slowly in my relationship with these two men.
But as weeks passed, I could see they meant what they said. They never attached any strings to our friendship. They never intruded on my schedule. If I needed help or prayer or someone to talk to, they were there — instantly and completely at my service. They have become my Aaron and Hur, tirelessly holding my arms up through the battle. It has been such a refreshing and encouraging relationship that I will gladly get out of bed early on a Saturday morning just to have breakfast and talk and pray with them. I’ll lose sleep to be with these guys, because they are friends in the deepest, truest sense of the word.
Furthermore, this experience has shown me that deep friendships have enhanced my pastoral role. Having close emotional ties to a few kindred souls in the church has helped to make the worship experiences, the funerals, the weddings, the births, and baptisms all the more rich and meaningful.
Though some pastors — afraid of appearing to have favorites — try to have a lot of relatively superficial relationships throughout the congregation, I can’t. I can’t be friends with everybody. I have to have a few close friendships. I can’t deny my own humanness, my need for friendships.
Loneliness Barriers
Still, it’s not as if we can simply decide to make friends and do it. Some barriers stand between us, as pastors, and the friends we need, barriers that need to be overcome.
Some parishioners, for instance, want to keep us up on a pedestal, as little porcelain icons. They may want to see us up close and personal — that is, they may enjoy having lunch with us, working with us in ministry, or talking theology or C. S. Lewis with us. But many laypeople are not prepared to see us as fallible, vulnerable human beings.
They’ll acknowledge our humanity in a general way (“Sure, I know he’s not perfect …”), but they really cannot handle getting close enough to see that we hurt, we bleed, we experience doubts and fears, we cry, we swear, we argue with our wives, we yell at our kids, we kick the dog. If people actually see us doing the same things under pressure that others do, they think less of us — at least some people do. They think, Gee, I thought this guy was a servant of God. I guess I was wrong.
In some sense, we should be on a pedestal, for example, when we preach. When we step into the pulpit, we should do so with prophetic, transcendent authority. I’ve even said from the pulpit, “When I preach, I want you to give me the same attention and respect you would give to Jesus himself, because I believe he wants to say something to you today.”
The problem — for me and many of my parishioners — is that it’s hard to change hats when I step out of the pulpit. The question becomes, how do I become real and vulnerable outside of the pulpit without undermining my authority inside the pulpit?
In addition, institutional expectations tend to separate me from the people. If I am expected to give the bulk of my time to programs, administration, preaching, and other organizational duties, I don’t have much time for friends. Yes, I will spend lots of time with people — meeting with them, planning with them, attending banquets and luncheons with them, teaching them, and preaching to them — but I won’t spend much time visiting with them in their homes or counseling with them. I won’t have time to simply relax with them and get to know them.
It’s amazing the degree to which this holds true in my own life. I live right next door to one of my parishioners — and I never see him except on Sunday! When Jeff shakes my hand on the way out of the sanctuary, we always laugh and say, “See you next Sunday!”
Then there’s the busyness perception. Many parishioners I would like to spend time with think I’m too busy to welcome a social invitation. Frankly, I’d make time if I received such invitations, but I don’t get many invitations to parties or concerts or quiet, relaxing dinners with friends. I often hear, “I didn’t bother to call you because I know you’re so busy.” People are always amazed when I tell them I’m glad to be invited out.
On the other hand, a few people continually invite you out, try to befriend you, and you know that it is unlikely you will develop a friendship. You don’t dislike the person; you simply recognize that, for one reason or another, there is little potential for a deep friendship to ever emerge. This sounds harsh, but it’s true. You often find yourself spending social time with people you’d rather not.
It’s not cold or unloving not to be someone’s best friend. I can still be that person’s pastor; I can still seek to shepherd this person in issues of heart and spirit. But I can’t be everybody’s best friend. That means I will have to turn down invitations for lunch or to play golf from time to time. On one occasion I even had to say to someone, “I can’t be your close friend. I care about you, and I want to minister to you, but I can’t be your buddy.” That was hard, and this individual was clearly hurt. But I know it was the right thing to do.
Internal Blocks
These loneliness barriers above are all external barriers. But for many of us, the real cause of our loneliness as leaders lies not without but within, in internal blockages that prevent deep, close friendships.
As we already noted, pastors are prone to busyness. But some of us are driven to lead busier lives than necessary. When we are compulsive about work, it’s going to interfere with relationships.
In every true friendship, there is a beautiful, exuberant, almost wanton carelessness about time. Some of the most important “work” that is done when two good friends get together is “killing time.” And “killing time” is anathema to the workaholic. When a workaholic gets together with friends, he anxiously rubs his hands together and wants to have an earnest conversation, and usually that means talking shop.
I know a few intense, workaholic pastors who approach friendships with the same compulsive intensity that they approach everything else. They think to themselves, The big lack in my life is friendships. I must make friends! So they become “open” and “honest” in a studied, almost posed way. They salt their conversation with a few profane words to show they are being “real.” They approach friendship as a task like any other, and the result is that friendships are killed. It would be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic.
In a true, close friendship, people have to take time to lighten up, to let go of the need to talk about “important” subjects. Trivialities are important in a friendship. So is silliness. And the most serious business of any friendship is laughter. Frankly, workaholics are bores.
In addition, it’s not uncommon for leaders to feel like impostors. We are often called to carry responsibilities far beyond our abilities. Sometimes we feel, If people really saw me for who I am, I would be seen as a fraud. I’m just passing myself off as spiritual or likable or knowledgeable or capable — and someday the jig is going to be up, and I will be unmasked. We fear the rejection and the withdrawal of love and friendship that would bring.
The impostor complex causes us to withdraw or withhold ourselves from others. No one can accept the real me, we think, so we project a persona instead.
Another internal block that often leads to loneliness is, ironically, that we are ill at ease with ourselves. We are uncomfortable in our own company. The philosopher Blaise Pascal once observed that the preponderance of human problems comes down to our inability to sit alone in a room.
When we are uncomfortable in our own company, we are unable to have rich, meaningful relationships with other people. If I’m afraid of what I will find whenever I look deep inside myself, then clearly I am going to be terrified of disclosing my deepest self to others. As a result, all my relationships will be superficial at best — and I am doomed to remain lonely. I will be lonely even in the company of my wife, my children, and my friends because the deepest part of me will remain hidden from view.
Finally, we fear betrayal. Once I was leading an important goal-setting meeting involving most of the staff and lay leaders in the church. A close friend of mine thought that some of the ideas I was proposing were completely wrong-headed, and he had told me so in private. Because of our friendship, he wouldn’t attack my ideas head-on in the meeting, so instead he dealt them glancing blows. He is blessed (and sometimes cursed) with an agile wit, and he delivered a wisecrack during the meeting that was devastatingly funny.
It really hurt. My friend didn’t intend to be cruel, but I felt like a complete idiot nonetheless. Few things are more painful in life than being sabotaged by a close friend.
My nimble-witted pal immediately regretted what he had said, and he has since apologized for it. But I learned it’s possible that a good friend and I will find ourselves on opposite sides of an issue in the church.
As we go deeper into relationship with another person, we disclose hidden recesses of ourselves, and we make ourselves vulnerable. Our friend may betray or misunderstand us. Or he or she may become disappointed, or horrified, by who we are.
It is natural to fear rejection and betrayal, but the risks that come with investing in deep relationships are worth taking. If we don’t acknowledge and accept those risks, we doom ourselves to loneliness.
Seven Keys to Unlocking Loneliness
Out of my own trial-and-error experience, I’ve discovered a number of keys to help me find and maintain close friendships. They minimize the risks and deepen the joy of investing in relationships:
• Take the initiative. Most of us give little conscious thought and planning to our contacts with others. When I’m feeling alone and friendless, that’s a sign I need to give more focused attention to forming new friendships or to renewing existing relationships.
Instead of saying, “We ought to get together sometime,” I need to open my planner and say, “When is your next free evening?” Instead of wondering why I never get invited out, I need to call a friend and say, “What are you doing Friday night?” Friendships are too important to leave to chance. They need intentional care and nurture.
• Seek friends who make few demands. One sign of a good friend is that he or she doesn’t try to get something out of you. Good friends don’t clutch at each other; they hold each other lightly. In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis says that friendship is the most free and least binding form of love. I have found that to be true.
After a worship service, church meeting, or potluck usually a number of people flock to me and want to talk. The interesting thing is that my best and closest friends seldom approach me at those moments. They instinctively know not to place additional demands on my time. When I am in my pastoral role, they back off because they know I need to be available to as many people as possible.
• Seek friends who are fundamentally sound. I believe it is critically important to seek out friends who are fundamentally sound and comfortable with themselves. These are people with whom I will be taking off my mask; I need to know they have the insight and ego-strength to unmask as well.
This is not to say that we should seek out people who have seemingly few problems. We are all broken people to one degree or another. Yet I have been fortunate to have found a few confidants and intimates who are, in heart and soul, fundamentally healthy, who have the ability (as Pascal said) to sit alone in a room, who have the honesty and strength to enter into a mutual, vulnerable relationship with another human being.
• Seek friendships with peers. God often speaks to my wife, Loretta, in the middle of the night. She wakes up, and she has a message for me, and it’s uncanny how often that message is exactly what I need to hear.
One morning, I arose early; I dressed and started to walk out of the room. Then I heard my wife’s muffled voice from under the covers of the bed: “You need a friend outside the church, someone who is your professional peer.”
Later that week, I shared with my men’s group what my wife had said. One of the men in the group said, “You know, I’ve been thinking exactly the same thing for the past two months: ‘Ben needs a friend who’s a peer outside the church.’ And I know just the guy. He’s a friend of mine. I’ll introduce you.” So this fellow set up an introduction with a well-known pastor in New York City.
Over our first lunch together, I told this pastor the chain of events leading to our meeting. “Now, we don’t really know each other,” I said, “so my feelings won’t be hurt if you say no, but … would you be my friend?”
He laughed and said, “Yeah, I’ll be your friend.”
I had never simply asked someone to be my friend before, but on this occasion I believe God wanted it to happen. He and I have gotten together or talked on the phone a number of times since, and we are in the process of becoming good friends.
I believe every leader needs that kind of friendship — a friendship with a peer outside of his own church or organization. Although staff relationships are important, there is more emotional freedom in an outside relationship. Some issues — such as considering a call to another place — are better wrestled with outside of staff relationships.
• Take time for solitude. I believe the most potent strategy for punching our way through times of loneliness is to use our solitude as an opportunity to go deeper with God. Ironically, one of the best cures for loneliness is to be alone. Solitude forces me to become more focused on God and his sufficiency. It forces me to face myself, and to learn to become comfortable with myself again.
Loneliness, like any pain in our lives, has a potential for making us better people and better leaders. It puts us in touch with our humanity and brokenness. It sweeps out our hearts and makes us more tender, more attentive to God’s Spirit and more sensitive to the needs of others. It’s a lot like fasting: just as fasting heightens our awareness and appreciation of food, so loneliness deepens our sense of gratitude for the fellowship of God and others.
A Mystery and a Grace
The machinery of friendship functions in conversation, in laughter, and (much more than we realize) in silence. Many unspoken messages pass between friends. Even when nothing at all is said, volumes of meaning are communicated.
Friendship is a mystery. How do friendships begin? With a chance meeting in a hallway or with a casual introduction on a tennis court or over breakfast with mutual acquaintances. Two people talk. Something clicks. Something indefinable happens. One person says, “Hey, let’s get together again.” In time, that tenuous connection might dissolve — or it just might ripen into a deep and lifelong friendship.
Genuine friendship doesn’t happen often, but when it does it is a delight and a surprise and a grace. It’s a quality that can’t be captured and frozen in time; it can only be appreciated in motion, like the gracefulness of a dance.
Copyright © 1993 by Christianity Today
