Find Prunedale Band Called Without Reason

"Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble ...

Back when I was a student in the pastoral program we were advised against forming close friendships with individuals in our church. A degree of detachment was necessary to maintain the prophetic voice in the pulpit and avoid the accusation of favoritism. I must admit that over the years I’ve occasionally had problems with both. One of the major factors that played into our decision to leave the great people of Prunedale, CA was that I felt I had become a friend to the extent I could no longer effectively call them to discipleship. I was Craig, not Pastor Craig. Not that the title matters, per se, but because we hung out so much during the week, having a lot of fun together, it was difficult for them to see me as the pastor on Sundays when I stepped into the pulpit. From Prunedale to Riverside. Whereas Prunedale was a rural area with most of us living within a couple miles of each other, Riverside was a metropolitan situation. We rarely ran into anyone from church while out and about. But we did form good friendships with a couple of families in the church, which resulted in others feeling like they were on the outside. “You like ______ better than me.” OK, that’s true. But you complain about everything in life and do nothing to help out at church. Hello; nobody likes you. (I didn’t really say that out loud.) So, pastors should avoid close friendships, thus preserving their effectiveness in ministry and protecting themselves against accusations of favoritism. What they didn’t say is that the resulting downside is an isolation and loneliness that accounts in large part for the very high dropout rate among pastors. Yeah, they said we should form friendships outside of church but that’s unrealistic for a whole bunch of reasons. I went from Riverside back to teach at the college where I spent the next 10 years in the classroom during the week and as a lay person on the weekends. I could hang out with anyone from church I (we) wanted, because I wasn’t the pastor. Then I left the college and became the pastor of that church. And a weird thing happened. Celebration was such a great group of people that we were all friends. Why didn’t I loose the prophetic voice as I had in Prunedale? Most of them called me Pastor Craig (some used "PC"), but I don’t think that’s the reason. It probably had as much to do with the culture in west Michigan which is steeped in traditional Dutch Reformed denominationalism.

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