The conversation about pastoral boundaries is so so sad to me, but I also can’t let it go.

It’s so sad to see how many people have such unmet emotional needs, and how little people understand those emotions.

But I can’t let it go because I know people are getting hurt.

When we are someone’s pastor, we cannot and must not reject them personally. We can and should set boundaries, but rejecting who they are personally will feel like a rejection from the Divine.

We can pretend that isn’t true, but it is.

The beautiful thing about friendship is that it is entirely free of obligation. We choose our friends, just because we want to. And when they choose us, we have this huge gift of knowing they didn’t have to, they wanted to.

And friendship is one of the rare relationships that remains one of choice. We don’t *have* to be friends, we *want* to.

But this choice carries with it the risk of rejection.

We choose *not* to be friends with certain people, and others choose not to be friends with us. We can tell our friends no, I don’t want to do that particular thing, and ultimately, we can always choose not to be friends with someone.

Friendship is pretty unique in this way- we have much deeper obligations in almost every other relationship. (Although of course those *can* fail and we experience rejection, but the idea is that there is obligation to other relationships.)

Possible friendships with our church members introduces certain rejection into our relationships with them. Some we will choose not to be friends with. Some we will want a lesser level of closeness with than they want. Some we might choose not to be friends with later.

And this will hurt their spiritual lives. It will hurt their sense of Divine acceptance of them.

And clergy friends, their is nothing more sacred in our jobs than protecting that.

Based on the pastoral care I have given people who have been hurt by other pastors:

Clergy friendships inside a congregation can be just as spiritually damaging as clergy affairs inside the congregation.

I don’t say that lightly.