“Most of your friendships are helping relationships,” my counselor declared one day.
“You mean there’s another kind?”
Friend-bullying and back-stabbing betrayal have been repeated themes since childhood, so I’m skittish around females. I learned to armor up, read the room, and give people what they want. I even professionalized my techniques by becoming a pastor’s wife. Then I joined our church staff.
But here’s the rub: Friendship in the church is not a nice-to-have. It is a must-have tool for becoming like Jesus together. God did not design church to be a spiritual Disney World where everything stays shiny, but as a safe relational space where dividing walls crumble and chosen family builds each other up into the fullness of Christ.
So if this is God’s vision, why is it so hard to bring our real selves to church?
It’s Me, Hi, I’m the Problem
Conventional wisdom says pastors’ wives cannot be friends with people in their church. Some carry unspoken, unrealistic expectations. Some just want proximity to your husband. Add my reflex to hide behind service, and I camouflage in plain sight. Keeping everyone a moat’s-length away is an occupational hazard. Putting your needs before mine sounds like love, but when it’s motivated by fear, it’s a noisy gong and clanging cymbal.
Even if you are not married to a pastor, church relationships get complicated the moment you lead anything. You know the drill: someone corners you at a birthday party to ask about VBS or flags a burned-out light bulb while you’re trying to worship. Dual relationships create ambiguity, which creates stress for everyone.
Load-Bearing Walls
My own story began to shift when a pastors’ wives’ support group called Parakaleo thawed me with their stout love. There is a particular grace in being known by people who need nothing from you, whose affection is uncomplicated by your role or your husband’s title. It costs us to be the emotional repository for a congregation with nowhere to set it down. Parakaleo invited us to set it down. We spoke vulnerably without griping and truthfully without platitudes. We were loved, not leveraged. The more we centered on Christ’s rescue, the more our eyes brightened. It felt like a Jesus-infusion straight to our veins.
That kind of love overflows. We couldn’t help but slosh gospel energy and joy everywhere. It dawned on me that everyone needs spaces like this, not just pastors’ wives. What if we got upstream of loneliness and challenged our churches to form people we could trust, while helping us become trustworthy people ourselves. What if therapy and parachurch organizations, as good as they are, didn’t have to pick up the church’s relational slack? What if the church regularly connected the real us to the real Jesus in the context of real community? Some churches are great at this, but what if all were?
This is not merely a friendship problem. It is a weight-bearing problem. Friends are not home décor in the living room of your life. They are load-bearing walls and support beams in the foundation of your heart. These steadfast souls don’t flinch at what you’re carrying, nor drop it somewhere dangerous. Instead, they instinctively grab a corner and help you bear up under it.
For seventeen years, I’ve been cultivating groups animated by this culture. I jokingly call them friend training. They function like group counseling with a gospel focus. They’re the scuba diving of small groups. Turns out people wanted them. Even more surprisingly, people changed, and our church culture did, too.
Start by Snorkeling
Even after all these years, friendship is still complicated for me. I want it, and yet I don’t. Jesus, in his mercy, has not allowed me to stay in my isolated castle. Grief, illness, and church planting splayed me open and broke every vow I’d made to remain self-sufficient. Messy love from my local church coaxed me into the wide-open spaces of his love.
If you want to wade in, here’s where I’d start.
Drop your anchor. Stay close to the gospel of grace. Admit your sinfulness. Acknowledge your weakness. Remember that God promises to remake you into the image of his Son. Everything flows from being his.
Cast your net wide. Who do you genuinely enjoy? Who challenges you in ways that feel clarifying, not crushing? What do they embody that you need more of? What might you have that they need? Be open to who’s swimming next to you.
Drop your waterline. Risk being known. The road to community is paved with stones of awkwardness. Embrace it. Be the one who risks first.
Snorkel in stories. Explore with kind curiosity what others have entrusted you with. Offer your own story. Remember: no hiding behind service.
Come up for air, then dive back in. Relationships are messy. Building deeper relationships is not for the faint of heart. Redemptive friction forms us into the new creations God intends. Keep showing up. Keep diving back in.
Hang out on the boat. Relationships develop over leisure. As David Brooks says, be lingerable. Love is not efficient. Presence and attention are rarer than you think.
The Buzz of Belonging
Envision a dad at your church balancing a paper cup and a diaper bag without breaking eye contact with a young guy who just stumbled in off the streets. Behind them, a 20-year-old whips around a corner to hug the octogenarian who’s in a small group with her. A widower scoots over to sit next to a divorced father who’s without his little girl that week.
None of this looks dramatic. Yet this ordinary buzz of noticing, burden-bearing, and rejoicing with those who rejoice is extraordinary. It’s a subtle but powerful way God keeps his people. In our well-documented age of loneliness, this kind of community is not incidental to the church’s life. It is the church’s real life, teeming with our real lives.
Anne Henegar serves as the Director of Spiritual Formation at Atlanta Westside Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, GA where her husband, Walter, is Senior Pastor. She writes curriculum and leads small groups through the slow work of transformation. She and Walter have two grown daughters, a son-in-law, and one granddaughter.