It’s a blessing to meet with other church leaders based in Mount Gambier on a weekly basis.
Some of us have been together for a while now, and we talk about our lives and our vocations as friends and mutual encouragers.
As pastors, we often run into answers or conversation ‘blocks’ which are given by people who feel they don’t want to let people into their lives past a certain distance. These can be either conscious or unconscious cues.
Between us we’ve probably heard them all, and while, for a variety of reasons, we’ll let these sorts of verbal ruses pass with others (at times), we don’t let each other get away with them.
When someone says they’re ‘well’, but they’re not, or are ‘going okay’ when their tone of voice or body language says otherwise, we gently call each other on it, not to pry, but because honesty is the oxygen of friendship.
John Ortberg writes at Christianity Today about five very different people who sought to take their friendship to a very open and accountable level.
Five principles emerge which provide boundaries which both protect and proved safety.
- We can ask anything, no holds barred.
- if you answer, you must tell the truth, as much as you know it.
- if you don’t answer, you must say why you won’t or can’t answer.
- Everything that is said to each other will be held in absolute confidence.
- We will make absolutely no judgments of each other.
Read the whole article here.
As Ortberg indicates, these sorts of principles have to be mutually and knowingly embraced.
They can’t be compelled on others, or assumed.
They’re an example of intentional friendship, a covenant of comradeship, which seeks to move beyond weather and sports results and truly share life together.
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