Why Pastors Need Each Other

A pastor can go years without a real friend and never once decide to.

That's the strange part. Nobody sits down and chooses it. It accumulates. A move. A season that got busy and never got un-busy. A man who left the area. A thousand Sundays where you're the one at the front and everybody else is the one in the pew. And somewhere in there you notice there's nobody to call, and you can't name the day it happened, because there wasn't one.

Maybe that's near where you live. Maybe it isn't — maybe there are two men you'd call tonight. Either way, Paul says something in the opening of Romans that settles a question worth settling: whether a man in your position is allowed to need somebody.

Romans 1, verse 11. Paul writes to a church he has never met: “For I long to see you so that I may impart some spiritual gift to you, that you may be strengthened.” That’s the sentence we expect from an apostle. He’s the giver. He has the gift. They need what he carries. If Paul had stopped there, every isolated pastor in the country would have his proof text: the man of God pours out, and he does not receive.

But Paul does not stop there. Verse 12: “that is, to be mutually encouraged, while among you, by each other’s faith, both yours and mine.”

Look at what he just did. He wrote a sentence, then he added a new angle to it. “That is” — let me say that again, more carefully. The encouragement is not a one-way pipe from the apostle down to the amateurs. The prefix Paul uses is syn- — “with,” “together.” Greek softens it to sym- before the p, so the word reads symparaklethenai: to be strengthened TOGETHER. Paul — who had the visions, who wrote the letters you preach from most Sundays — tells a room full of strangers in Rome that he needs their faith to encourage his.

Now hear the weight of that. If the apostle Paul will not pretend he is self-sufficient, where did you get the idea that you may?

And the reasons not to are good ones. That's what makes them stick. "I'm protecting the flock." "I don't want to burden anyone." "I can't be that exposed in this town." Those aren't excuses a man invents to cover something. Some of them are just TRUE — there are towns where the third one is simply a fact. This is the real math of the office.

But run the math out and look where it lands. It lands on a man who is the one Christian in his county trying to live without the body of Christ — not because he rejected it, but because the arithmetic never left room for it. And a man will starve on arithmetic as surely as he'll starve on rebellion. We've all watched where that goes. A resignation nobody saw coming. Sometimes worse.

So the math is wrong. Not because you're proud — because it left out what Paul just put in.

Here’s the part that should set you free. Paul didn’t write “I will encourage you and accept nothing back.” He said “both yours and mine.” He expected to receive. He wanted to. One pastor strengthening another is not charity handed down. It is two men, both empty, both full, handing each other what Christ has given them. The brother you’ve been too proud to call has a gift you need — and you have one he needs, and your silence has been robbing him of it.

So do something this week. Not “build a network.” Not “find community.” Name one man. A pastor an hour down the road, a seminary classmate you’ve let go cold, the guy whose number has sat in your phone for two years unused. Call him — not text, call — and say the true thing: “I’ve been doing this alone and I shouldn’t be. Can we talk every so often?” That sentence will cost you something. Pay it.

Picking up the phone will feel like admitting weakness. It is. That’s the point. Paul admitted it to Rome in writing, and we’ve been reading it for two thousand years.

You cannot impart what you refuse to receive. Make the call.

—David