A New Mindset On Friendships: A Conversation With Phil Strout

Phil Strout: Attending 11 conferences over the summer, I think we can safely say I got a pretty good feel for the Vineyard as it is right now. Large churches, small churches, medium churches … urban, rural, suburban.

It was interesting, because a couple of years ago when I was out and about doing those conferences, I got a prophetic word about cynicism that turned into quite a thought, a wave. I did a study on it and taught on it. I did a lot of deliverances concerning cynicism.

This time around the conference circuit, another word came up for me night after night, and that was the idea of friendship. And when I gave various invitations, the issue of friendship and loneliness came up. I was really surprised by how many people responded to that.

Week after week, we were ministering to a lot of Vineyard leaders. So we really started poking around the concern about friendship. Why were so many people responding to this issue of loneliness in the midst of the church?

Proverbs talks about someone being lost in the midst of the congregation. It’s an interesting dynamic. I bought a few books on friendship as I was working with the idea. A friend of mine turned me on to one in particular called Becoming Friends by Paul Wadell. He talks about the 12th-century monk Aelred of Rievaulx, and about Aelred’s journey in understanding friendship and studying it for 20 years while leader of his monastery.

The more we poked around, the more my team and I realized it was a word from the Lord. It was striking a chord. I started asking the question, “Is friendship related to fruitful longevity with pastors?” It wasn’t about being an introvert or extrovert. I wasn’t judging anybody; I was seriously asking. And Becoming Friends was revelatory for me.

So why do leaders and pastors in particular, who should have naturally relationship-oriented positions, still find themselves so lonely?

I have a couple of thoughts on that, but my disclaimer is that the psychological and emotional aspects of that question are a bit above my pay grade.

What I’ve realized is, that is what’s often taught in seminaries: that it’s lonely at the top, and that you should be aware of those people who want to get too close to you as the leader.

So some of that loneliness is almost taught to leaders as a mindset or a worldview. You can find lots of articles for spiritual leaders that caution you about having friends! So it’s partly a learned behavior.

Secondly, when you’re pastoring, you’ll have people that betray your friendship. You have to speak unfortunate and hard things sometimes. And even if you’re a gentle person, you’re going to say some things that are hard to hear, and some people aren’t going to take that well. So we get discouraged, and it is hard to allow trust to happen again after that.

I’ve had my own experiences, which I won’t detail here, that made me back up from trusting others and allowing people to get too close.

I wonder if those things work together too: if you’ve imbibed this mindset from your training, and then when it actually happens, it confirms your mindset on a more generalized level.

Yes, the cement is beginning to dry by then. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Right? All the walls go up. You become an incredibly protective person.

The man who wrote Inside Out, Larry Crabb, also wrote a book named Encouragement. He says that you always have to make a strong commitment to try to always be an encouragement to other people. It’s an unconditional commitment.

But you can’t commit to spending any energy on other people to get them to encourage you back, because then you end up manipulating them to do so.

In friendship, you have to commit to being an unconditional friend, and you can’t put any demands on people to return the favor. Because that’s where you begin manipulating people to meet your human need.

This works in so many ways. I can be generous and hope that others would be generous, but I can’t force others to be generous. I can be encouraging, and pray that others would be encouraging to me, but I don’t want to force others.

But I can be a friend and still pray for others to be a friend to me.

Whenever someone says “I don’t have very many friends,” it can be hard not to feel manipulated into being their friend!

Right. You already kind of know you’re going to disappoint them.

At the same time, though, if people don’t have a place to honestly talk about that, it can be a bit of a hamster wheel. This is where pastors get stuck. You sure can’t be everybody’s best friend. So what is happening when we have so many Vineyard guys and gals wrestling with loneliness within a relational atmosphere, the church?

What is the danger of loneliness? Why is it important not to isolate yourself, even if it feels risky to invest and make some connections?

Isolation is the result of a prolonged misdirected mindset. And isolation is the devil’s territory. You’re moving into the wandering of the mind, the cosmic web of accusation. You don’t even know where the thoughts come from because you don’t process with people.

You might start thinking, “People think such and such about me,” but you don’t process it with anybody because you don’t trust anybody. Then isolation becomes a way of life. And we’re not made that way.

Bert Waggoner hammered on trinitarian belief for a reason. I believe the connectedness of the Trinity and the plurality of the Trinity says something to us. I see loneliness and lack of real friendships as spiritual warfare in that regard. This is not just an innocent human behavior. This is actual warfare. The devil tries to get us off alone to process by ourselves with ourselves. He wants us all to be sole targets. It’s dangerous.

With a lack of friendship, who asks you the hard questions?

In your research, what are you learning about how friendships develop?

The book Encouragement that I mentioned before is a great resource. Also, Aelred of Rievaulx categorized friendships into three types. What he would call carnal friendships, those that are the most lethal, he says are nothing more than a harmony of vice. You can have friendship, but it’s centered around things that keep you away from God. You only speak in darkness; you never speak in truth. There is only death and destruction there.

The other categories are worldly friendships and spiritual friendships. Worldly friendships would be similar to what we would today call networking: “We have a united purpose of mind, and therefore we have a connection, but as soon as you’ve fulfilled whatever that purpose was, then I have no use for this friendship.”

But spiritual friendship he really unpacks.

Also, one of the main things I’ve seen is that there is an effort. Deep friendship is not easy. An intense, conscious effort must be made. There we have a fear of being hyper-spiritual. But Aelred argued for deep spiritual friendships. In this type, the Lord is what we have in common. Our worldview is the same, and we’re consumed by it with the same heart, the same mind.

Can I be friends with somebody that doesn’t share my Christian faith? Of course I can! But can I share a spiritual unity with them? Probably can’t.

Now, I wouldn’t argue for only spiritual friendships, because I’m too much of a missional person. But I think I can look at that from the other point of view, and I think pastors can sometimes be a little bit light on spiritual friendships.

If I’m being honest though, I still have some questions on how to live within that tension. Jay Pathak’s book The Art of Neighboring is a great resource. We need to be friends with our neighbors and to be friends across cultures and languages. But loneliness can creep in if we’re missing the spiritual friendships. There’s a fear of getting too close, and that’s what we have to battle.

And maybe we’re afraid of the word “religiosity.”

Yes. Maybe we’re afraid of being overly religious. Of hyper-spirituality. So we err in the other direction, where we’re just “buddies” all the time. But we don’t tell each other the truth. And we get lonely.

What would you say are practical next steps, first for the person who feels isolated already, but then from a “preventive medicine” perspective for the people who want to avoid isolation in the future?

I would go at this in two ways. To be honest, I don’t look at this as just a mood in America. I think of this idea of loneliness as a spiritual issue. But I also think we need to look at it as an evil presence that we are not to be afraid of. We can address this. We can address isolationism.

I mentioned I talked about cynicism a couple years ago. I said then that cynicism is not your friend. It will eat you up.

Isolation is the same. It will eat you up.

So practically speaking, you just have to open up and talk. Isn’t that our biggest job: to create space to talk safely? We must create a community that is safe, so that if somebody is lonely, there are vehicles of availability to address it.

You know, there might be a social issue regarding technology somewhere in there too.

[bctt tweet=”Maybe we are so overstimulated that our new tendency is to want to get away from people. ” quote=”Maybe we are so overstimulated that our new tendency is to want to get away from people.”]

There’s nothing quiet in the world. Everything is noisy. For many of us, this is our everyday reality. Our prayer should be that we want God’s voice to be louder than all the others.

So the Vineyard is all about soul care and for contemplativeness and quiet retreats. I don’t want to get rid of those. But the counterfeit tendency is that you begin to just live there permanently, living between your own ears. Instead, you have to let people in.

I get concerned when people say, “I don’t like people.” I don’t mean in an introvert-extrovert way, but in a withdrawing way. People have to know they don’t actually have the luxury of withdrawing. Everyone needs other people.

So, join a small group. Be vulnerable. Force it if you have to. There’s a little bit of heaven involved. There’s a little bit of earth. Yes, it’s a spiritual issue. And yes, you have to get your calendar out and open your front door. You have to. Both of those, the spiritual and the practical sides, are real and really important.

I think the richness of friendship is what makes it feel like spiritual warfare. I have known loneliness, but I also have some profound friendships. Deep, deep friendships. They can’t be explained or defined. They’re with people who would take a bullet for me. I don’t have to explain myself to them.

In five years, if what you’re sowing into this movement about friendship were to bear fruit, what would it look like? What would a Vineyard that was less lonely and more full of friendship be like?

You know, I would refer back to something I’ve been saying since I started this job, and that’s the “one accord effect.” When you live in one accord with one another, and you esteem others more highly, when you see them as your brethren and cheer for them and honestly care more for their well-being than you do your own, there is no limit when we live in that level of divine friendship.

It’s not self-focused. It’s people putting a lot of effort into giving and not receiving. It goes back to what Larry Crabb says: You give yourself to the giving, and you pray for the return, but you can’t commit yourself to the return or you’ll end up using people.

The more the Vineyard guys and gals work and walk toward this idea of spiritual friendships, the more everybody will be healthier and live in one accord.

And it’s not mentioned in the book of Acts without supernatural in-breaking playing a part. That’s a big deal.

Our friendships can then lead toward missional thinking. That’s the connection: spiritual friendships. If I can’t love my brother in the Lord and have deep friendships there, what will it mean for me to love my neighbor?

Totally. I want to have both. I want to have the deep spiritual friendships, but not at the exclusion of the missional. There’s a bit of dynamic tension in that. As Rich Nathan said, it’s the “both-and” in an “either-or” world. We need deep friendships in Christ, and we need to be deep friends to those that may think differently than us.

In many ways, the Vineyard is really good at the latter. We’re excellent at the missional aspects. But I want us to grow in spiritual friendships, that they may have roots and substance.