Why Pastors Need Each Other

You preached yesterday. This morning the office is quiet, and you’re sitting with the question nobody in the pews knows you’re asking: did any of it land? Perhaps there’s no one to ask. You’ve gotten used to that. Somewhere along the way you decided a friend was a luxury a man in your position can’t afford — too much time, too much risk, too much of yourself handed to someone who might use it against you. So you carry the whole thing alone. I want to tell you why that decision hinders you, and I want to do it from a text.

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?

You didn’t get it from the text. You got it from your pride, and you dressed it up as devotion. “I’m protecting the flock.” “I don’t want to burden anyone.” “I can’t be that exposed in this town.” Every pastor likely has told himself every one of those. They are not humility. They are a man deciding he will be the one Christian in his county who does not need the body of Christ. That is not strength. That is the slow starvation that ends in a moral collapse or a quiet resignation letter — and you know it, because you have watched it take men you admired.

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