Pastors need friends. Pastors need friendships with other pastors. Church Planters also need friends. Further, Church Planters need friendships with other church planters.
Theologian Michael Haykin has written a helpful book on friendship titled Iron Sharpens Iron: Friendship and the Grace of God. He explains that the “privileges and responsibilities of a biblical friend involve intimacy, loyalty, and a strong emotional attachment.” Friends are those people we can be vulnerable with. They are the ones who stick during the hard times. Further, they are the ones we connect with and enjoy. CS Lewis said in The Four Loves that friendships are born when someone says to another, “What! You too?”
Pastors need these types of friendships with other pastors. Haykin is a church historian and traces different friendships from church history. John Ryland and Andrew Fuller were early British Baptist pastors who helped launch the modern missions movement. Ryland once said of his friendship with Fuller, “I never had a friend who was so willing to stand by me … yet I never had a friend who would more faithfully, freely, and affectionately give me warning or reproof … And this I think is the best friendship in the world.” That is the type of friendship we desire for our Church Planters.
We have designed our cohort in order to develop friendship amongst church planters and their wives. We want them to know each other. We want them to lean on each other. We want to create safe spaces for them to grow together. Not only do the guys gather twice a month to study together and pray together, but we also offer monthly fellowship lunches. We also started providing a monthly fellowship lunch for the wives. Finally, we periodically offer family fellowships to foster these relationships.
Thank you for giving so generously to the Denton Baptist Association so that we can not only fund church plants, fund a cohort training, but also fund these opportunities for Church Planters to develop relationships that will carry them through the years of planting. Please pray that our guys would develop lasting life-giving friendships. Pray these relationships bring them life during the ups and downs of life and ministry.