Exploring how holy friendships enable pastoral flourishing and healthy vocational leadership

“Exploring how holy friendships enable pastoral flourishing and healthy vocational leadership ”

Team Members/Contributors

Victoria Atkinson White Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Contact Me

About this pastoral study project

Pastors and Christian institutional leaders need a new model of friendship that encourages challenge, honesty, creativity, and encouragement. The church needs healthy leadership to thrive, and those leaders need healthy and holy friendships to flourish. L. Gregory Jones has defined holy friendship as those which challenge the sins we have come to love, affirm the gifts we are afraid to claim, and help us dream the dreams we otherwise would not dream. This project seeks explore how Jones’ definition might play out in the lives of Christian leaders, producing human flourishing in the process.

In the race to deal faithfully and innovatively with institutions in steady decline, hindrances like competition, shame, lack of time, and distance keep pastors in particular, from cultivating and nurturing friends, much less, holy friends, to help them experience abundant life. Many do not even give themselves permission to create holy friendships because of fear of exposure and the heavy social expectations that come with public leadership. For this project, I will lead 3 intimate gatherings of diverse pastoral leaders as they enact and experience the principles of holy friendships while also discussing and critiquing them, thus contributing to their pastoral flourishing and healthy vocational leadership.