The primary failure of 9 pastors out of 10 in the Southern Baptist Convention–I have little knowledge of any other denomination; I have no figures to back this up, but I believe it with all my soul–is the lone ranger syndrome. Their ministry is a solo act.

They’re trying to do the work of the Lord alone.

Now, they have their staffs and they have their family and church members. But it’s not the same as having two or three or four preacher buddies.

What most pastors do not have is a few good friends in the ministry whom they meet with regularly for fellowship, prayer, study, confidential talk, accountability, a round of golf, a good meal, and rest.

A preacher needs a friend with whom he can hang out.

That omission has seriously limited the ministry of almost minister I know. It surely weakened my service for the Lord.

I think of two critical times in my own ministry when I needed a few good buddies in the worst way.

When I first started pastoring, I had finished college with a degree in history but had zero experience and absolutely no training in church leadership. Each week, as I worked on sermons, I reinvented the wheel. I started from scratch, trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing.

That was over 45 years ago and I recall like it was last week the pain I felt searching the Bible for something I could turn into a sermon.

In the Birmingham suburb where we lived, there must have been a dozen Southern Baptist pastors–and plenty not in the SBC–who would have loved to have taken a phone call from a 22-year-old preacher asking, “Could you meet me for a cup of coffee at McDonald’s?” Or, “I wonder if I could come by your office and pick your brain for a few minutes.”

I know pastors, and I am dead certain any of them would have responded enthusiastically and been glad to advise this young preacher. But because I did not know that, I struggled alone. Poor Unity Baptist Church of Kimberly, Alabama–what they had to put up with!

A quarter of a century later, with two seminary degrees on the wall and a large number of friends across this land, I knew how to prepare sermons and pastor a church. But, when the chairmen of deacons and the personnel committee stopped by my office one freezing winter night to announce that either I tell them I was trying to relocate or that a move would be made to get me out of that church, I was stunned. It had been the most difficult pastorate of my life (and continues to hold that ranking today), and when I finally left after only three years, I did so with mixed emotions.

Looking back, my regret is not that I did not call in my network of friends and supporters when that little delegation delivered their ultimatum. When I needed the counsel of good friends was six months into that pastorate, when I was beginning to learn the nature of my tasks and the size of the obstacles I would have to overcome in order to have a decent ministry.

I regret so deeply not calling a half-dozen friends to drop what they were doing and come visit me.

I should have said, “I’m in a crisis situation and need you.”

They say a true friend is one you can call in the middle of the night to come help you bury the body and he does and never asks for an explanation.

Now, my friends would have exercised a little more discernment than that, but they would have been there, I’m completely convinced of that.

But I did not make that call and went on alone.

“The Lord was there,” you say. He sure was. And so was Margaret, my wife. We had a back-porch custom in those days where we sat and unloaded. (The agreement she and I had was that we could say anything on the porch, but could not bring it inside the house. It was a good system, one we have recommended to others in the years since.)

But I needed one thing more: I needed a few buddies.

These days, I frequently have the opportunity to address young ministers about the work to which the Lord has called them. One point I drive home is that among the things they’re going to need, “a couple of buddies” ranks toward the top of the list.

Too many pastors today are like Elijah, a loner in every sense of the word. The problem is, as any professional counselor can tell you, solitude makes the person vulnerable to loneliness, depression, even anger, sometimes thoughts of suicide, and then, oddly, pride.

We see every one of those traits in Elijah.

“Lord, I’m the last one you have left.” (I Kings 19:10, 14 He said it twice!)

Woe is me. Everyone else has given in to the enemy. I’m the Lord’s last hope.

Not so, said the Lord. In fact, He answered the prophet, “I have 7,000 who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” (19:18)

Elijah was too smart to argue with God, but we can imagine him protesting that the others were holed up in caves somewhere, while he himself was on the front lines, risking everything for the Lord.

The lone ranger syndrome can produce depression and thoughts of suicide and at other times, pride and egotism.

The Apostle Paul is a better role model for today’s pastor. We get the impression from Acts 9 that he began his ministry as a loner. Soon, he made the discovery that this was a dead-end route, that he would need friends. “Barnabas took him and brought him to the apostles.” (9:27)

Later, when Paul barely escaped from Jerusalem with his life, he returned home to Tarsus for an indefinite period. We wonder what was going on in his mind at that time. Was he making tents and studying the Word? Was he feeling like a failure? Was God letting him marinate a bit before returning him to a far greater ministry?

When revival broke out in Antioch of Syria, Barnabas happily discovered that Gentiles were coming to Christ in vast numbers. He remembered that God had called Paul as a missionary to that very group. Acts 11:25 may be one of the most important sentences in history: “Then Barnabas departed for Tarsus to seek Saul (Paul).”

When Paul became a missionary, he went with Barnabas. Later, he took Silas and then Timothy, while John Mark accompanied Barnabas. No one went alone.

At the end of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, we are struck by how many people he knew in Rome by name and the significant way he referred to them