Crushing on Your Pastor

It’s perfectly ok, and can even be healthy and healing, to have a crush on your pastor.

It is not healthy, healing, or ok for your pastor to take advantage of those feelings.

We've started talking publicly about how it is wrong for pastors to sleep with members of their congregations.  It's about time! 

But we haven't talked about why it's wrong.  And that has, for some people, stigmatized the completely normal feelings they have for their pastors, made them feel wrong or dirty or gross for feeling attracted to their pastor.

You aren't dirty or wrong or gross!  First of all, because feelings and attractions aren't dirty or wrong or gross.  Actions can be wrong, and the choices you make about those feelings can be wrong, but your feelings aren't.

And attractions to pastors, just like attractions to therapists, are completely normal, and often part of the healing process.  If your pastor is a good pastor, they have been trained to expect this, and taught how to handle it in a safe and good and loving way.

Sometimes we get crushes on people like therapists, pastors, and other emotional caretakers exactly because they are people who we should be able to trust not to respond to our feelings.  These feelings might be part of healing if we have had our trust broken in the past, and need to experience an authority figure respecting healthy boundaries and not taking advantage of us, and we might even test the to see if they really will be safe.  Or we might be trying out a new identity or attraction that we aren't quite ready to act on, so we practice feeling it with an unavailable authority figure.  Sometimes we just have never experienced emotional or spiritual intimacy outside of a romantic relationship, and so our first response to an intimate relationship is to assume it's romantic, until we get to experience that it doesn't have to be.

In each of these examples, experiencing feelings for a safe authority figure who won't act on your feelings is part of healthy healing.  And completely normal! And nothing to be ashamed of!

But they also show why pastors need good and healthy boundaries with the people we care for.  We need to be the loving, but unavailable, space for people to experience non-sexual, non-romantic intimacy.

And pastors, we can simply never know if the church member who is attracted to us would be attracted to us if we weren't their pastor.  They probably wouldn't.  This is what we mean when we talk about a power imbalance, about transference, about all those other words we heard in seminary.  People are trusting us to teach them what loving intimacy, outside of romantic and sexual love, looks like.  They crushing on us precisely because they need us to be unresponsive to their crush.

If you have feelings for your pastor, or your therapist, or some other trusted authority figure, you can talk about it with them.  Sometimes naming something helps make it safer and more manageable! A good pastor will be able to talk with you about this in a way that makes you feel even more safe and cared for.

Your pastor might feel a little awkward, and that’s ok too! They’re human. And humans get awkward taking about sex.  But let it be their job to manage their own feelings. They are the professional.

Bad pastors won't.  Bad pastors might take advantage of you.  I don't want to lie to you about this risk.  And if you experience that your pastor is encouraging your feelings, telling you they return them, or offering to act on them, I'm really sorry, you need to leave the conversation and find someone else trusted to talk to.  The only good news I have for you is that more and more of us will believe you, will affirm that you did nothing wrong, and will have your back in deciding what to do next.

If you've ever been in a relationship with a pastor that doesn't feel right, it isn't your fault.  Keeping the relationship safe is your pastor's job, not yours.  I hope you can find some other trusted person, maybe not a pastor, maybe a therapist or someone else, to talk about this with.

(An aside about sexual harassment: pastors do get sexually harassed by their parishioners. If your pastor is a woman, is a person of color in a white church, is LGBTQIA+, has a disability, etc, they’ve almost definitely been harassed. Good pastors can tell the difference between emotional transference and the assertion of dominance that is sexual harassment. That’s another blog post, but I want to promise you that if you’re worried about respecting your pastor’s boundaries, that’s almost definitely not what your crush is about. Just like you would with any other person, listen when your pastor says what kind of touch is ok, and what isn’t, listen when they say when the conversation is done, and other boundaries they set, and you’ll be ok.)

The relationship between a pastor and the people they care for is a deep and holy one.  It is loving, and intimate.  It should also be safe, for your feelings, for your spiritual explorations, for you to grow into the person God has created you to be.

I want for you to have that.  And your feelings are perfectly ok.