Christian leadership gets lonely because being needed and being known are two different things, and leaders usually get plenty of the first and almost none of the second. People bring you their crises, their questions, their grief. Very few ask what is going on with you, and many leaders have learned not to answer honestly when someone does. Dr. Nicole Martin’s diagnosis is blunt: “It is exhausting to be inauthentic.” The cure is not more stamina. It is at least one person who actually knows you.
That answer runs against a common instinct. The usual assumption is that leaders are lonely because leadership is lonely by nature: the burden sits on one set of shoulders and nobody else can lift it. There is some truth in that. But the conversation between Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, and Martin points to something more fixable. A great deal of the loneliness is built by the leader, one guarded answer at a time.
Why Does It Get Lonelier the More People Need You?
Fields tells a story about a pastor who fell badly, the kind of collapse that left everyone around him stunned. Afterward, a friend of his looked back over years of conversations and realized something. In Fields’s retelling, the friend said, “He never told us anything that was going on with him. He was the person we all went to.”
Then comes the line that explains the whole problem:
“So we had a false sense of closeness because we were confiding in him, but nobody knew him.”
— The pastor’s friend, as retold by Lisa Fields
Notice what that sentence does. It describes a relationship that felt close from both sides. The friends felt close because they had opened up. The pastor probably felt surrounded because people were always around him. But the closeness ran in only one direction. Everyone had seen his care for them. No one had seen him.
Fields also names the assumption that kept anyone from noticing. Because he was the one helping everybody else, people concluded he must be strong. His usefulness became evidence of his health. That is the trap. The more capable a leader looks, the less anyone thinks to ask, and the less anyone asks, the easier it is to keep looking capable.
So the answer to the question is uncomfortable. It gets lonelier the more people need you because need gets mistaken for intimacy. A full calendar of people leaning on you can sit right next to an empty life of being known.
What Does Performing Strength Actually Cost?
Martin does not treat this as a minor inefficiency. She treats it as a weight. “It is exhausting trying to cover up your flaws,” she says, and she describes the alternative in plain terms: being able to answer a friend’s simple “How are you doing?” with the truth that you are really struggling. Her own example is specific. She describes a season of ministry when she was surrounded by loss: “I’m ministering to a people who are grieving and they have lost, and I don’t have the answers.”
That is not a dramatic confession. It is an honest status report. And it is exactly the sentence many leaders never let themselves say, because they believe the person in charge is supposed to have the answers.
Martin goes further. She says that if you “spend your life living in this facade of perfection and power and all the things the world says you need to have, you’re exhausted.” Then she connects that exhaustion to something heavier: “And I understand why living that way can lead to deep depression, or why living that way can lead to deep anxiety.”
She is careful here, and the care matters. She calls depression and anxiety real conditions, and she thanks God for counseling, medication and prayer. She is not saying a leader’s depression is simply the result of pretending. Her point is narrower. Those conditions can be made worse “when we try and operate out of this false sense of ourselves.” Pretending does not cause everything. It makes everything harder to carry. The Jude 3 Project affirms that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith, and nothing in Martin’s argument suggests that honesty with a friend replaces that kind of care. It is one more place the truth gets to live.
Martin also explains where the performance comes from. She does not think leaders set out to be proud. “I think we refuse to acknowledge our insecurities,” she says, and when we practice the art of covering them, pride becomes the mask. The polished, confident, always-fine leader is often not overflowing with confidence at all. He is working very hard to keep something hidden.
There is a quieter cost too, and it shows up when the leader is grieving someone else’s loss. Recalling what pastors told her during the funerals of 2020, when distancing stripped away the ministry of simply sitting with people, Martin says she learned about secondary grief and trauma among pastors. “And when they don’t have spaces of authenticity, then that grief feels like their grief.” She adds that even when the loss did not happen to them, “because they’re walking with families through that, it happens to them.”
The condition in that sentence is the key. The grief becomes theirs when they don’t have spaces of authenticity. Fields describes the same dynamic from a friend’s side: when friends go through something hard, “their burden becomes yours.” A pastor holds that weight for an entire congregation. As Fields puts it, “Sometimes before they call 911, they call the pastor.” The burden itself may be unavoidable. What makes it crushing is having nowhere honest to set it down.
If you are a leader carrying depression or thoughts of ending your life, please tell someone today.
Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (US): call or text 988
Is the Real Question Whether You Are Known or Known Of?
Fields passes along a question one of her friends asks: “Would you rather be known or known of?”
Being known of is reputation. People know your name, your sermons, your title, the way you handle a room. Being knownis narrower and riskier. Someone has seen your fear, your sin and your bad weeks, and has not left.
Most leaders would say they want to be known. Many arrange their lives to be known of. The fallen pastor in Fields’s story was known of by everyone and known by no one, and his closest friends discovered that only after the damage was done.
This distinction also explains why “be more authentic” is not enough as advice. A leader can be quite open in public, telling self-deprecating stories from the pulpit and admitting past failures that are safely in the past, and still be known by nobody. Public openness can be another form of performance. Being known happens in particular relationships, with particular people, about things that are still happening now.
Martin describes her own slow move in this direction. Early in her leadership, she says, she was hyperaware of not being too emotional or too passionate, worried about being stereotyped as a woman or as a person of color. Now she puts it simply: “What you see is what you get.” She admits it has taken time: “I’m just now learning to just be me.” That is worth hearing from someone who has carried serious leadership responsibility. Being known is not a personality trait some people are born with. It is something leaders often have to unlearn their way into.
Can’t a Leader Just Bring All of This to God?
This is the most serious objection, and it sounds spiritual. If God is enough, why does a leader need another person to know the truth? Shouldn’t prayer be the place to be honest?
Prayer is a place to be honest. But Scripture does not set honesty with God against honesty with people. James writes:
“Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed” (James 5:16).
The confession in that verse is horizontal, one believer to another, and it sits right next to prayer rather than replacing it.
Paul makes a similar point:
“Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2).
The surrounding passage is about believers restoring someone caught in a fault and watching themselves as they do it. A few verses later Paul says that every man shall bear his own burden (Galatians 6:5), but in context that verse concerns each person examining his own work before God, not a rule that people should carry their troubles alone. Paul expects mutual burden-bearing among Christians, and he calls it fulfilling Christ’s law. Leaders are not exempt from the “one another.” A pastor who carries everyone and lets no one carry him has quietly placed himself outside the instruction he preaches.
Martin’s own story makes the same point from experience. She describes a season when she did not get the support she expected from people she thought were her inner circle, so she asked God to affirm her. What happened next is telling. God answered, but the answer came through people: notes from men outside her organization, young women who said they admired her, leaders from different backgrounds. In her words, “When you ask God to affirm your gifts, that affirmation comes sometimes in the most unlikely ways.” Bringing the need to God did not remove the need for people. It changed which people showed up.
Doesn’t a Leader Have to Look Strong for the People Who Follow?
This objection deserves a fair hearing. Congregations, staff and students do need steadiness from their leaders. A leader who processes every private struggle in front of the people he serves is not being authentic. He is shifting his burden onto people who came to him for help.
But the objection assumes only two options: perform strength for everyone, or confess weakness to everyone. Fields’s story points to a third. The pastor’s problem was not that he failed to bare his soul to the congregation. It was that he told nothing real even to the other pastors who were his friends. Honesty does not have to be public to be real. It has to exist somewhere.
Martin also challenges what counts as strength. Talking about leading people who are depressed and burned out, she says, “It is not a show of weakness to pause and care for them and give them hope. It is a show of strength to do that.” If caring for weary people is strength when a leader does it for others, then letting someone care for you is not obviously weakness. It may be the same strength, received rather than given.
Paul is the clearest biblical case. Martin observes that “Paul despised the thorn, but it was because of the thorn that he recognized when I’m weak, then I’m strong.” The Lord tells Paul, and Paul answers:
“My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (2 Corinthians 12:9).
Paul is writing to a church that was comparing him unfavorably with more impressive rivals. Instead of competing on impressiveness, he tells them about his weakness. That is a leader choosing to be known rather than known of, in writing, to people who were judging him.
Why Is Honest Community So Hard to Find in Christian Settings?
One more detail from Martin explains why leaders in Christian organizations may have an especially hard time hearing the truth. She describes what she calls Christian nice: the habit of avoiding hard words in performance reviews and budget meetings, softening bad news until it disappears. She says leading in Christian organizations is “so much harder” partly because “nobody wants to say the bad news.”
That habit cuts both ways. If a Christian culture makes it hard to tell a leader the truth about his work, it also makes it hard for a leader to tell the truth about himself. Everyone is being pleasant. No one is being known. The same niceness that keeps meetings smooth keeps leaders isolated.
Martin even wonders whether this is part of why fewer young people want to become pastors. She imagines them looking at what pastors carry and concluding: “You don’t have anybody to talk to. You don’t have any way of being healed. You don’t have any way of being yourself.” That is not a criticism of young people for lacking commitment. It is a description of a model the next generation can see clearly, and it suggests that honest community for leaders is not only a private comfort. It affects who will be willing to lead at all.
What Does It Look Like for a Leader to Be Known?
Fields gives the pastors who watch the podcast direct counsel: leaders need relationships with “people that actually know you.” Not admirers. Not people who depend on them. People who know.
Practically, that probably starts smaller than most leaders fear. It does not require a public confession or a perfect accountability structure. It requires identifying one or two people outside the circle of those you serve, and then answering their questions truthfully. The sentence Martin models is ordinary enough to borrow: I am in a season where I can’t make sense of things, and I don’t have the answers.
It also means noticing where help is actually arriving. Martin calls receiving unexpected affirmation a discipline. Leaders often dismiss encouragement that does not come from the source they wanted, and in doing so they turn down the very support they say they lack.
The fallen pastor in Fields’s story did not need more people leaning on him. He had plenty. He needed one person who knew what was really going on before it went public. The question worth asking is not whether you have people around you. It is whether anyone around you would be surprised.
Quick Answers
Why do leaders feel lonely when they are surrounded by people? Because being needed is not the same as being known. Fields describes a pastor whose friends realized after his fall that they had confided in him for years but never knew what he was going through.
What is the difference between being known and being known of? Being known of means people recognize your reputation and gifts. Being known means someone has seen your real struggles and stayed. Leaders often have the first in abundance and very little of the second.
Is pretending to be fine actually harmful? Dr. Nicole Martin argues that keeping up a facade is exhausting and can make real conditions like depression and anxiety worse. She affirms counseling, medication and prayer as part of the care people need.
What is secondary grief? It is the grief and trauma leaders absorb from walking others through loss. Martin says it becomes their own grief especially when they have no spaces where they can be honest.
Isn’t prayer enough for a leader’s private struggles? Scripture pairs the two. James 5:16 calls believers to confess faults to one another and pray for one another, and Galatians 6:2 tells Christians to bear one another’s burdens. Leaders are included in that “one another.”
