You can love a person, but not like them. That's what I was told. I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now. To me, it sounds like an excuse for a bad attitude.

For the leader of a large congregation, who has developed a position with little personal contact with the average member of the church, this might work. As the Pastor of a small church, this attitude will certainly kill you.

People will vote for the schmoozer, who can make you feel good, but delivers nothing, at the national level. We've seen recent evidence to prove this point. At the personal level, in an environment where people regularly rub shoulders with us, they quickly read when we are being disingenuous.

Since most small churches survive on close relationships, it would seem that we would be cutting our throats to develop this strange, unsupportable doctrine which teaches, that we can love someone without liking them.

John asks us this question in his first epistle, "If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" ¥ I'm sure you have already read between the lines, and are ahead of me even now. You probably see that I have baited the hook, and I am waiting for you to bite. So, I might as well get to it.

If my love for God is measurable in the human relationships around me, I must therefore assume that my "like" for God is similarly measurable. "If a man say, I [like] God, and [disliketh] his brother...?" Hmmm, that hits home doesn't it?

In the development of Christian virtues, liking people has been placed before loving people. Peter put it like this, "And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to your virtue knowledge; and to your knowledge temperance; and to your temperance patience; and to your patience godliness; and to your godliness brotherly kindness; and to your brotherly kindness charity." (2 Peter 1:5-7)

Now we know that charity is old King Jimmy language for the word love, but let's take verse 7, and put it in the Phil version. "...and to your faithfulness in the spiritual disciplines add a genuine like for others, and to your genuine like for others add love." Brotherly kindness is as close as it gets to saying you need to learn to like people.

This brotherly kindness is indeed, a prerequisite to true Christian love. If we cannot learn to like people, there is no way, that we will ever be able to truly love them.

Will Rogers is quoted as saying one of the most Christlike lines I've heard, "I never met a man I didn't like."

Not only is this genuine like for people a key to pastoring the small church, it is a key to evangelism as well. After all, over 75% of the people who join a church, do so through a family member, or a friend. I guess we'd better get to liking some people, and making some friends.

The call of the Lord is upon our lives to love those whom we serve. No, His call is asking more of us than that. He is calling us to like them.

Learning to like people is infectious. It flows through the church almost as fast as gossip. Well, not quite that fast.