Where friendship ends and customer begins

Being a member of a church is funny. You are called to be parts of the body of Christ, working together with God at the head, all different and doing different parts, but all one body. It's a lovely illustration of being who you are unique yet part of a team, designed for a specific job that is made for you not somebody else. If you are an ear, you hear, but you wouldn't be doing a good job if you were a foot trying to do the job of an ear! Tonight my musings as I struggle to sleep are when does friendship stop and being a client/customer /consumer/sheep begin? Both my husband and I have known our relationship with our priest has been professional. At times it may have appeared to be friendship, actually my husband and our priest have quite similar interests and fairly similar wives! It has always been more business though, and none more so than the past year. That's fine. Not a criticism. The difficulty comes when 2 women are friends. It is not business like or professional, although they serve together, the basis of their friendship is not that they were colleagues. After a few years of friendship one becomes an employee. The friendship remains the same. I'm not really sure when the friendship ended and somebody was able to put boundaries in for who an employee has as a friend. How is that reasonable? In what other workplace would you be prevented from seeing a friend? Now I understand about rules preventing colleagues contacting those suspended, and managers contacting those who are sick. I have worked in places where, thankfully, my colleagues have become my friends, even managers in one place. If I were sick I would love non work related contact. When your friendship predated employment, and one of you isn't employed but is more than just a consumer (nobody in a church should be there just to receive a service) how can you say contact must stop? How can an employer really expect that to be acceptable? Are you not allowed to be friends with "customers"? The very notion implies a hierarchy and a sense of "them and us", and splits the body into essential and non essential parts. Yup, I'm an appendix. No problem whilst working well but an absolute pain when it gets sick and as it is not essential the body can do without it. It's removal is painful and leaves a scar, but the body can function fine with or without it. Anyway that's not really the point I've been trying to make. Making friends with clients in the secular workplace is often frowned upon. That is not what is happening here. The friendship predated even the creation of this job! Is this really a place for relationships to be broken down to that between a service provider and a customer? I expect most church members would not feel that way. So can you even draw a line? Is that fair to either party? Is it scriptural? Is it even moral? I don't know. There is a place for safeguarding. Of course there is but this is not a secular business. We serve each other as brothers and sisters but also sometimes as friends.