Thickening Communities I
The lack of male friendship is nothing short of an epidemic. The rise of therapy and a therapeutic culture for men and women is, not always but more often than we’d like to admit, a substitute for friendship. We’re lonely, we need friends, and you need good friends to live the Christian life.
I’m arguing that there are three shifts we can make to address the discipleship crisis. We can embed habits, we can thicken communities, and we can stretch minds.
I reckon we can thicken our communities by considering friendship, tables, and thresholds. Three topics which I write about a fair bit, so this won’t be super surprising.
To be a follower of Jesus you need friends. We might want to disagree and say instead that we need the familial bonds of the household of the church, but if you do this and don’t gain friends, I’m not convinced that you’re actually doing this (or someone else isn’t). Jesus casts his disciples as friends (John 15). Not slaves, but friends. Friendship is the love of the kingdom. It’s tighter than ‘brotherhood’ because it’s bound not by blood but by choice. God the son became God my brother and then called himself God my friend.
We become companions with God—literally ‘same bread’—as we eat with him. We become companions with others when we break bread with them. But that’s getting ahead of myself. In order to live a Christian life that bleeds out of Sundays and starts to colonise every hour of your life you will need friends to live that life with; friends to challenge and to laugh with. I use that martial language deliberately; Jesus is the rightful Lord of your life and will wage war against your other gods.
The remarkable thing is that the warrior King, here to crush your idols, has decided to make you a friend. He’s invited us into his inner ring. One of the ways we encounter Jesus is in other Christians. While we understand friendship in light of Jesus’ friendship of us, rather than the other way around—much like we learn what a father is in the face of the Father—it is easier to understand Jesus as your friend when you have good friends.
This is an instrumental reason to get friends though, don’t do it to understand Jesus better, do it because friends are great. Friend is a word much said and little understood in our present moment. There is much that could be written, and I’ve explored this a little, but you need those in your life who you can share your life with.
If friendship is, as Lewis suggests, the way the angels feel about each other, then it’s also the sort of love we’ll have for each other in the age to come. There is something otherworldly about true friendships. You aren’t going to have more than a handful, and all of those are imperfect reflections of what is the actual goal of history: friendship with God. Even so, there’s a smell of the resurrection about a good friendship (even if it consists of laughing at bad puns and sending memes).
Of course the word means lots of things. Robert Dunbar famously coined Dunbar’s number, that everyone cannot have more than 150 ‘friends.’ He means people that might attend your wedding or your funeral. He posits rings of relationships where the intimacy decreases as the number increases. Dunbar argues that everyone has up to five best friends, who you talk to weekly, 15 close friends, who’d drop everything to help you, 50 good friends who really care what happens to you, the 150 on your Christmas card list, 500 people whose names you know and 1500 people whose faces you recognise. He says these are fixed at particular numbers (and that the multiples of three are part of that story) and has a lot of circumstantial data to argue that, but the sizes aren’t the key points. The layers are the point.
In that sense we all have lots of friends, and the Christian life requires a web of these various layers. Human life does. Dunbar doesn’t interact with how churches change this—I think they must do to some extent, though maybe a smaller extent than those of us in church leadership expect—and I suspect thinking about this in connection with church size, and life group size, would be interesting. In fact, he includes God in your five friends if you talk to him weekly, speaking truer than he knows I imagine.
Nevertheless, I think the size of these inward most rings are contracting. I sent the diagram that represents this thinking to a friend and he found it darkly comic: “who has five friends?” It’s these inner rings, the five, the fifteen, that we’ve losing and need to do something to develop. It’s this inner ring that Jesus invites you to join.
We need thicker communities, but saying that and doing it are very different things. Rebuilding life after it’s been stripped apart by the many arms of cultural change will take a long time, maybe even generations, but the church has all that’s required to do so. If we want to get practical, one of the ways we can thicken our communities is to make sure we have friends. Actively seek them, pray for them, make regular (habitual!) time in your life for them.
Large numbers of men don’t have any friends. While Christian men on the whole do better, large numbers of Christian men also don’t have any friends. I think that’s a serious problem. Friendship is hard, and lots of cultural headwinds are against us, but we all need friends. The traditional ways that men make friends have largely disappeared, so lean into making them in the church. Deliberately hold onto those you make when you’re young; we all think it’ll be easy to make more, but it isn’t. I would encourage churches to teach on friendship—a key Christian concept that I think I’ve heard taught on once and I was the one preaching—and to hold it up as vital and important. We should consider friendship an important theological category in our thinking. If there are things that can be done to facilitate friendship then that’s great but even if not, changing the mood music about whether this a problem and whether its important would make a big difference.
Photo by Egor Myznik on Unsplash
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