"On Friendship"

Dear WRC,

I suppose there are a lot of different reasons to pursue a terminal degree like a Doctorate of Ministry. Perhaps it could open up some doors professionally. Being able to throw around a title like Reverend Doctor still has force in some conversations. There’s also the learning—it’s an opportunity to develop mastery over a body of knowledge and expand your learning in a way that will build up and bless the Church of Jesus Christ.

My biggest takeaway from these last three years, though, has been friendship. Friendship may not seem like nearly so lofty of an accomplishment as the academic and professional acclaim, but these new friends have lifted my heart and buoyed my soul in a way credentialing never could.

We don’t often talk about friendship within the Church, but it’s good to note that on the night he was betrayed, when the hour of his glory had finally come, as he celebrated his Last Supper with his disciples and shared his final words with them, Jesus made a big deal of calling them friends (John 15:15). This is what Jesus has done in and for us: made us now his friends. Friends of the Word made flesh, in whom all things came into being, the very light of the world. Can you believe it?

And it’s that friendship with God that allows us to enter into deep and abiding friendships with one another (“As I have loved you, so also you ought to love one another.” John 13:34). These friendships don’t revolve around us—what we get out of it, what another can bring to it, the affection we feel toward another—they blossom out of a shared love of God. I can’t remember if it was Augustine, Aquinas, or Aristotle (it started with an A…), but one of them pointed out that true friendship is always based on a shared love. The depth of the friendship corresponds to the depth of that shared love. If we both love baseball, have kids in the same school, or share an appreciation for craft beer and tacos, we may bond over that shared love and find our hearts warmed on receiving a text about a new taco joint or the latest web gem. Loving the same thing breeds an affection between us that may even deepen into sacrifice and service. But the weightier and deeper that shared love, the deeper the friendship that it fosters.

We have been welcomed into the deepest of friendships by Jesus. “No one has greater love than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends” (John 15:13-14). Entering into that friendship with Jesus, we find ourselves working and worshiping shoulder to shoulder with others of Jesus’ friends who in turn become our friends! Our shared affection of Jesus opens us up to love one another in deep and profound ways—not only in sacrifice and service, but in rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep.

I didn’t begin this program searching for new friends, but I supposed I needed to be found by them. It has been such a holy joy to pray with them and be prayed for by them; to help bear their burdens and have mine borne; to struggle together with what it means to pastor faithfully in an age that sees the church through the lens of the marketplace; to laugh and cry and even dance together. It has been a blessing in the truest sense of the word: a gift unforeseen and undeserved. I need the blessing of these friendships for this journey.

I think many of us long for these kinds of deep and selfless friendships. Our age is conspicuously lonely and disconnected. Thankfully, many modern sources can add to what Augustine (or whoever) had to say about how to make friends. Seems like I’ve seen a number of videos and posts over the last few months about how to make friends in your 30’s and 40’s, and they all boil down to the same idea: be a friend. Show interest in others; learn their name and say it; ask questions and listen intently when they respond. The worst way to make friends is sit back and wait for them to find you. When Jesus sought to befriend us, he came to find us while we were still lost.

Want friends? Give the love Jesus poured into you to others. Love as selflessly as he did. Show up when others need a friend. Do it not for what you’ll get out of it, but for what you can give. I’ve seen this kind of love shared among you. I’ve watched people be “befriended” in our midst, and it’s as beautiful to watch as it is to experience.

My D.Min. is now over, but I’m eager to continue to give away this gift that I’ve received. Wanna be friends?

In Christ,

Pastor Andy