There was no reason they invited me. I was a freshman, barely out of high school. Because of a late-summer birthday, I was mere months from seventeen. Kate already graduated and was the intern for our campus ministry. Taylor and Kade both took the long way through college. The age gap was at least 3 to 5 years. The maturity gap even steeper. But they invited me anyway, to meet them in the chapel and pray every day before class. And we did, Monday-Friday that spring.
That spring changed my life. God worked mightily. I learned to pray. I learned Scripture. I learned myself. I confessed my sins, concrete sins, shameful things, to others for the first time. And without knowing what had happened, I fell into a kind of friendship I didn’t know existed. it was my first experience of spiritual friendship.
I had other friends I saw every day. In the dorms. In the cafeteria. Out and about in our shenanigans. College is a relationally rich period. You have so much time and so little responsibility. So much time with others.
But with Kate, Taylor, and Kade, that short time in prayer, sometimes a brief thirty minutes before class, sometimes a lingering hour, forged a special character of friendship I had never experienced before. I loved them. I cared deeply about them.
Jesus was the center of our friendship. It changed the relationship. It changed what we talked about and how we talked about it. The affection and a graciousness shot up so fast it felt like Jack’s magic beanstalk, reaching heavenward overnight. I had known others for years. But never had I experienced the kind of camaraderie and kindness and acceptance and even challenge these friendships both gave me and required of me.
So what are spiritual friendships?
A spiritual friendship is a friendship centered on Christ, committed to one another’s good, and helping one another become more like Jesus.
That might seem strange, even alien to many of us. We already face a widespread deficit of friendship. The pandemic produced intense social isolation that many have still not dug themselves totally out of. It precipitated a loneliness and isolation pandemic. Our smartphones, ostensibly a technology of connection, have ironically cut us off from each other. We can entertain ourselves without ever leaving our couch or bed or bathroom. As The Atlantic journalist Olga Khazan puts it, “The typical American, it seems, texts a bunch of people “we should get together!” before watching TikTok alone on the couch and then passing out.”
We face difficulties particular to the Bay Area. Most of suburban California was designed to facilitate the lowest possible bar of community interaction. We drive far away for work. We come home, park in the garage, so we never have to interact with our neighbors. Then there’s Bay Area Busy. There’s a faster pace of life here. Maximizing work. Maximizing leisure. Investing all the right extracurriculars into your child.
And it’s especially bad for men. Many men live incredibly isolated lives. Single men. Married men. Fathers. Most men with families rarely pursue any friendships outside the social calendar that their wife largely runs. Comedian John Mulaney notes how his dad, an aging empty-nester, has no real friends outside of his World War II books. Mulaney jests that the true miracle of Jesus was that a guy in his thirties had twelve close guy friends.
The Survey Center on American Life reported in 2021 that adults have far fewer close friends than thirty years ago. In 1990, 3% of adults reported having no close friends. It’s now at 12%. With men, it’s more dire. Nearly 70% of men had five or more friends back in 1990. Now, that number has dropped to only 40%.
All this is bad for health and happiness. All the studies show social connection is essential to human health and flourishing. Whether it’s long-standing relationships with neighbors or a brief conversation with a stranger on the subway, we feel better and are happier when we’re connected. Yet so much of our lives run consciously and unconsciously against this. We’re lonely, we know we’re lonely and yet we perpetuate the very structures and habits that keep us lonely.
So what do we do about this? And what does spiritual friendship have to do with any of it?
Many of us don’t think of friendship as a priority of Christians or the church. Preaching the gospel, yes. Worship, yes. Bible study, yes. But friendship? Yes, we ARE a community. But that’s usually a different bucket than friendship. There’s a compartmentalization alongside a secular-sacred divide. Friendships=secular. Communuity=sacred. Church is for community. Work or hobbies for friends.
But what if that’s wrong. What if friendship is an important part of church, of Christian life?
Listen to how Paul’s vision for the Philippian church. He invites them to have the same heart and mind as each other. Bible scholar Eugene Peterson interprets Paul’s invitation as “be deep-spirited friends.” He wants the church to be “deep-spirited friends” with each other and with him.
Or take Jesus. Actually, Mulaney might be on to something. It was a miracle that Jesus, the image of the invisible God, would befriend twelve bumbling and unfaithful men. In fact, Jesus himself spoke in the very terms of friendship. that the formation of these spiritual friendships was central to Christ’s mission.
On the night before he died, a very important night in anyone’s life, he tells his disciples “no longer do I call you servants,…but I have called you friends.” Friendship was how he articulated discipleship. To be a disciple is not only to be Christ’s servant, but his friend.
Even more, Jesus frames this friendship as the reason why he’s about to go to the cross: “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. It is because Jesus has befriended us that he died on the cross. He’s the good friend who pays off the debts of that childhood friend who keeps getting into trouble.
And finally, Jesus calls his friends to demonstrate the same love he’s showing them to each other. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” To put it differently, Jesus says “do what I’ve done. Copy me. I’ve befriended you in love. And you now need to befriend each other in love.”
So maybe church IS more about friendship than we’re accustomed to thinking. But Jesus is also elevating our paradigm of friendship.
Our culture, if it values friendship at all, validates friendships of convenience and pleasure. Consumer culture teaches us to see relationships and friendships as products for consumption. What do I get out of it? As soon as a relationship becomes inconvenient or it doesn’t deliver, we drop it.
The Christian thinker C.S. Lewis would label many modern friendships as “companionship,” relationships of locality and convenience. Friendship, he explains, develops out of companionship when “two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share.” Friendships initially revolve around some shared thing. An interest in football or bikes or the Golden State Warriors. True friendships, in other words, begin with a lowercase “l” love.
This lowercase love does not necessarily make friendships good or wholesome. We can share in shallow or even foolish interests. This was Aelred of Rievaulx’s insight. Aelred, a twelfth-century Christian monk, wrote a fantastic Christian meditation on friendships. He noted many friendships are carnal, meaning they are driven by more base motives. A pair of twenty-something dudes get together to drink. Their love of alcohol is the basis of friendship. But Aelred posed that there is a level of friendship that is connected to virtue, what he calls spiritual friendship.
In these higher-level friendships, a development has occurred. Alongside the lowercase “l” love, the interest, has grown a sincere Love, not for the thing, but for the person. Friendship evolves from mutual admiration for something else to a mutual commitment towards the other, the friend’s good.
So many worldly friendships don’t get to this level. They don’t do the hard work of loving the other towards their goal. That requires tough love at times. Asking penetrating questions. Saying hard things. Persevering. But the best friendships begin with a shared love and commitment and develop into a mutual Love and Commitment for each other. A love and commitment to the other person’s good.
Which aligns with that Jesus tells us about friendship. He says friendship is about love, a sacrificial love.
In addition, what distinguishes spiritual friendships from mere friendship is a mutual love and interest in God. God is the aim, the goal. And alongside this common love and interest is a commitment to love each other.
So just to clarify, spiritual friendships are rooted in a mutual interest in and love for God. They seek to spur one another on towards God. And they seek to develop an organic, committed authentic affection for each other’s good.
And these spiritual friendships are not to be incidental to the life of the church. They are essential to the life and work of the church just as they were to Jesus’ own life and work.
What does that mean for Indelible Grace Church?
We want to create structures and conditions for these spiritual friendships to occur. We don’t necessarily need structures for these to develop. I know of multiple friendships in our church I would call spiritual friendships. They’re some combination of profound intentionality, repeated commitment, and the grace of the Holy Spirit.
As leadership, we want to help more spiritual friendships to occur. At my old house was a grapevine with delicious grapes. It was so healthy because the former owner had built a trellis for it to grow on. The vines and branches grew out because of the trellis. We want to build structures to help spiritual friendships to grow in multitude.
To be clear at the outset, there’s something supernatural and even mystical about friendships. They are “spiritual.” They require the Holy Spirit. That means we don’t have control over the process. We can be intentional. We can be purposeful. We can put in the effort and the hours, but there’s a large part of this we can’t control. Friendship requires a mutuality. It takes two to tango. We can’t control others. It didn’t always work for Jesus either. He was denied by his best friend in his hour of need and betrayed by the another.
But, we can aim for spiritual friendships as a church, building structures to help facilitate them and promoting an encouraging culture around them. We want this for our community groups. We want people in community groups to find like-minded brothers and sisters they can pursue outside the group. Friends they can get together for coffee and lunch and deepen the conversation. Friends they can text and call for prayer in a time of need.
We’re starting spiritual friendship cohorts to be even more intentional. They are even more focused on spiritual friendship. What are these cohorts?
Spiritual Friendship Cohorts are small groups of three to five men or women committed to three simple practices: Share. Bear. Prayer.
We share honestly. We bear one another's burdens. And we pray for each other.
They’re more intense. That they’re gender-specific helps to cut to the chase, allowing for less guarded sharing. Who are you? What is God doing in your life? Here’s what God is doing in my life. Here’s where it hurts. Here’s where it’s hard. How can I love you? How can I love you towards Christ’s love. How can I pray for you?
Share. Bear. Prayer.
And the last one, prayer, is honestly the key to the whole thing. Prayer often gets short shrift. We tack it on as obligatory. We spend all our time sharing, talking to each other. But prayer is the secret sauce. It’s when we pray together that the bonds of love are truly strengthened.
That might seem too intense. Too quick. Too inauthentic. Humanly speaking, it is. But we’re assured that there is a super-human reality. Jesus promises to be specially present when two or more are gathered together. That’s the power of spiritual friendships. Jesus is there.
Because of Jesus, spiritual friendships are not addition, not 1+1=2. It’s 1+1=4. They’re multiplication. As we grow in love and friendship to this person, we are simultaneously growing in friendship with Jesus. Partly this is because we are seeking to love this person with the love of Jesus. Partly it’s because they are giving us a concrete example of Jesus’ love for us. Their words of encouragement are Christ’s words of encouragement. We’re both experiencing the love of Jesus in addition to and through this dear friend.
Aelred, in Spiritual Friendship, muses to his friend “Here we are, you and I, and I hope that Christ makes a third with us.” Someone else is here, in the friendship.
That’s our hope for these spiritual friendship cohorts. Not merely that we make new friends or form stronger friendships, but that Jesus would be present with us. May we know his deep and powerful love even more in these friendships, drawing us ever more into his eternal and everlasting friendship.