Friendship without burnout: Three foundations for true Christian fellowship

I have the trifecta when it comes to managing friends badly. I prefer deep and meaningful to acquaintances and small talk; I am an introvert (although not many people believe me); and I get sensory overload when surrounded for too long by noise and crowds.

These factors combined mean I freak out a bit about how to manage multiple friendships. I have 631 Facebook friends, and another 600-odd people across the day at church on Sunday—just the idea of conducting deep and meaningful friendships with all those people has me curled up in the foetal position.

But then I realized I’ve been approaching friendships the way the world does. Our society tends to act as if there are only two types of friendships, besties and Facebook acquaintances. There is nothing in between. You can’t be besties with all your acquaintances, so you deliberately keep them in the shallow end of the friend pool.

With church friends this becomes even harder. We need to be welcoming, we need to be familiar, we need to connect and engage, and we need to be friends. We are exhorted to bear with each other in love and unity (Col 3:12-14), and Proverbs is jam-packed with the wisdom of friendship (e.g. Prov 18:24), but we can’t be besties with 50, 100, 600 or 1000 church members, and we owe them far more than just being acquaintances. So what do we do?

Scripture tells us to build each other up and encourage each other (1 Thess 5:11), and we are to love each other as brothers and sisters (Heb 13:1). There has to be a ‘third way’ that the world doesn’t know. Outlined below are three foundations for doing Christian friendships that are focused on our relationship in Christ.

We are to be involved in each other’s lives.

Truly encouraging each other means knowing what is going on in people’s lives—and not just knowing it, but taking an interest in it.

We can ‘know’ what’s going on in people’s lives from Facebook—the bit they want to show us. But that’s just head knowledge. We can know stuff without knowing the person. Taking an interest in someone means we are caring about their stuff, and not just knowing it.

In order to know and take an interest, we need to interact with people beyond their Facebook feed and a few pleasantries on Sunday (although both are useful!). We have an array of opportunities to be involved with each other. We can be in Bible study groups together. We can go to activities and events together. We can text and email. Every so often we can meet up for a chat and a coffee to ask how things are going, and to pray for each other.

We don’t have to be besties in the worldly sense. We don’t have to exhaust our time or give emotional energy we don’t have or talk only of serious weighty issues. It’s not about going out together constantly or talking every day or hosting parties. This third-way friendship is focused on each other via a focus on Christ.

We ask the right questions

Being Christ-focused doesn’t mean no small talk (let’s face it, what’s happening on Masterchef is always going to be super important), but we can ask each other “How are you going?” and mean it. We can ask “How is your spiritual life?” and genuinely want to know so we can help support them. We can ask “What can I pray for you?” because we really are interested and we truly want to talk to God on their behalf.

We love them

Love gets a bad rap these days as a feeling that comes and goes and waxes and wanes. But God commanded us to love each other, and Jesus reiterated this command as an action:

And he said to him, “You shall love [ἀγαπήσεις] the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love [ἀγαπήσεις] your neighbour as yourself. (Matt 22:37-39)

The word ἀγαπήσεις is a verb (“you will love”), which means it’s something we do. That doesn’t mean we feel love for everyone, it means we love them through our actions. It means that when we text to check in, or send a message to ask for prayer points, or meet up for coffee once in a while, or have pizza delivered on a night you know they’re working flat out, or hang around a bit longer after church, or send a postcard just to say “thinking of you”, or Skype someone who’s away on long distance placement… it’s not because we’re trying to be fake besties; it’s because we love them and we care about their standing before God and the journey that they (and all of us!) are on.

This is third-way friendship. It’s so much more than Facebook acquaintances, and in many ways it has more depth and breadth than besties. But even as a middle and third way, it has exceptional clarity—because it is rooted in Christ. Christ gives our friendships boundaries and purposes that are clearly seen in Scripture, which repeatedly talks about love and unity and mutual encouragement. He also gives it focus—a focus on him which gives the strongest kind of infrastructure to our relationships. He is the reason we know each other. He is the reason we draw closer to each other. He is the reason we can be involved with each other, ask each other the right questions and show love through our actions.

These aren’t wishy-washy worldy friendships based around a favourite sport or night spot. These are friendships that are deeply rooted in the clarity of Scripture, and the focus on Jesus.

As his disciples, we can’t sit on the sidelines by ourselves. We are commanded to love each other. So we need to act for and on behalf of each other. We bear our burdens together and journey as people to our true home in him. The best kind of friendship is wanting the absolute best for the other person.

Founded in Christ, this is what we can do, and feel, for each other until we are all home.