Spiritual Friendship

Brian McLaren, in his book, More Ready Than You Realize, presents a different way of thinking about evangelism when he uses the term spiritual friendships. Brian believes that many people are seeking God and are open to God but stumble at the old modern understanding of God presented to them by too many churches and Christians.

These people often react against: an uptight God who is about black-and-white easy answers and brittle, rigid logic and law. They react against a God who is encountered through systems of abstractions, propositions, and terminology. They react against a God who is controlling, cold, analytical, and mechanistic in nature. They react against an exclusive God who favors insiders and is biased against outsiders. And they react against a tense God who prefers people to become judgmental, arrogant, and closed-minded. For many of them, they are either uninterested in the church or have walked away from the church having be wounded.

What they hope God is about is many faceted truths, self-sacrificing love, compassionate justice, and profound relationships. They hope God is encountered through amazing stories, intense poetry, beauty, experience, experiment, and community. They hope God is a master artist and lover who is passionate about good and evil, justice and injustice, beauty and desecration, hope and cynicism. They hope God is a God of scandalous inclusion, amazing mercy, and shocking acceptance, who blesses insiders so that they can extend the blessing to outsiders, thus making everyone an insider. And they hope that God wants people to become humble, open-minded, and teachable.

Unfortunately many of these people looking for God to be this kind of God don’t believe they will find God in the Christian church and are looking elsewhere for God. What Brian suggests in response to this is to see ourselves as being called by God as Christians to be spiritual friends with those we encounter. This is a radical shift in how we think. Instead of seeing ourselves as being the ones with the correct answers from God, with the spark of God’s love in us, instead we see everyone as having the spark of God’s love in them. This means seeing God at work in every person around us. This makes our job not that of giving people God’s spark but rather fanning the spark that is already in them so that it can take flame.

The starting point for becoming a spiritual friend is in serving others. We have to see, like, approach, and serve people if you want to become their spiritual friend. We earn the right to be heard by serving, listening too, caring, smiling, or doing something to show ourselves to be a friendly, safe person to talk with. We don’t have to have all the answers because sometimes the shared questions are just as import as any answer. What people need to know is that we are safe, that we will not judge them and will give them the room to struggle and grow.

I myself grew up in a time when many ministers believed that it was better to scare someone into heaven than risk them ending up in hell. The problem with this is that God’s love is lost and it pushes people to put their faith in their ability to behave correctly for God rather than in Jesus and his saving word done for us. The reality is that spirituality cannot be decided by coercion-physical, political, spiritual, or even interpersonal. Just like you cannot make someone love you, you also cannot make someone love God. If as the author of I John says in the New Testament, “God is Love,” then there is no way God would want to connect with us through any other means than love.