Theology of Friendship: Curate Summit Transcript

By: Rachel Cuthbert

I want to start by affirming this: Friendship is a generally revealed kindness to all of creation.

Just by virtue of being alive in God’s world, whether or not you’re a Christian, you experience God’s good design of community in friendship at some level. Like a gorgeous sunset or a beautiful mountain range, you can love and appreciate the stunning creation, without actually knowing the Creator to whom it all points. I think friendship points to the Creator.

I don’t know if this will be controversial, but I’m going to propose that Christians actually have a fuller understanding of friendship, because they have a fuller understanding of the Creator of friendship. In order to fully grasp and think deeply about friends, I think we need to establish what I’m going to call a “Theology of Friendship.”

It is essential, if we really want to understand what true friendship is, that we understand where true friendship comes from. If Christians rightly understand the mystery of the Trinity (inasmuch as we can understand that mystery), we know that the three-in-one God of the universe is the ultimate, always existent community. In eternity past the Father, Son, and Spirit were joyfully engaged in communion.

Therefore, humans were created in the Image of God for community, by the God of community, and invited into relationship with the Triune community. And because all human beings are made in the image of God, we all are innately communal beings. Our desire is for community. I’ll take it a step further: our desire is for friendship. That is all part of God’s good and glorious pre-Fall design.

Basically, God designed our world from the beginning for true friendship. Friendship with him and friendship with one another. Before sin entered the world, the triune God had perfect fellowship with his people. First, there was fellowship of God with Adam. When He deemed it “not good” that Adam be alone, He created the first human friendship (in marriage) when he created Eve. It’s really important to note here that Adam’s earthly aloneness was deemed “not good” even before sin entered the world. According to theologian Tim Keller, “Adam was not lonely because he was imperfect, but because he was perfect. The ache for friends is the one ache that is not the result of sin…This is one ache that is a part of his perfection…God made us in such a way that we cannot enjoy paradise without friends. God made us in such a way that we cannot enjoy our joy without human friends.”

But then sin entered the world. Through the doubting of God’s love and rebelling against his authority, Adam and Eve rejected his friendship. And this depravity affects everyone.

The good news? The just God of the universe sent Jesus to live an earthly life, die a human death, and rise from the dead, rescuing all who trust in Christ—his friends—from sin and sin’s consequences. Keller writes, “The entire history of redemption—in a sense—is a giant cosmic act of friendship.” I think what he means is not only are we designed as image-bearers to desire and be in community with one another, but the story of redemption after the Fall is God making His enemies (us) into His friends.

Ultimately, in the greatest act of mercy, Jesus gave His life for His friends. Is there a more pure and selfless friendship love than that?

This is why we constantly see this played out in the arts, literature, in music, and in movies. The stories that we come to love are the ones that reflect what we live. How we understand God, ourselves, and our place in this temporary world is what shapes how we live. And the joy in friendship foreshadows the exceeding joy in the new heavens and new earth!

Our theology, if you’re still tracking with me, now shows us that we actually are ultimately created for friendship. But what does that really mean, what does it look like, and how do we find it? 

The Necessity and Gift of Friendship

Through every age, since the beginning of time, sociologists, philosophers, and the ancient Greeks have all thought and written about friendship. What its ultimate purpose might be. How man might achieve it.

And though the yearn for, study, and even understanding of friendship has always been there, our modern era provides unique challenges to forging significant bonds with others. Study after study has shown that in our increasingly digital world, we are also becoming increasingly more isolated. We’ve probably all heard this before.

Sometimes technology can help us connect with our friends. I have Marco Polo conversations and text threads I’m so thankful for. I think it can complement already forged friendships as a way to communicate and stay in touch. But nothing can replace the in-person time spent digging deep with a friend. I want to challenge us not to replace community and communion with mere digital communication.

We’ve often conflated seeing photos/stories/reels of friends and their lives as relationship. The word “friend” in our culture has been watered down to include the thousand plus “friends” that we might have on Facebook and has come to mean almost nothing. Or at best, an acquaintance. I think a large portion of our culture is connected to many yet connecting to no one. We don’t just need general community with many, though that’s important. In order to flourish, we need connection with a few. And perhaps our small part in the redemption narrative is to counter-culturally make friends and build community. Living out a pre-Fall plan in friendship.

But in that endeavor, at some point, we will experience unmet longings for close relationships. We may have lost friends or been betrayed by them. We may experience hurt and turmoil in friendship or just go different directions and drift away. We may see on our Find My Friends app that we have been left out or excluded in a friend group. Friendship on a human level isn’t all that it should be, but it is not worth abandoning.

C.S. Lewis famously wrote in his book The Four Loves:

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell.”

All this to say: you will experience hurt because of friendship because we live in a fallen world. But any hurt you may feel is far outweighed by the love and companionship that is friendship. And maybe some of those hurts and wounds are part of the Holy Spirit’s sanctifying work in your life. Like any and all human relationships, the redemption and recovering are meant to mirror a greater reality of humanity redeemed by God.

In preparing for what I was planning to say today, I read several books and articles. One that I highly recommend and am drawing a lot of content from is Drew Hunter’s book entitled Made for Friendship with the appropriate subtitle, “The relationship that halves our sorrows and doubles our joys.”

I’m sure this comes from the 19th century Anglican bishop J.C. Ryle who wrote, “This world is full of sorrow because it is full of sin. It is a dark place. It is a lonely place. It is a disappointing place. The brightest sunbeam in it is a friend. Friendship halves our troubles and doubles our joys.”

I think we have all experienced this at some level. When we have great news or a big accomplishment, we want to tell our friends. A joy shared is truly a joy doubled. We love to celebrate things with the people we love.

With the heaviness and sorrow that is this life, friends give us their wisdom and care. We long to be comforted, listened to, and understood. We should hope to be those friends, sharing joy and excitement and also speaking hope-filled, gospel-saturated words when we walk through life’s valleys.

When you have close friends, whom you’ve invested in and who have invested in you, they often know you as well or better than yourself. When you can’t think clearly, sometimes they can help you put words to your emotions and pray for you when you don’t even know what to pray.

If you define a “friendship” in a fickle way, you may often ask, “how does this relationship benefit me?” But thinking of friendship in a bit of a deeper way, in a gospel-rich-friendship-theology sort of way, it actually should look more like, “how are we mutually encouraging each other to run this race well?”

I’m sure many of you are at varying degrees of friendship. College is a really unique time in life when you have more time for and often live among your closest friends. Sometimes it can be joyfully intense or sometimes overwhelmingly intense. College is a really significant season of friendship. But some of you may be looking and longing to find your people. Some of you are already anxious about college wrapping up and leaving your people. I hope that whether you feel like I’m touching on your current stage of friendship, you might take some of these thoughts I’m about to share into future seasons of friendship. 

Seasons of Friendship

My dad turned 70 last year and also retired from over 40 years in medicine on the same day. As part of our family’s celebration, we spent months secretly collecting letters and notes from people in his life and putting them together in a book. The assignment was pretty broad. A lot of notes were from patients or colleagues, but there were also some of the sweetest notes from his dear friends. Some friends from childhood and high school, some teammates from college, and then all throughout his career. I ended up in tears more than once as I was able to read about the seasons of friendship in a 70-year life.

His friend and fellow physician Al wrote this: “Thus began a 35-year friendship that I would grow to appreciate, enjoy, gain strength from, and value nearly as much as my marriage. Over the years Jim has seen me at my best and my worst. He has accepted me in both. He has spoken words of wisdom, compassion, and correction into my life. He has not only been a friend, but an example of excellence in practicing medicine, leading his family, and worshiping God with his life. [He] would always give you his best, and as a friend could you ask for anything more?”

I hope someday I have a friend who might describe me in this way. I felt like Al succinctly described what we long for in friendships. Not perfection, but faithfulness.

It made me reflect on my own life, significantly longer than all of yours, but still a bit short of 70. These milestones or life transitions make you evaluate all sorts of things, friendship being one of them.

I recently went to a friend’s milestone birthday party. We celebrated one evening with what she affectionately called her “Eras Party.” For one evening all together, there were friends from childhood through the present, all representing a different season of life.

Life and friendships have seasons. There will be marriages and babies, job changes and moves. It will most likely be impossible to keep up all the friendships that you currently have or have had

at the same level. And there might be seasons of both drought and abundance. Some of those seasons will provide sweet friendships that mean so much in that particular time of your life. Friendship may look different for each of life’s stages, but it will always be necessary.

Exactly one year ago today, I was at a house on Lake Michigan with 5 of my sweet childhood friends. I have known them all since I was 6 years old. Honestly, I have no idea if we met today if we would become friends, but something about growing up with people forges friendships regardless. We haven’t all stayed perfectly in touch with each other, and there have been some years with sparse communication, but this is the second time we had carved out a weekend to get together in the last 5 years. It was such a fun reunion of friends who have just always known me. As the saying goes, “You can’t make old friends.” They have seen me at my middle school braces worst, watched all the dating relationships, born witness to some not always great choices and, and have loved me always. It feels so rich to be that known.

I have a group of college friends that has made the effort to get together most summers since we graduated. My college years contained significant spiritual growth, and some of these friends faithfully walked with me through very dark times. Probably worth noting: some of these friends I met on the first day of freshman year, and a couple of them I hardly knew until we were seniors. You never know who, or when in these college years God might put a sweet friend in your path. Getting together with them over the years has often meant dragging along our new babies and now trying to get our families to a place where they can survive without us for a weekend. It’s sometimes meeting up at a lake home or hotel, but the weekend always ends up with a detailed life update from each of us and how we can be praying for each other more regularly. I’ve had the joy of being with these friends through some of life’s deepest sorrows and greatest joys. Our group text is full of hysterical memes, funny stories, and heartbreaking life challenges. God has been so kind to continue to provide sweet friendships in every stage.

How you cultivate them and what they look like might look different as life looks different. I currently have a note in my phone that is a list of things I want to talk to one of my dear friends about. We get together regularly, and never have we gotten through our lists. My current season is busy, but I still desperately try to make friendship a priority. How many friends you have might look different because people have different capacities and social bandwidths. But I think we all have more time and energy than we think. It’s worth being selfless in friendship—maybe even giving something else up in your life—because friendship is far more beneficial for us and for others than most things.

If you don’t remember anything else I say, please pay attention to this: If we don’t feel like we have enough time, maybe it is worth evaluating whether we are spending our time wisely when it comes to friends. How much energy have we spent pursuing friendships that are neither edifying to us nor glorifying to God but because they put us in a certain social circle that we desire or we think we want to be in? It’s worth having some self-aware and honest conversations with yourself when it comes to your motivations behind friendship.

I have the sweet gift of being married to my best friend. Marriage could be a whole other conversation. To anyone who is married or might be married, I urge you to cultivate what Tim Keller calls the “best spiritual friendship” with their spouse. They are, or should become, your most prioritized friend and someone who knows you as well as you know yourself.

But I’ve also experienced seasons of heartache in friendship. There have been seasons of abundance and some lonely and sparse seasons. I’ve been hurt by someone I considered a friend, and I know I’ve hurt friends. Sometimes I’ve needed to set boundaries or draw back from relationships that weren’t good for me. The change in friendship, or even the loss of friendship, shouldn’t be done lightly. You will sin against your friends, and they will sin against you. Friendship should not be disposable or something you quickly move on from. There are, however, situations that warrant distance, and it takes prayer and discernment to figure out what that looks like. 

Practically Cultivating Friendship

So how do we practically do this? With all this backdrop in mind, how do we make and cultivate what I want to call gospel friendships?

The best advice I can give on how to cultivate better friendships is to be a better friend. Back to the theology of friendship: the best way to be better in our horizontal friendships is to make sure we are investing significantly in our vertical one. Spending time with God and in His word not only helps us grow in virtues of patience, love, and kindness, but also reminds our hearts that since we have been extended such an extreme kindness of forgiveness from the very model of friendship, we should be willing to model kindness and forgiveness and generosity and love to our friends.

Hunter writes, “The world can never get friendship right, because it rejects the first and greatest love. The world refuses to love God as God. And when you reject God, it’s impossible to get your horizontal loves, like friendship, right. It is impossible to seek your neighbor’s greatest good while rejecting the very God who IS their greatest good.”

Properly treasuring God above friendship also means you won’t make an idol of earthly friendship. So many things on this earth can be put in an improper place in front of God. And even the wonderful, created gift of friendship can begin to be an idol if we expect of it what it was never meant to be. You will never find a perfect friend, and in the process of seeking after one, you may find that you destroy that which you’re trying to find.

You’ll also never be the perfect friend. God doesn’t call us to some sort of martyrdom in friendship. We already have Jesus who was that perfect friend; but He does model for us selfless friendship, and that’s something that we all should work toward.

I’ve realized, as I have thought deeply and specifically about friendship, that I certainly have a lot of short comings when it comes to being a good friend. Am I pointing them to Christ? Am I loving well? Am I sacrificial? We aren’t meant to live in a perpetual state of guilt about our own shortcomings, but I do think we can seek to be sanctified and desire to grow in healthy ways, seeking to be better friends.

I love how Rebecca McLaughlin puts it in her book on friendship, No Greater Love. She starts by quoting the first verse of Psalm 133: “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity?” She then goes on to write, “It is truly a beautiful thing when brothers and sisters live like this. But just as we will only come to resurrection on the other side of death, we’ll only reach that final unity when we have first been broken on the jagged edges of our sin. I can’t do Christian friendship without Jesus. Neither can you. Without Jesus’ help, we’ll fail at fighting the good fight. We’ll cling to idols and form selfish inner rings. We’ll hate the discipline of mutual accountability and love the smugness and superiority that comes from leaving others out. We’ll play it safe because we cannot face the vulnerability of closeness, and so we’ll miss the chance to find our very heart in friends who love the Lord with all of theirs.”

A second piece of practicality I want to challenge you with: grow where you are planted. We often long for a past experience or hope for future ones. I think sometimes that takes away from the opportunity to live in your current life. This can be the case with friendships too. We long for friends from home. Soon you may long for your college years and friends here. We also idealize what the future of friendship might look like or the future of what marriage friendship might look like.

Wendell Berry once wrote “We live the life given, not the planned.” As a friend of mine recently shared, that can look a lot like the Israelite exile to Babylon in Jeremiah 29. Jeremiah writes in verse 4: “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into the exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: ‘Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce.’” Basically, you aren’t returning to Jerusalem any time soon, even though God is also letting you know He hasn’t forgotten you or His purpose for you.

Let’s not be people of perpetual discontentment and unhappiness in our circumstances or in our friendships. Don’t sacrifice the life you have on the altar of the life you wanted. Tend to the people around you. Pursue deep and meaningful friendships with the people that God has provided. Water what you have, and I think you might be deeply blessed by the way that God provides.

Another piece of practicality is to cultivate friendships across age lines. Friends do not have to be your age! I know we often gravitate towards friends in a similar demographic or at least in a similar stage of life. And this is good, helpful, and understandable. I get that college is a really intense time of “everyone is my age.” But stretch yourselves to cultivate friendships that might span decades. This can certainly look like mentor or mentoring relationships, but I also think this can just look like beautiful friendship. Dig a little deeper into your multigenerational church and see who is out there. We all have things to offer and to gain from crossing generational lines. Though age and stage of life can be a significant connecting point, the gospel is actually an even more significant one.

When it comes to friendships, I often think of what my dad once told me during college. He said, “Get out of your own head. Stop thinking about yourself. No one is thinking about you as much as you are.” Maybe it sounds harsh, but he was right. I was studying abroad, in culture shock, lonely, anxious, and depressed. Getting outside your own head doesn’t immediately solve all those issues, but I think it can be a step in the right direction. It is our natural inclination to be selfish. We think about ourselves, our needs, what others must think of us. And the reality is that everyone else is much more concerned about themselves than they are with you. So, practically, don’t overthink it. Fight against the insecurities that say, “maybe they won’t want to be my friend.” Don’t leave conversations obsessing and analyzing everything you said. It can be the most freeing experience in friendship to not make it all about you. In fact, some of the stupid things you say or the oversharing you might replay in your head later can sometimes be the most endearing. It makes you human and relatable. Not perfect and polished.

Tim Keller wrote this amazing little book entitled The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness. It’s not written specifically about friendship, but I think a lot of it can apply to friendships. He writes, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.”

As a bit of a tangent, I don’t do enough regular public speaking, so it takes some serious effort and reflection. God probably provides these opportunities to keep me appropriately empathetic to my husband who does this weekly. It’s a good test of self-forgetfulness. Am I more concerned with what you all will think of me? Or am I most concerned with being a vessel used by God to convey edifying information and encouragement for us all? I imagine I’m probably not alone in this inner struggle.

Do you know what is super attractive in friendship? Friends who are self-forgetful.

I have come to love making friend connections. This means, I love to connect people I know with other people that I know because I think they might click as friends. I’m a friend matchmaker, if you will. You might not feel like you have the bandwidth to join a group, but when you see that two people might mutually benefit from one another, be in the habit of making that happen.

Also, don’t hoard good friendships. Don’t be jealous or envious. Share good friends. For the sake of others, selflessly encourage friendships when you can.

In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis writes, “In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets...Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, ‘Here comes one who will augment our loves.’ For in this love ‘to divide is not to take away.’”

Another way to practically cultivate friendships is to find people with shared interests. College often is a natural place to find a whole lot of people with shared interests, and the challenge becomes going deeper with people who share both your interests and worldview. As you move on from here, this might look like joining book clubs, or church groups, or moms groups, or asking someone to play tennis or pickleball or go to coffee.

When I was a young mom and we were living in Lansing, some women of all ages from my church discovered we had a shared love for Downton Abbey. We got together to drink tea and watched the show, and that led to the sharing of books we all loved and eventually sweet friendships. Downton Abbey was a shared interest launching point that led to years of deep gospel friendship.

I touched on it earlier, but one way to build authentic friendship is to be vulnerable. In fact, I don’t think you can truly build a deep, lasting friendship without it. Vulnerability pushes against an Instagram highlight reel or the protective facade that is so tempting for all of us to put up. It requires quite a bit of courage and a little bit of risk, but I think what you may find if you are willing to be vulnerable is that this C.S. Lewis quote will ring true: “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one!’” You have to be willing to invite people into the mess that is your life. Not just messy homes or relationships, but our messy hearts and minds. This is admittedly not my strong suit. When my heart and mind feel messy and chaotic, my first inclination is to isolate. To just soldier on and figure it out by myself. Not only is this not the way God intended—to fight on in solitude—but it robs my friends of the chance to come alongside me and be a persevering presence. Don’t rob your friends. And be that persevering presence when your friends need it.

Finally, in my non-exhaustive list of ways to cultivate friendship—intentionality. Ask someone to coffee, schedule a walk with someone. And if someone asks you to coffee? Even if you feel like you’re “all good” in the friend department, consider saying yes. You might not know what providential joy and kindness could come from being willing to not grow stagnant in some sort of friend clique. I firmly believe that you will never truly “arrive” in friendship. If you ever think you have, I’m going to challenge you that this actually isn’t God’s plan for your life in friendship. Cultivating a “plurality of friendship” can really be a blessing for you. New friends might love or encourage you in a way that you’ve never been loved or encouraged before.

But maybe you’re here feeling lonely. If you’ve never had a season of loneliness, my guess is you will at some point. Instead of wallowing in self-pity, could you view loneliness as the Holy Spirit’s way of saying, “who can you reach out to?” I can absolutely guarantee that there is someone else in your life who would love to be reached out to. In that loneliness, what a perfect time to go to our one perfect Friend in prayer and say, “Lord, I’m lonely. Will you provide?”

I want to close by reading 1 Corinthians 13. I know you are probably all familiar with it, but I think we are used to hearing it at weddings in regard to romantic love. I want you to hear it with friendship freshly on your minds.

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Rachel Cuthbert

Rachel and her husband Ben have called Hillsdale home for the last 8 years. An Iowa native, and Taylor University (Indiana) graduate, Ben and Rachel lived in Boston and Lansing before Ben took the Senior Pastor position at College Baptist Church. Rachel spends most of her time as homemaker and mom to their four kids (Jonah 16, Thatcher 14, Oliver 11, Monroe 7) but also works part time as a photographer and designer (interiors and events) and volunteers at church. She loves to spend time with her family, travel (especially internationally!), and play/watch all sports.

Email: rachelclemens@gmail.com