If Moltmann is right, and I think he is, that Christianity is a friendship with Christ and with others, then church needs to be reconceived. Borrowing from Kant, he writes in The Church in the Power of the Spirit that friendship is respect joined to affection. This dynamic is at the heart of what it means to be a community that follows after Christ. When affection and respect—indeed friendship—are present, there is no pressing need to be in charge, to have hierarchy, to prefer oneself to others. In fact, friendship has the ability to eradicate all the barriers that churches somehow manage to construct or borrow from the local culture.
Two problems should be readily apparent. Large churches will have a difficult time building on friendships. They are in fact built upon the service of felt needs or a desire for safe, homogenous "community." Large churches offer small groups to foster discipleship and friendship, but as most professional clergy know, a small percentage of members attend small groups. Friendship is sadly lacking in our culture anyway, and the church seems to do little to rectify that.
Second, if Christianity is a friendship with others, our fellowships need to be places that welcome others. My professor said in his Pentecost sermon that if you can't include a group or a certain kind of individual within your embrace, you aren't filled with the Spirit. (Saying this to a Nazarene congregation is probably professionally risky.) Realistically, how many churches do you know that are open to the other where other is understood as someone that would make me extremely uncomfortable? This political year brings out the worst in everyone, even or especially churches. Churches on the right and left of the political spectrum demonize the other side, yet remain hyperopic to their own sins. In non-election years, evangelical churches demonize homosexuals, liberals, atheists, and other groups as part of the cost of doing business.
I've heard a few sermons on friendship with God, but I've never heard one that insists the Christian be friends with those God prefers: the poor, the outcast, the pariah, the disenfranchised, and the one that makes me really uncomfortable.
If Moltmann is right, and I think he is . . .
I think you're right!
Posted by: Dave | August 15, 2004 at 03:43 PM
... the one that makes me really uncomfortable.
You mean like, for example, the Gerasene Demoniac in Mark 5? The guy who ran around stark naked in a cemetery cutting himself up, breaking apart handcuffs, and howling at the moon?
I just noticed while looking at Mark 5:19 that Jesus tells the cured demoniac to "go home to your friends." That he might still have had friends is a moving thought, given your points about the paucity of authentic friendship in the world. Would I have been among the friends that this guy went home to? I wonder.
For some reason I thought of the demoniac while reading your point about how Christians "demonize" the other. There are probably plenty of suburban churches where the standard image of the people on the other side of the neighborhood gates is not much different from the image of the Gerasene.
If Jesus came around befriending such people, the church today would probably have much the same reaction as the bystanders in Mark 5: "Then they began to beg Jesus to leave their neighborhood."
Posted by: Caleb | August 15, 2004 at 06:15 PM
Frineds are friends forever...
Don't we need structure at some point though? In my experience a group of friends with out structure or leadership of some kind will be more likely to go wrong then one that has some form of leadership. If we are disussing a group like a church it would be unlikely for people to grow in a "friends" setting with out some kind of structure to it. I don't think that can work. Thoughts?
Posted by: eddie jones | August 16, 2004 at 02:35 PM