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A focus on friendship rearranges our assumptions. What if the resources they have also meet our needs? What if jesus is already present in ways that will minister to us? What if in sharing life together as friends we all move closer to Jesus’ heart?
Our completeness is found in Christ and community where distinctions in status or resources mean much less.
Instead, we’ve tried to cultivate a shared life right in the midst of the most needy and marginalized persons and communities. No compounds, but life as neighbors and friends; not trying to do it as individuals, but together building community by being community.
Jesus offers us friendship, and that gift shapes a surprisingly subversive missional paradigm. A grateful response to God’s gift of friendship involves offering that same gift to others—whether family or strangers, coworkers or children who live on the street. Of fering and receiving friendship breaks down the barriers of “us” and “them” and opens up possibilities of healing and reconciliation.
When we shrink our interest in people to the possibilities of where their souls may spend eternity, it is easy to miss how God might already be working in and through a particular person. We are better able to resist tendencies to reductionism when we are in relationships that affirm each person’s dignity and identity and when we come into those relationships confident that God is already at work in the other person.
If we want people to experience the kingdom of God and to dwell with God for eternity, then how they experience their relationship with us should be a foretaste of that goodness and beauty.
The kingdom of God came into conflict with the empire—the kingdom of humanity. It follows that we would see evangelism and mission as life on the frontlines of kingdom-level conflict and missionaries and evangelists as subversives. But subversion is not usually our first image when we think of mission or evangelism.
Mission, then, is less about our efforts to help or evangelize “them,” and more about how we can live into the kingdom together. Friendship puts the focus on relationships and offers an alternative to models of mission that are more formal, professional or bureaucratic.
The career mentality that had initially seemed stifling to us has now become an invitation to fidelity in friendship. Can we remain faithful to our friends who have trusted us with the most vulnerable parts of their lives? Will our own community be able to resist turning them into the “flesh and blood” stories for a cause that will bring attention and advocacy on their behalf?
Our friendships are inviting us into a faithfulness that looks a lot like a calling or vocation—determined for us by the very relationships we have formed.
Our friends are not projects or personal embodiments of a cause, but partners in community.
Befriending someone merely so you can tell them the gospel is a form of manipulation and a violation of trust. Augustine argued that loving the neighbor meant wanting what was best for them, which is to know and to love God.6 So desiring this for a friend is a very good thing. But it must involve more than words and strategy; it involves fidelity within the friendship itself. Real friendship leads to an ongoing community of love. Such love is self giving and vulnerable; it puts the other person first.
Being friends with Jesus and with those who are poor requires that we give up being friends with “the world.”
Wesley explained, “One great reason why the rich, in general, have so little sympathy for the poor is because they so seldom visit them. Hence it is that ... one part of the world does not know what the other suffers. Many of them do not know, because they do not care to know: they keep out of the way of knowing it; and then plead their voluntary ignorance as an excuse for their hardness of heart.”
When we get to know people who are vulnerable, we are challenged to take more seriously the power and opportunities we have. We might need to rethink our vocations in light of God’s purposes for the world. Can we more consistently use our training and skills for human good? Can we use our leisure time in ways that more fully reflect our love for Jesus and his friends? Friendships with people who are poor make our lives bigger and invite us to enlarge our circle of responsibility.
We were caught off guard when some of the kids warned us about the other Christian group. They explained to us how the group leveraged food for faith, and readily described the techniques the group used to get the Christian message across.
When our relationship with God is so compelling to us that we invite others to experience the same kind of life-giving relationship, we are in mission. The starting and ending point of mission is relationship, not only at the individual level but also at the level of communities.
After some time we formed a friendship and Beth explained that she found it difficult to trust most evangelicals because of the tendency she’d seen on their part to try to subvert interfaith conversations and use them for apologetic or conversion purposes.
“We need the poor more than the poor need us.”
People are transformed when someone is willing to listen to their stories, to share a meal with them, to find their insights and concerns important or interesting. They are able to recover a measure of self respect and a fuller sense of identity. But hospitality works both ways, and people on the margins also gain self respect and recognize their own gifts when someone is willing to receive their hospitality.
In this passage, Jesus invites us to think about the people with whom we share meals. He isn’t saying that we should ignore our family and friends, but to make our circle larger. An important spiritual discipline around meals is to ask ourselves regularly, With whom am I eating? Who is invited, and who is left out? Our meals become kingdom meals especially when people who are usually overlooked find a place—a place of welcome and value.
Friendships also put pressure on our lifestyle choices because our possessions and consumption patterns are hard to hide from friends.
Close proximity makes us more conscious of both abundance and lack. Friendships can move us to choose generosity over stinginess and modesty over extravagance.
But we also remain committed to the relationships we have formed with children and youth who for some reason are unable to break away or to take the steps necessary to change the trajectory of their lives.
In the same way that we tried to resist the reduction of our friends on the street to targets or potential converts, we wanted to resist reducing our wealthy friends and acquaintances to potential donors.
