Spiritual Friendship: Learning to Be Friends with God and One Another

Introduction

An Origin Story “How important is friendship for the faithfulness, fruitfulness, and flourishing of serious disciples in the church today?” The first time I wrestled with this question was a cold January afternoon in 1995 when I was a freshman in college wandering around the Zondervan Library at Taylor University. I had a whole afternoon free with nothing to do and spent it walking up and down rows of books hoping to discover something interesting. I came across a series with more than thirty volumes and was amazed to discover it included books written by people who had studied with the Apostle John! 1 Others had written their works within just a few generations of the last apostles, and all had been written during the first five centuries of the church. 2 1 The series I discovered that day are called the Ante-Nicene Fathers (ANF) and the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (NPNF). All of these books can be read for free at www.ccel.org/fathers. 2 You can read many of these early authors in Michael T. Cooper, ed., Practices of the Ancient Church: Wisdom from the Apostolic Believers , Sacred Roots Spiritual Classics 7 (Wichita, KS: TUMI Press, 2022).

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