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

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Spiritual Friendship

with Atwater provided important support as she mentored the founders of over fifty ministries including Billy Graham (evangelist and founder of the Lausanne Movement), Bill and Vonette Bright (founders of Campus Crusade for Christ, now known as Cru), and Jim Rayborn (founder of Youth for Christ). 13 In centuries past a commitment to a lifelong friendship between two members of the same sex was known in both the eastern and western branches of Christianity. In the eastern church, a formal church service for solemnizing a lifelong commitment of friendship between people of the same sex was called “sibling-making” ( adelphopoiesis ). 14 In contrast with the more pagan practice of exchanging blood to become “blood-brothers,” two friends would exchange crosses (usually worn around the neck) as a reminder of their friendship during a church service which included a special prayer of blessing over the friendship. Today, contemporary North American culture has polluted friendship with the idea that almost any close friendship includes the possibility of sexual intimacy. In contrast, unmarried Christian men and women who choose to enter intentional, committed, same-sex spiritual friendship are committed to faithfully living in obedience to biblical teaching about sexual ethics. 15 The practice of committed same-sex friendships is a gift that the contemporary church needs to recover. In the context of spiritual friendship, these committed friendships represent a promise to pursue Christ together for a season 13 Henrietta C. Mears, Dream Big: The Henrietta Mears Story, ed. Earl Roe (Ventura, CA: Gospel Light, 2012), 3−10. 14 See especially Letter 11 on friendship and the related notes in Pavel Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, trans. Boris Jakim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 327−30. 15 Beth Felker Jones, Faithful: A Theology of Sex (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2015).