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

192

Spiritual Friendship

a walk or a phone date, a monthly or even annual time to connect with a friend. You might consider creating a group at church that can help to form and deepen spiritual friendships through conversation and service. The Siafu Network is one example of how many churches among the poor are creating these spaces for spiritual friendship. 23 Hopefully reading Spiritual Friendship has provided opportunity to talk with friends about spiritual friendship. Did you find these conversations helpful? If so, perhaps you can commit to reading and discussing another spiritual classic together? In sum, spiritual friends talk with one another about their souls and their pursuit of God as a regular component of their friendship. Spiritual Friendship Deepened through Letter Writing In Letters of Faith through the Seasons , James Houston makes a number of intriguing observations about letter writing. 24 He emphasizes that writing letters is a way to develop and deepen a culture of friendship. He notes that twenty-one of the twenty-nine New Testament books are actually letters to individuals or groups, and that some have described the whole Bible as God’s love letter to us (e.g. Søren Kierkegaard). Houston also observes that throughout church history letter writing has remained an important ministry. To this day, we have over nine thousand letters preserved from the early centuries of the church. Among these many letters we find a long

23 Don L. Davis, The SIAFU Network Guidebook: Standing Together for Christ in the City (Wichita, KS: TUMI Press, 2013). 24 James Houston, Letters of Faith Through the Seasons: December to May (Vancouver, BC: Regent College, 2018).