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

Resources for Application

199

(1.29). More recently, Henry Clay Trumbull (great grandfather of Elizabeth Elliot) has provided dozens of examples of friendship between the sexes in a chapter entitled “Who Can Be Friends?” 36 Certainly friendship between the sexes can present dangers in the highly sexualized culture prevalent today, but abuses should not be used as an excuse to prevent deep friendships between sisters and brothers in the family of God. If you do not have spiritual friends of the opposite sex, take some time to consider how your life might look different if you opened yourself to a broader understanding of friendship within the kingdom of God. While some focus on the danger of friendship between the sexes, others find danger in the opposite direction. For those with same-sex attraction, who aim to live faithfully to traditional biblical teaching about sexuality, the practice of building same-sex friendships can feel difficult or even impossible. How does one become friends with a member of the same sex without falling into some kind of sexual temptation? Similar to friendship between the sexes, deep and eternal friendship within the body of Christ is possible for those who experience same-sex attraction. 37 A fourth set of dangers often appears when two individuals seek to build a spiritual friendship across chasms of class, culture, race or significant power differentials without recognizing the differences in lived realities that shape 36 Henry Clay Trumbull, Friendship the Master-Passion: Or, The Nature and History of Friendship, and Its Place as a Force in the World (New York: Charles Scribner, 1912), 105−14. 37 See the frank discussions of this challenge in Wesley Hill, Spiritual Friendship: Finding Love in the Church as a Celibate Gay Christian (Ada, MI: Brazos, 2015).