Have we forgotten the three questions of friendship?

It seems we have forgotten how to make and keep friends. 

New research indicates that one in four people feel lonely at least once a week.  Apparently, experts are declaring that loneliness might well be our next public health epidemic. 

I am convinced that the reason this is happening is that we are losing our understanding of the nature of true friendship and also the art of relationship negotiation that is an essential part of any healthy friendship. 

Last week I wrote about what it meant to love our neighbours, and I do think that this is a challenge we all need to face. This week though, I want to focus on the difference between what the biblical notion of a neighbour and what the bible calls a friend.

The Bible makes clear that friends matter:

“The righteous choose their friends carefully, but the way of the wicked leads them astray.”

Proverbs 12:26

A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity.

Proverbs 17:17 

Jesus makes it clear that friendship is right at the heart of his relationship with us, and should be at the heart of our relationships with each other:

My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit-fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you.  This is my command: Love each other.

John 15:12-17

Last week I introduced a diagram about relationships with a local church that attempted to subtly show the difference between neighbours and friends.

I attempted to show that for a Christian, every single person in their community is a neighbour, and the task of every local church is to work out what love looks like for those neighbours.

I did that with an arrow that points outward towards the neighbour circle. This assumes that, at least initially, the impulse to connect with neighbours must come from the follower of Christ not necessarily from the neighbours. 

As you reach out and connect though, something special happens and the relationship moves.  As I tried to point out in the diagram with an arrow that points in both directions, the difference between friends and neighbours is that friends are always a two way, reciprocal relationship.

A friendship is a relationship where there is at least some common ground around three things: 

1. The things we are trying to do together, (our common goals). These can be as simple as wanting to not be bored, or as complex as wanting to change the world.
2. The things that matter, (our shared values). These can be as simple as a football team or as complex as climate change.
3. The way we will relate to each other (our ground rules). These can be as simple as “we will only talk about the football” or as complex as “We will speak the truth to each other even if it hurts.”

These three things are the common ground of our relationship. They are the things that are “ours”.

The awkward thing is that none of us ever sit down with someone else and negotiate answers to the three questions. The negotiation process is almost always done without words and we often misunderstand one another. 

You would think that with all of our communication technologies we would be getting better at the negotiation of relationships, however, the data shows that we are very quickly getting worse at it.  

I think the missing ingredient is probably the first step. Unless at least one party is trying their best to love their neighbour, which necessarily means seeing things from their point of view, it is very hard to even begin the process of building a friendship. 

Another challenge in building friendship is made clear by the following diagram:

As is obvious from this diagram, a healthy friendship also needs to recognise what is not “ours.”

In a healthy relationship, I know what things are mine alone, what things are yours alone and what things we share responsibility for.

If there is no “ours” there is no friendship. If there is only “ours” then chances are there is a very unhealthy relationship where one party dominates another.

What this means is that it is not really possible to have healthy relationships until you know the answers to the big three questions:

1. What am I trying to do with my life? (What are my goals?). These can be as simple as wanting to finish a puzzle, or as complex as wanting to follow Christ.
2. What things matter to me?, (what are my values>). These can be as simple as loving coffee or as complex as wanting to live from the teaching of Jesus.
3. How do I treat others and myself? (What are my ground rules?). These can be as simple as wanting only to wear nice clothes or as complex as wanting to genuinely love every person God puts in my path.

The level at which you can answer these three questions will determine the level at which you will be able to have friends. 

If you seek to have a relationship before you have done the work to know yourself, you will either spend your time directed by the other party, or you will spend your time fighting against them. Neither path makes for a healthy relationship in the long run.

The truth is though that we are all in the continual process of refining our answers to the big three questions, which means we must all always be ready to re-negotiate our relationships as our understanding of the “what’s mine” changes.

The fact that we need to continually be navigating the questions of “What’s Mine?” “What’s yours?” and “What’s ours?” points to one of the most common causes of pain in our relationships: different understandings of where the boundaries lie.

It is normal, for instance, for one party to think that they have the right to make a decision about something (it could be as simple as a piece of cake)  that they see as “ours” while the other party sees that particular thing as “mine.”

Given all of this, it is clear that a healthy friendship has an answer to three overarching questions that frame the the questions that must be answered about goals, values and ground rules:

1. What is mine?
2. What is yours?
3. What is ours?

As we get clear on these questions, we find that we can start to be friends with people who we might have previously avoided. There are things that can be “ours” between you and almost anyone.

The fundamental requirement for healthy relationship though is enough mutual respect that there is permission to hold some goals, values and groundrules in common which can become “ours,” and mutual permission to differ about the goals, values and groundrules that differ.

This level of relationship with people who are different requires a level of maturity and commitment that looks a lot like what the Bible calls love. This level of relationship is meant to be second nature for the Christian church:

So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Galatians 3:26-28

The diagram I introduced last week was an attempt to describe how this should look for the church:

There are lots of friendships that churches can, and need to, have. We can (and must be) friends with other churches. We can be friends with local government, with businesses and with schools. We can be friends with people who want to help us achieve a goal, such as running a craft program, promoting block parties or hosting Christmas carols event.

If we are clear on the three questions, the church can even be friends with people who would only have a small “ours”. For instance, Christians and Moslems can work together to care for new migrants to Australia. The Gay community and the Christian community can work together to stop bullying. Feminists and the Christian community can work together to gender bias and discrimination. 

This though requires churches to accept that they need friends as much as any person needs friends, and the challenge we have is that our most common models of church don’t really have room for friends.

The modern church has bought into the model of “church as business” to the point where most church structures are identical to corporate structures.  In this model, the church becomes a product, and all products need customers or consumers, so success becomes measured by the number of consumers who are attached to your product.

The “church as a business” mindset sees neighbours as potential customers so it normally has strategies to reach out and invite relationship, however, this model has very little time for friends who are not customers or potential customers.

This has meant that increasingly churches and church leaders have moved away from civic engagement and partnerships that don’t have an intent to increase the number of people coming to church.

One of my heroes is Martin Luther King Jr.  When he rose to his feet to deliver his famous speech he was standing shoulder to shoulder with people from different faiths and who held different values.

What he was able to do though, is name the goals, the values and the ground rules that they all agreed on, and as friends, they changed the world.

I pray that more church leaders will be able to do the work of building friendships that go beyond simply trying to get people into their church.  

The paradox is that as people become your friend, without strings, they are more likely to engage with the things that are important to you anyway.

Daniel was able to do it in Babylon, Nehemiah was able to do it with the Persians and it seems the early church was able to do it with anyone they came across.

I pray that people generally will understand that friendship takes real work and that unless we are ready to healthily disagree we will never really be able to agree. We can never have an “ours” unless we have a “mine” and a “yours”.