I interviewed Rosaria Butterfield, author of The Gospel Comes with a House Key, on the topic of codependency. Many have responded to the rise of codependency by encouraging various boundaries in friendships, but Rosaria believes the problem (and solution) is at a deeper level. “Idols serve something; they plug a hole,” says Rosaria. “They are born because people are tragically and dangerously lonely.”

I can tell you anything. No one understands me like you do.

I don’t know what I would do without you.

I’m so glad we struggle with the same sins. It makes me know that I’m not alone.

Perhaps some trace of these statements sounds familiar to all of us, but when they characterize the tenor of our relationships, we have a problem. Codependency stems from an epidemic — a crisis that has quietly crept into our churches. Rosaria Butterfield calls it the “crisis of loneliness.”

I interviewed Rosaria Butterfield, author of The Gospel Comes with a House Key, on the topic of codependency. Many have responded to the rise of codependency by encouraging various boundaries in friendships, but Rosaria believes the problem (and solution) is at a deeper level. “Idols serve something; they plug a hole,” says Rosaria. “They are born because people are tragically and dangerously lonely.” This crisis is “not about boundaries.” Boundaries perpetuate our hearts’ petting of idols and enable a “culture of infancy” to flourish in our churches. She tells us, we must “deal with the crisis of loneliness” by filling the hole with more than just each other.

Am I in a Codependent Friendship?

According to Rosaria, we form a codependent relationship — “make an idol out of a friend” — when we: “(1) ask that person to be something more than she should, and (2) ask that person to love me more than she should, to see me as a kind of savior.” An idol is born, Rosaria warns, from “not mediating that relationship through Jesus Christ.” When we “desire for a person something that God does not desire for her, or desire for that person to see us in a way that God does not want us to be elevated,” we have crossed the threshold from brotherly affection to worship distortion.

Rosaria directs us beyond changes in the structure of our churches and families to identify and eliminate underlying, distorted views of ourselves and of Christ. We need a mental shift for healthy relationships in the church in four key areas: sin, identity, discipleship, and repentance.

Friendships Built Around Sin

Three problems regarding our understanding of sin feed the codependency wildfire: our ignorance of our own sin, our world’s perception of sin, and our “sin in common” mentality.

“Sin is predatory. I don’t think Christians really think about that. They think, ‘I’ve got it under control,’” Rosaria says. But we need to know the way “Adam thumbprinted us,” and if we don’t know what that is, we must rely on our brothers and sisters in Christ to tell us where we need to watch out for temptation. And feelings — the “precursor for our actions” — are not immune to temptation. Feelings can often subtly birth a codependent relationship because we do not check them against the word of God to filter their fleshly origin.

We also need to acknowledge how Satan fans the flame of codependency to potentially become a “homosexual outworking of idolatry.” In a sexually charged world, “homosexuality has now even become iconographic of progressiveness,” rendering tamer forms of codependency acceptable. But if we are mindful of how homosexuality has been normalized in our world, we can remember the Bible’s taboo against it is there not to harm or hinder us, but to protect us — for our good and for God’s glory.

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