We need thicker communities, but saying that and doing it are very different things. Rebuilding life after it’s been stripped apart by the many arms of cultural change will take a long time, maybe even generations, but the church has all that’s required to do so. If we want to get practical, one of the ways we can thicken our communities is to make sure we have friends. Actively seek them, pray for them, make regular (habitual!) time in your life for them.

The lack of male friendship is nothing short of an epidemic. The rise of therapy and a therapeutic culture for men and women is, not always but more often than we’d like to admit, a substitute for friendship. We’re lonely, we need friends, and you need good friends to live the Christian life.

I’m arguing that there are three shifts we can make to address the discipleship crisis. We can embed habits, we can thicken communities, and we can stretch minds.

I reckon we can thicken our communities by considering friendship, tables, and thresholds. Three topics which I write about a fair bit, so this won’t be super surprising.

To be a follower of Jesus you need friends. We might want to disagree and say instead that we need the familial bonds of the household of the church, but if you do this and don’t gain friends, I’m not convinced that you’re actually doing this (or someone else isn’t). Jesus casts his disciples as friends (John 15). Not slaves, but friends. Friendship is the love of the kingdom. It’s tighter than ‘brotherhood’ because it’s bound not by blood but by choice. God the son became God my brother and then called himself God my friend.

We become companions with God—literally ‘same bread’—as we eat with him. We become companions with others when we break bread with them. But that’s getting ahead of myself. In order to live a Christian life that bleeds out of Sundays and starts to colonise every hour of your life you will need friends to live that life with; friends to challenge and to laugh with. I use that martial language deliberately; Jesus is the rightful Lord of your life and will wage war against your other gods.

The remarkable thing is that the warrior King, here to crush your idols, has decided to make you a friend. He’s invited us into his inner ring. One of the ways we encounter Jesus is in other Christians. While we understand friendship in light of Jesus’ friendship of us, rather than the other way around—much like we learn what a father is in the face of the Father—it is easier to understand Jesus as your friend when you have good friends.

This is an instrumental reason to get friends though, don’t do it to understand Jesus better, do it because friends are great. Friend is a word much said and little understood in our present moment.

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