I’ve heard it said often, but I am just starting to really understand it for myself in a personal and deeper way, that church is really all about relationships with people.
Sure, there’s the teaching and the learning, and there is the music. But what is really important in a church are the relationships among the people.
If you leave a church, you are really severing relationships. While you can maintain those friendships outside of the church, being in the same church brings you a level of friendship that is hard to develop anywhere else as a group.
A church group of friends share many experiences together that are the foundation of the relationships. Here are some of why I think friends at church are so precious and why it would be hard to start new friendships at another church:
1. We have a history to refer to. This past Christmas, I made peanut brittle and gave them out to the leaders of the church. One of them immediately thought back to a year ago to our failed attempt at peanut brittle and said, “Ah, you got them right this time!” Without another word, we laughed. When we say “Studying Luke” or “Romans”, we know what we mean. We have a connection through shared experiences that we simply do not have with new friends. Inside jokes and reminiscing old times are all a part of the gift of old friendships.
2. You know they accept you for who you are. If they don’t, they wouldn’t still be hanging out with you. We all have our quirks and weirdness. And when you’ve known someone for years, their weirdness is not weird anymore. It’s just what makes them funny! A man at our church is often critical, but because we know him, we understand that he means well, and we love him just the same. Years of fellowshipping together and working together on various projects at church tested our acceptance of one another’s good, bad, and the ugly. With new friends, you don’t know if you can be totally yourself. They may start giving you that funny look. But old friends know you, and still love you.
3. They come to your aid whenever you need them. In a group of friends at church, if one person can not help, another one surely can. There are diverse gifts within a church so that if you need a specific type of help, there is someone there who probably has that expertise. Everything from web design and internet marketing, to guitar lessons and free vegetables!
Thanks you all, for being my friends.
February 20th, 2008 at 5:52 am
You become friends and develop good relationships with other Christians in your church because that’s the way God wants it. “Live in harmony with each other” (Rom 12:16; Eph 4:2; 1Pet 3:8) – “Serve each other in love” (Gal 5:13) – “Be kind and compassionate to each other” (Eph 4:32) – you can’t help being friends with people who do that to you.
February 20th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Laurie, that’s a good point. It is the way it should be.