In recent years, community has become a popular concept in Christian circles, and for a very good reason. In a cultural moment where loneliness is declared an epidemic, we need community more than ever. Christianity can be compared to a team sport - you can practice basketball on your own but you’re not really playing until there are others on the court. Sometimes though, our notion of what makes a good spiritual friendship is more informed by our broader culture than it is by the ideas found in Scripture.

Often we look to build Christian friendships around either accountability or fellowship. By accountability, I mean friends who care about one another's holiness and are mutually seeking to support one another in their spiritual lives. By fellowship, I mean friendships with other Christians who we enjoy spending time with and whose interests align with our own. Fellowship and accountability are very good things to look for in a friendship and both of them are essential to life giving relationships. That said, I believe we can go a layer deeper.

In 1st Corinthians, St Paul uses the analogy of a body to describe the Church. A body has many distinct parts but at the same time, each part is one with the others. A hand is a hand but it is also, in one sense, the foot, the ear, and the nose, in that all those parts are the body. When I stub my toe, I don’t say “my toe, in and of itself is in pain,” I say “I AM in pain!”

By referring to Christian community as a body, St Paul directs us not just to build friendships based on things that are helpful to us but simply based on our mutual sharing in the life of Christ. We are called to build friendships where we rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep, where (while still maintaining a healthy sense of distinctness) we live as a body, where one part cannot live without the support of the others.

What in practice does this look like?

A few months ago, some good friends of ours got married in a beautiful little university chapel in rural Nova Scotia. Theirs had been a long journey and so it was such a gift for us and for our community to witness them make their vows and come to the culmination of their discernment. As we sat in the Church, seeing the unbounded joy on their faces, my wife and I couldn’t help not just being happy for them, but being happy ourselves.

Around the same time, another one of our good friends shared with us something very difficult going on in her life. For several days, I experienced an underlying sadness with her - not because something was going wrong in my life but because one of the members of the body of Christ was in pain.

Our community grew this capacity for union with one another over time. It was the fruit of slowly intertwining our lives with one another, going beyond friendship as a spiritual discipline (e.g. being part of a small group) to friendship as a way of life, where the threads of our lives weaved in and out of each other. That can sound lofty but practically speaking, it meant inviting our community to join us for meals, carpooling to work together, and serving in similar ministries at our Church.

This kind of community came out of thousands of little decisions about how we would live our lives in Christ. It’s so easy to build a life (even a spiritual life) alone and then try to invite others into it. Through formation, prayer, and discernment, we realized that we needed to build our lives together, sometimes accepting inconveniences in our schedules and ways of doing things to accommodate a real kind of life together.

While we don’t always do it perfectly, I am blessed to be a part of a community where we seek to be in union with one another. Being in union with each other means that when one person grows, we all do, just as how when one member of the body improves, the whole body does. I experience the spiritual fruit of my whole community, not just myself and I’ve also discovered a way of life with so much more joy and abundance than if I were to do it completely on my own.

When St Paul directs us to strive for unity with our friends, he’s not directing us to become our friends. People can only be in relationship with one another to the extent that they realize they are not each other. Boundaries - knowing where I end and where another person begins - are an essential component of any good and healthy friendship.

It’s actually this healthy sense of distinctness that gives us the capacity to love deeply. It’s one thing to feel the burdens that my community members feel but it’s another to absorb it so deeply that I become unable to function. It’s one thing for us to share our lives with one another but another to spend so much time around other people that we never have time to tend to our own responsibilities or need to recharge. We can feel with and alongside other members of Christ’s body while still retaining our ability to minister to one another and bear each other's burdens.

Amidst the cultural tide of individualism and the increasing onslaught of loneliness, many of us find ourselves asking the question “what truly is a good friendship?” Ultimately, friendship is about being the body of Christ with others and allowing ourselves to live the highs and the lows of life alongside each other. Love is helpful, but ultimately love is good for love’s sake. As John the Apostle wrote in one of his letters, God is love. It makes sense then for us to seek out friendships where love is really the only end goal, because wherever love is, God is too.