Intentional Friendships

Back in February 2005, I wrote this post in which I describe "Three Crucial People." To recap, every Christian needs three kinds of Godly relationships:

1. A spiritual parent, someone who mentors us.
2. A spiritual friend, someone who walks beside us.
3. A spiritual child, someone that we mentor.

The concept of a mentor and the concept of discipling someone is somewhat foreign in our North American church these days. To go even further, many people find the idea to be subtly offensive. If we desire to be a mentor, we seem to be placing ourselves on some pedestal. If we want to mentor someone else, that seems to be a judgment against them about their spiritual maturity. Either way, people don't really want any part of it even if we agree that it's a good Biblical principle (as I wrote about here).

And so we default to some other vague plan. We wait for God to work things out and bring someone into our lives. We wait for someone to come to us and ask for us to become their mentors. We wait for someone to come along and offer to become our mentors. And you know what? These kinds of relationships very rarely "just happen."

In my opinion, I think that we need to be very intentional regarding the friendships and relationships that we develop. We need to look for the lonely person and offer them a ride to church. We need to purposely talk about serious issues with our closest friends. We have to choose to open up some private areas of our lives to our close friends. We need to specifically create an environment to let our friends open up about their lives and trust us.

I, for one, have not functioned well as a pinball in the game of life. Simply bouncing from friendship to friendship and from paddle to paddle left me feeling empty. It left me doubtful about what the purpose of my friendships was. I found that I sometimes learned major things about my friends years later to which I was oblivious - so how well did I know my own friends after all?

As Christians, we often give lip service to the concept of small groups and discipleship, to the call of the Great Commission. We say that young Christians should have someone to help them along but then we send them to Bible Study and Sunday services and think that they will be fine. We appreciate the wisdom of older people but then relegate them to groups of people their own age.

These things to do not just happen. We need to create opportunities by inviting people into our homes. We need to devote our personal time to certain people. We need to ask someone to challenge us about our own lives.

Intentional friendships.