Friendship and the history of the Gospel in the church

This forms the second of a three part series. You can read part one here.¹This paper expresses where I came to through my early attempts to be a church historian, which occupied much of my time 1960-1975: I did not want to do antiquarian or institutional church history, but rather to practise church history in close relation to theology, missiology and practical theology. I tried to persuade the Ecclesiastical History Society to engage, but after some happy, involved years, I moved to working more through theology to the contemporary making of church history. Our year in Germany 73-74, studying Barth, Bonhoeffer, Vogel and Dibelius in their time, filled this turn out. After that, I taught little church history, but worked at political theologies, and the ‘social responsibility of the local church’ and such things. 

So when I had the chance to write something for John Briggs’ festschrift, and given that he had become a leading British Baptist historian and ecumenist, it seemed a paper like this was a good fit. 

So far so good. I wrote this paper when I was depressed by church. It was good for me as an historian to write about what I knew from decades of participation, but I could not write in tune with the complacent self-congratulation that was strong in the church. In general terms I think the church is fallible, sins and is lamed by its histories, and I could not see the churches I knew as an exception. Church does not live and do well out of its natural virtue, but by knowing and responding to forgiving grace, which enables living in the truth about what is and what we are called to.

It is unlikely that a church, as a merely human company, will survive and grow so that it gets to the point of a fiftieth anniversary history, if it is unfriendly. The occurrence of friendship is an immense resource for the church. Little fruitful church history is made by friendless or unfriendly people. Certainly, the Baptist mode of church, as responsible covenanting congregation growing into Christ through truth and love, requires friendship as its medium. Since it is without coercive bonds, a voluntary association has to draw people into friendship if it is to hold them. 

God as Trinity of love is the ground and source of the Gospel as good news of a friendly God. God reaches to the ends of the earth, down to hell, making friends with enemies. The Church has no life with integrity if it does not take the way of friendship. With all its limitations, ‘as much as in it lies’ it is to be at peace with all. Church is not merely a place where friendships happen, but where they are cultivated, disciplined, understood. Living in church should involve formal and informal training for friendship. In the context of its positive valuation of friendship, the church cannot but reckon with the shortfall in friendships – sometimes merely shallow, sometimes hurtfully broken by evil. Humanity in church is not unfallen, so friendship there needs to be criticised and redeemed in the Gospel. 

Friendships have histories and make histories. Charting the friendships in and around a church is a practicable way into the history of the Gospel in the church. Friendship trees, like family trees, could be charted. Who has been friends with whom? How did they come together? What was the bond and inspiration of their friendship? Who have been the inspiring friendship-makers? Who are the dependents of friendship made by others? Who are the go-betweens and peace-makers? What strains did any friendship survive, what did it fall to – and how? 

How did this friendship – or this circle of friends – relate to other circles in the church? Where were the centres of friend-circles, and where were their peripheries? How were friend-circles related – by overlaps of their outlying members, or by links between their core members? 

How far did a friendship link friends in the church with friends outside? Who was excluded from this friendship – against whom was it a defence or a ploy? (Some friendships have negative inspirations and dynamics.) 

How was the church built up or complicated by this or that friendship? Was the church aware of the importance of friendship? Did it do anything to foster friendships? Was there ever preaching and praying about it? What aspects of the church’s life and organisation fostered or burdened this friendship? 

Was this friendship grounded in a shared involvement in some part of the work of the church? Was it a friendship for the sake of the church? Some friendships are made through working as church together. Church is a common project, in which people grow together through responding actively to a shared vision and loyalty. It is a journey, if not quite a contemporary Canterbury Tales, where people get to know one another. Focused by the Gospel, friendship might have its centre in sharing in mission, serving something greater than themselves. Such friendship is then sustained by service – by ‘office’ rather than by merely personal attachments, to borrow the distinction Bonhoeffer used in his wedding sermon of 1943.²D. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. E.Bethge, Collier, NY 1972, pp. 42-43

Church-work-oriented friendship may be distinguished from other friendships amongst church people, which can be more than semi-detached from the work of the church. Church can be a place where we meet other people and so find friends, but the joy of friendship is not integrated with the joy of being church. They are friendships which are untouched by church mission and responsibility. Such friendships may thus be part of the story of secularisation within the church, which is a topic not to be evaded in recent church history. Yet they are not on that account to be despised as worthless. The secular is also part of God’s creation, not merely within the space allowed by his permission, but as a dimension of the human life God wills and delights in: the secular is the sacrament of human otherness, freedom and responsibility, and therefore it is also the sacrament of the will of God, who wants human partners not sacred puppets or dusty angels. The pietism which has marginalised uniformed youth organisations because they are not explicitly christian or ‘keen’ enough has too often relied on inadequate theology to defend its policy. 

Sometimes friendship detached from the mission and management of church is all that keeps people in church. Church can be painful and dispiriting: the music distasteful, the preaching boring and yet complacent, the politics and organisation frustrating. Then people may take refuge in friendships. Sometimes they mourn together about what is going on in church – but they do it quietly in a trusted circle of friends, because otherwise they know the elders will preach against what they see as nothing but grumbling and a lack of submission, rather than as symptoms of malaise. Sometimes, people are too weary even to grumble: Tonight, they say, we will look after ourselves, keeping our friendships in repair, so we will talk about anything but church. They may be one step away from leaving church altogether, as so many have in the last fifty years, on the verge of adding to that large crowd fixed outside the church by hurtful memories of why they left. But sometimes, these mere friendships help people to get through periods of exasperation with church, so they stay long enough to give it another chance: people hesitate to make a final break with church where they have so many long-standing friends. It is not a sign of a wholly unchristian judgment if people decide that putting up with unsatisfactory church is a price worth paying for lively mature friendships. Churches would do better if their ardent leaders and people-managers had a better narrative awareness of how important this kind of calculation is for many people. 

In all this, some of the strange and beautiful complications of life appear. For example, sometimes those who give others reason to leave church by the ways in which they exercise power in it turn out to be those who make church attractive by the practical help they offer in genuine friendship. Sometimes people who make the public church hard to bear, by the religion they impose, show themselves in ordinary dealings to be considerate, humble and wise. The paradox of their humanity in church is comparable to the complexity of politicians, alienating by their ya-booing in debate, secretive under questioning, yet surprisingly thoughtful and open if ever they get into genuinely private responsible conversation. 

Friendship by itself is not enough to carry church in the full sense. Friendship, like music or caring for the fabric, or pastoral care, or even some sorts of evangelism as recruitment, can be an activity without intelligible connection with the profession of faith in God which is essential to church. But if friendship without confessed faith is not enough, it can at least hold people in the broad life of the church, within the hearing of the Gospel; and without friendship, as James might say, faith is dead. 

An enquiry into friendships would produce a much better historical picture than the notion of the church as a family. The family model is a fiction which has not helped the church in recent times. A history of friendship would also produce a better picture than the conventional structuring of historical narrative around the succession of ministers: friendship is a category which will include everyone, transcending any clericalist model. Discovering where ministers fit into friendship trees would tell us much about the history of ministry. Once, ministers were told to avoid having friends in the church where they ministered, lest they were seen to have favourites, fail to be equally available to all and get mired in church politics. That prohibition has faded, but there are still difficulties. Ministers are under stress, it seems, partly because they do not find supportive friendship in the church, with the people who are constantly available to them. 

Chasing the history of friendship will take us into the ordinary humanity of the church. 

That may be one reason why it is under-investigated in conventional historiography. Moreover, because it is mostly undocumented, it is not available to the historian working on documentary sources. But the living church in conversation is not so limited: the history of friendships is the systematising of its gossip. Friendships in one generation produce family connections as children marry. As friends talk, they recall and chew over experiences in church: without knowing it, they do church historical work. They build up the traditions, the jokes, as they put one layer of recall upon another, in response to new circumstance. 

But the historian, or the church writing its own history, cannot expect the whole work to be done for them by the ordinary incessant chatter of friends. The care of friends for one another may well inhibit research into the history of friendship. Tact and respect for privacy rarely help the historian. Friendship tends to be patiently tolerant, uninterfering, uninquisitive. To be a friend is to give the other space; we allow a friend to have his secrets, even guilty secrets – friendship does not want to know. Part of the goodness of friendship is that it is a loyalty to the person regardless of performance – it is looser than marriage or patriotism because it is less demanding – but it means friends shrug their shoulders where the historian starts digging. Friendship cools when one becomes suspicious of the other, with an urgent need to know. Friends are for relaxing with. 

Friends collude in developing stories and cultures which are like ideological armour shielding them from difficult truths about themselves. Their conversation, left to itself, produces fruit with a built-in protection against the investigative historian. People who survive in church, as in life, develop stories selectively and purposefully. They want to put the best face they can on strife, sorrow, disappointment, boredom, unbelief, ineffectiveness and confusion in the church. How morale-boosting is the rhetoric of the Pharisee who went up to the Temple to pray – how friendly he was to himself. But the dismal service of the historian is in part to be the publican’s voice, and to get behind the best-face mask. History in the service of the Gospel aims at a true confession of sin and a new life in the truth of forgiveness. The Gospel is not hostile to friendship, but it requires friendship to transcend its easy natural forms. 

This is a slightly revised version of the second part of paper published in the festschrift for John Briggs, Ecumenism and History, edited Anthony R Cross, Paternoster, 2002, pp 208-224.

Read part one of this series here.

It will be followed by part three, on Power and the history of the Gospel in the church.

Notes

• 1
  This paper expresses where I came to through my early attempts to be a church historian, which occupied much of my time 1960-1975: I did not want to do antiquarian or institutional church history, but rather to practise church history in close relation to theology, missiology and practical theology. I tried to persuade the Ecclesiastical History Society to engage, but after some happy, involved years, I moved to working more through theology to the contemporary making of church history. Our year in Germany 73-74, studying Barth, Bonhoeffer, Vogel and Dibelius in their time, filled this turn out. After that, I taught little church history, but worked at political theologies, and the ‘social responsibility of the local church’ and such things. 
  
  So when I had the chance to write something for John Briggs’ festschrift, and given that he had become a leading British Baptist historian and ecumenist, it seemed a paper like this was a good fit. 
  
  So far so good. I wrote this paper when I was depressed by church. It was good for me as an historian to write about what I knew from decades of participation, but I could not write in tune with the complacent self-congratulation that was strong in the church. In general terms I think the church is fallible, sins and is lamed by its histories, and I could not see the churches I knew as an exception. Church does not live and do well out of its natural virtue, but by knowing and responding to forgiving grace, which enables living in the truth about what is and what we are called to.
• 2
  D. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. E.Bethge, Collier, NY 1972, pp. 42-43