Friendships that sustain us

Friendships that sustain us

That's the heading of a chapter in a book I'm reading during lockdown: Friendships that sustain us.

It seems to be exactly right for our situation.

The book - Scattered & Gathered by Neil Hudson - is about how we do church, what a church is and how to make sense of the way we live our lives. As the people-church, if I can use that term (as opposed to the building), we live most of our lives apart: we are scattered. Generally speaking, we only come together, that is, we are only gathered, on Sundays and at other specific times or events.

In this chapter in particular, the author contends that we can only be church if we care for each other in real and meaningful ways. To do this we need to know each other. We need to know what failures and successes we meet in our scattered lives and offer approppriate support and encouragement when it is needed.

 There was one quote at the end of the chapter I wanted to remember:

The most interesting creative and political solutions we Christians have to offer our troubled society are not new laws ... or increased funding for social programmes. ... The most creative social strategy we have to offer is the church. ... We serve the world by showing it something it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers.

From Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, 1989

A place where God is forming a family out of strangers. That's us. That is what it means to be church. And at a time when we are all completely scattered and not able to gather together in any way at all, let alone Sunday services, it is something we need.

Jesus says: Come. Come to me and I will give you rest. If we all gather to Jesus, we can be together - virtually, spiritually - and find, together, that rest for our souls in these troubled times. And learn perhaps a bit more about being friends; discover what it means to be formed into a family by God.

Ends