Becoming Friends: Worship, Justice, and the Practice of Christian Friendship

In Becoming Friends, Paul J. Wadell claims that human life is incomplete without friends. He believes friendship is as inescapable as our need for food, drink, clothing, and shelter. As defined in the book, a quality friendship is an attraction to another person involving liking and enjoying him/her with an added commitment to freeing him/her from destructive sins (i.e. acedia), and fantasies. For the Christian, Wadell claims friendship manifests itself in three essential ways; friendship with God, friendship with others, and friendship with the church in correlation to the world. Together these friendships coalesce to define Christians as the "community of friends of God." Wadell believes friendships should serve one's life in Christ and vice versa. He claims that friendship requires a since of other-centeredness with mutual benevolence being the shared virtue. As such, he shows how friendships are more of a surrender and loss of control to another human (or God) where one exposes him/herself in hopes of reciprocation and healing. Drawing from past church writers including St. Thomas Aquinas, John Chrysostom, Aelred of Rievaulx, and Augustine he writes, "If we are intimate with God we will know how to be intimate with one another." With that said, he also writes conversely about how we will know God's love for us is real through the `real friends' who love us. Becoming Friends additionally extrapolates on the `barriers to' and `results of' friendship. Wadell is quick to point out that we as members of the capitalist economy all long for intimacy but that our culture runs counter to it. He speaks of how geographical mobility (i.e. live in one town, work in another city), radical individualism, and capitalism set people against each other telling people to value consumerism instead of intimacy. The result is that our culture produces over-detached people. Speaking more positively, he explains the constructive results of friendship. It teaches us how to love, keeps us humble, and gets us involved in the `ministry of justice'. The friends of God, he claims, cannot ignore this. In conclusion, Becoming Friends is a great book that shows how individuals must learn to let people know their `inner history'. It is a call to the church to be faithful in its identity as the friends of God, which means getting involved in the ministry of justice. This means it must be a befriending community where intimacy and friendship can be learned. Lastly, it is presented that forgiveness has the last word in friendship. Wadell explains several different stages of the forgiveness process, which is essential to friendship.

This is actually a very readable and interesting book. I read it when my Sunday School class studied it together. Written in easily understandable text, it is a good overview of what believer's should be able to expect of one another when in Christian community. I would recommend it for either individual or group study.