Friendship

Welcome

One of my favorite authors is Andy Crouch. His most recent book is an exploration of how relationships suffer at the hands of technological progress. He invites us to consider how we’re remaking our world as a place fit for machines, more than people.

Read “Machine World” from The Life We’re Looking For

We’re going to be talking about our church today, and what it looks like for us to be a church that centers relationships. We want people, not products to be center of what we do, and that will come with some unique challenges as we move to our new model.

What we’ll keep always before us is Jesus’ promise that he considers us not slaves but friends. So let’s begin by singing together and celebrating the God who doesn’t see us as slaves or machines, but friends!

Message

It’s been a long-standing tradition here at Catalyst to set aside the last weeks of the church year to explore our core values. What sets us apart as a church? What makes us unique, different from other congregations?

When I first came to Catalyst, our core values were Love, Grow and Serve. Those weren’t particularly unique - one of the churches down the street has the same three core values. As God continued to work among us, and as the culture around us changed, our Leadership Team discerned that God was instilling a new set of values among us. Those were Friendship, Diversity, Discipleship and Pilgrimage.

Those were our core values for several years, but of course now we’re on the cusp of a major change yet again. And yet again, our core values are shifting. So for the next month, I want to explore with you the values that are shaping us moving forward.

This series is called “Next Level” because we don’t see this as a fundamental shift. We’re not tossing out our old values and getting brand new ones. Rather, we’re building on the values that have shaped us for the last several years.

Not unlike a video game, where the first levels let us practice the basic skills that will be necessary in later stages, all that’s come before us has prepared us for this new incarnation of our church family.

[Slide] So this month, we’re exploring Friendship, Collective Liberation, Change and Curiosity.

Today, we’re exploring that first value, the one that hasn’t changed - Friendship. For years, we’ve been saying, “Friendship is the heart of Jesus’ good news.” We believe that because we take Jesus at his word. The night before he was crucified, at his last meal with his followers, he told us: “This is my commandment: Love each other in the same way I have loved you. There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you slaves, because a master doesn’t confide in his slaves. Now you are my friends, since I have told you everything the Father told me.” — John 15:12-15

What makes us Christians isn’t what we believe or how good we are or what political party we vote or any of that. It’s that Jesus loves us and gave up his life to liberate us.

Full stop.

When God looks at you, God sees a friend. Not a worm. Not a sinner. Not someone who really needs to try harder.

God calls you God’s friend.

Friends, this is a revolutionary statement - that our creator calls us friends. That, not because of anything WE have done or not done, but only because of God’s great love, God has declared us to be God’s friends.

So what does that mean for our congregation as we move to this new model?

For that, I want to zoom out a bit and look at why this value is so important as we move forward.

On the one hand, it should be important simply because God declares us friends. It matters a great deal for our spirituality that the one at the heart of our faith calls us friends.

But it matters to our culture too. In May of this year, the Surgeon General released a new report on loneliness, which he declared a public health crisis. That’s right - even before COVID, half of US adults reported measurable levels of loneliness. That leads to an increase likelihood of heart disease and dementia in older adults and a 60% increase in the risk of premature death.

Loneliness is as deadly as smoking cigarettes daily.

So when I say that it really matters that for us Friendship is our first core value, I think we’re onto something.

A congregation that’s really good at making friends is literally saving lives. That’s a call worth taking seriously, isn’t it?

So what is the solution here? How do we become a church that is really good at making friends?

Turn with us to Matthew 6.

This is from Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount. One of the reasons this sermon is so famous is how deeply practical it is. Rather than esoteric religious oracles, Jesus offers a down-to-earth, nitty-gritty guide to a full, flourishing human life.

I want to read a bit in his instruction where he makes a sharp distinction between God’s path and another force that wants to shape our lives:

“Don’t store up treasures here on earth, where moths eat them and rust destroys them, and where thieves break in and steal. Store your treasures in heaven, where moths and rust cannot destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal. Wherever your treasure is, there the desires of your heart will also be.

“Your eye is like a lamp that provides light for your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is filled with light. But when your eye is unhealthy, your whole body is filled with darkness. And if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is!

“No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other; you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and be enslaved to money. — Matthew 6:19-24

No one can serve God and money. The actual Greek there reads, “Mammon”, which is wild because Jesus is turning commerce into a force we might call demonic.

We’ll come back to that in a moment, but I want you to notice what Jesus says here:

We can be worried about treasure on earth or treasure in God’s realm. We can look at the world around us or we can look to God. Where do we get our values? Which thing shapes us?

It used to be pretty hard to ignore people in favor of products. You had to barter or share with the other families in your village.

But today, we can get nearly anything we want with the push of a button. We can have everything we need delivered to our doorstep and left without a signature, so that we don’t even need to speak to the delivery person.

Our world has gotten really good at turning people into products. No surprise it started with a slave trade and has continued to dehumanize us.

In his book The Life We’re Looking For, Andy Crouch considers the promise of Artificial Intelligence. He observes that there are some fundamental differences between machine thinking and human consciousness that make it unlikely robots will ever truly become - let alone surpass humanity.

Like the interstate vs the pedestrian city blocks, we have to pay attention to our environments. As Crouch warns:

“Rather than actually creating machines that understand the infinitely creative and complex world of human culture, we will find that it is far easier to create attenuated cultural environments that treat persons like machines. Which is what Mammon has wanted all along.”

God created us to treat other humans as neighbors, not as products or delivery drones. When I say we were created for relationship, this is what I mean.

And when we see that loneliness has become an epidemic in our country, this is what we mean.

The Church - our church - has the opportunity to be different. To be a source of affirming humanity and really seeing each other and authentic community.

That begins by setting our eyes on the one who created us and calls us Friend.

Song

Can I be honest with y’all? Catalyst has not done a great job of being a place where it’s easy to make friends.

This is something I’ve noticed over the years here. We are a very friendly church. But we’re not a place that’s easy to make friends. Throughout the years, I’ve witnessed people visit us and they really enjoy their first few weeks here. They comment specifically on how friendly everyone is.

They express how refreshing it is, because the majority of the churches they visit aren’t nearly as hospitable and welcoming.

But within two to three months, they’re gone, usually without any fanfare. Why? Because we didn’t help them cross that gap from guests to friends.

I’ve spent a lot of time on this problem. I’ve talked about it with our Leadership Team, with other pastors, with many of you. It’s honestly something that keeps me up.

Because I really believe Friendship is the heart of Jesus’ good news. I believe if a church is not a place where we’re forming genuine, deep, vulnerable friendships, then we’re not living out Jesus’ teachings.

Of course I’m not saying friendship hasn’t ever happened here, nor that it doesn’t. And certainly this isn’t a problem unique to Catalyst. Quite the opposite - the church in America isn’t any better at friendship than the rest of the larger culture.

I’ve come to believe that’s because the Church likes Mammon a lot more than we think we do.

Remember - Mammon places the emphasis not on the person but on the product they produce. For a long time, the Church’s “product” has been salvation. And what do we mean by ‘salvation’? We mean that, if you believe all the right things, you don’t go to hell. With that as the product, what does church become?

Everything is focused on education - a great sermon, maybe in-depth Sunday School classes. Everything else is in service of the message because the message is the product. Whether or not you enter into authentic community with others in the church is incidental - it’s nice if it happens but it’s not necessary because all that’s necessary is you believe all the right things.

Is it any wonder, as technology has advanced that makes getting the right message easier - from podcasts, YouTube, etc, that church participation has plummeted? No. Because the people have become products and once you can get the product without the hassle of the people, why wouldn’t you?

So as we move to this new model, we’re asking what it looks like to start not with a list of beliefs but with relationships. How can we become a church where we get really good at making friends? Where everything - even the messages, is geared to helping us connect to each other in meaningful ways, to living out Jesus’ vision of the beloved community.

Friends, this is a radical vision that doesn’t feel very radical until we get right down to it.

God is calling us to a change that is beautiful and good. It’s good for us, but it’s also good for our world. To be a place where we’ve gotten really, really good at the sort of risks and vulnerability that make authentic relationships flourish.

It will be easy for us to fall back on the old ways, of prioritizing the message, the beliefs, the things that make it easy to treat people like products. Let’s refuse that. Let’s lead with friendship - the same friendship Jesus spoke over us.

Communion + Examen

We come to this table as Jesus’ friends.

How easily do I imagine God sees me as a friend?

What friendships in my life reflect my friendship with God?

What connections might God be calling me to cultivate into friendships?

How can I choose to be vulnerable in those connections this week?

Assignment + Blessing

Choosing vulnerability