Friendship Matters: Honoring God in Our Relationships

Chris L. Firestone and Alex H. Pierce

One of the most popular and celebrated television sitcoms of the past few decades is a show called “Friends.” Still watched by many in reruns, it follows the life of six twenty-somethings as they set out as friends in search of love and happiness. Their friendships give us a good snapshot of popular culture today. They are in their mid-20s, belong to a single ethnicity, and are part of the upper-middle class. There is little cultural, generational, or religious diversity. Their sexuality is free and open. The life of friendship is portrayed by a good number of laughs peppered with libido. The show highlights the way that friends help us to navigate life, for better or worse, and yet friendship on the show is a concept that is not defined. It is caught, not taught.

Like the television show, many of us are guilty of taking friendship for granted. Most of what we know about it, we assume. When we happen to think about it, we tend to analyze our relationships, lament our loneliness, or believe that our friendships happen by chance. We fail to appreciate fully those whom we consider our friends and what it means for us to call each other “friends.” We see examples in popular culture and wonder if those examples are the kinds of friendships that we should have too. Is friendship, as we experience it, the best it can be?

The claim of this booklet is that friendship is something far more than an afterthought, a side gig, or some frivolous pastime—it is instead a lost art and an underappreciated dimension of the journey to the good life. It is a gift from God that each one of us must act on and receive in order to reap the full blessings that life (both here and on into eternity) has to offer. The deep riches of friendship, particularly Christian friendship, do not happen by chance. They require you to be open to new ideas on friendship and attentive to how they may apply to your life.

Whether our various roles will one day consist of becoming a worker, a parent, a leader, a scholar, or an athlete, we all need friends to share in these experiences and to foster our own wellbeing and the wellbeing of others. While we have all heard that it takes a village to raise a child, many of us need to realize that it takes a community of friends to produce a healthy and whole person. If, like the authors, you feel that there is something more to living well than our highly individualistic culture would have us believe, then we invite you to join us on this brief journey into why friendship matters and how embracing its truest form can change your life.

I. Rediscovering Friendship

Before we start thinking about the relationships in our own lives, let’s begin by considering the friendships of Olivia, a current sophomore from Chicago attending a small liberal arts school on the east coast. Olivia is very family oriented, doing her best to keep in touch with her parents, four younger siblings, and large extended family. Also back home are her church “family” and her friends from high school. She writes letters and keeps up email chains with some, and has fallen out of touch with others. At school, because Christianity is important to her, Olivia spends a lot of her time with friends who share her faith. Outside of her Christian circle, friends who lived on her floor last year have formed a “Squad” that meets up for various events and parties, and her roommate often invites her to softball team gatherings. She is also a member of an a cappella group. She babysits every day for two adorable kids. She has five current professors and an advisor. Other individuals she interacts with on a daily basis include custodians who work at her school, the dining hall staff, past professors, the people in her Bible study, her pastor and other families from church, her classmates, and acquaintances from around campus.

Which of the people in her life can Olivia call “friend”? Which of them are Olivia’s closest friends? What are the benefits of friendship in Olivia’s life? Are there different kinds or levels of friendship?

The Limits of Friendship

“The Dunbar Number,” named after sociologist Robin Dunbar, explains that a single person can participate only in a limited number of relationships. At any given time, human beings have a range of possible acquaintances between 100 and 200, with an average maximum of about 150 stable relationships.¹ A “stable relationship” is one that involves people with whom we come into regular contact, recognize by face or name, and interact with at some basic level. They constitute our friendship “circle of influence.” Despite what many of us might think, social media have very little impact on the Dunbar number. We can catalogue our past friendships by “friending” people on social media, but these so-called friendships, and the superficial means we have developed for keeping up with them, do not impact our limitations. Somewhere around the Dunbar total of 150, we become incapable of adding new friendships without letting other friendships go.²

Consider the life of a university professor, for example. Over the course of a career, a professor might have more than 200 students in class every year. The professor can try hard to remember their names and keep in contact with them, but the stream of incoming students never ends and the list of former students grows continually. The professor has to make choices about which students will remain on his or her personal and professional radars and which students will disappear into history. The former group will consist of “friends” in the sense that will be defined below. The latter will consist of persons who might make it back into the life of a professor, but for now remain outside the friendship circle. As the example shows, even though our saturation point remains the same, the group of people who constitute our circle of friends is really quite dynamic.