“Christian friendship is the sweetest of all connections. It is the very life and soul of every other."

Struck by this quote from Christoper Ash that was just cited on FB by Pastor Robert Briggs:

“Christians can get the idea that the Christian life is about big events and celebrity speakers and find themselves picky spectators, more interested in evaluating the church experiences on offer than the hard graft of building deep relationships together shaped by the word of God.” Christopher Ash, Remaking a broken World.

In part this is the solution to a post by Wyatt Graham also on FB re why men are leaving pastoral ministry. Party of the solution is what Ash talks about here: building deep friendships. This was one of the main goals of my book Iron Sharpens Iron: to encoruage Christians, especially pastors, to form deep friendships.

About twenty-five years ago, when I was teaching full-time at Heritage Seminary in Cambridge, Ontario, I told a fellow faculty member of a piece of advice that W. Gordon Brown (1904–1979), the founding Dean of Central Baptist Seminary in Toronto, used to give to prospective pastors. I began my teaching career in 1982 at Central, which later merged in 1993 with London Baptist Bible College and Seminary to form Heritage Baptist College and Heritage Theological Seminary (now simply Heritage College & Seminary) in Cambridge. I had never met Dean Brown, who had died a few years before I began teaching. But I had heard that he used to advise students who were hoping to become pastors to avoid developing close friendships with any of their parishioners in the churches that they pastored. Bad advice!

I vividly recall relating this to a fellow faculty member in the mid-1990s at Heritage, who, to my shock and horror, told me that he advised students to not even form friendships with fellow pastors, for, this individual told me, they would use whatever confidences you shared with them against you. Terrible advice ! I have long considered this latter advice as illustrative of the low esteem in which friendship is held amongst certain Evangelicals.

Much better wisdom is found in this portion of a letter written in May of 1783 by John Sutcliff (1752-1814)—I wish I had known of this letter when I wrote Iron Sharpens Iron, for I would have exegeted it in that book:

“Christian friendship is the sweetest of all connections. It is the very life and soul of every other. Souls joined together with this heavenly cement are eternally united. Such acquaintance and intercourse are begun here below, but are to ripen and be perfected in the heavenly world. There, distance of place or difference of sentiment will never interrupt the communion of saints.”