The Wilful Sunflower

Sherman recently wrote a series of posts on "Friendship" and challenged me to not only write out what I think about them, but to conduct an open correspondence with him on the subject, on our respective blogs. Since his last few posts gave me some "light-bulb moments", I agreed...

 
Dear Sherman,

I've always been frustrated by the fact that we talk about church being 'family' but it doesn't embody my idea of family at all. You can't imagine the number of times I've often felt like a third cousin twice removed or something.

Building friendships in church seems to be so difficult. For one thing, we only see each other once a week at Sunday service. Or perhaps twice a week (add in cell group meetings). You know what happened when I joined my previous church and said that I hardly knew anyone? Others told me, "Join ministries and get involved in activities. That way you'll get to know more people."

Go into ministries to get to know more people? What is that all about?

So I think you hit the nail on the head when you said, "Thus far, friendship has been by and large a by-product -- a secondary result -- of the local church's exercise of revolving people around planned programmes".

But I'm not into the programmes and activities thing anymore. Gone are the days when I would knock myself out trying to "serve God" by sitting on committees, attending countless seminars and camps, running around here & there doing stuff. I still believe in using my gifts & abilities to serve God, just not necessarily always within a church setting.

For example, I used to be in one of the community service ministries coz I felt that there is a greater need for helpers there. My main interaction was with the children of that particular community (I was giving English language classes). How then could this ministry be used as a means to "get to know people in church"? That only happens within the church-based ministries... worship team, ushering team, audio-visual team, cell group leaders, etc.

I guess what I want to know is, how can we as a church start moving away from being activity-based and start being friendship-focused? Surely we can't do away entirely with activities & programmes.

With furrowed brow,
Sunflower