The Purpose of Friendship
“Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.” - 1 Thessalonians 5:11
You may have seen the viral clip of Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Meta fame, talking about friendship. He remarked, “The average American has fewer than three people they would consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it’s something like 15 friends or something.” Zuckerberg’s solution to societal withdrawal? Not more and deeper friendships, but AI friendships. His vision is a transformation of how people interact with videos on their feeds. No longer will they simply watch, but they will engage with the content through AI chatbots. I don’t know about you, but for me it’s a hard sell that AI chatbots will make up for what Zuckerberg describes as a twelve-friend deficit.
There is in fact a crisis of friendship in our society, undoubtedly spurred on by social media engagement. From Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” to Will Schwalbe’s “We Should Not Be Friends” whose titles tip us off to the data, there are stacks of books that have chronicled modern societal withdrawal from friendship. We would be unwise to presume that this lack of social engagement has no effect on the church. One of the things I often hear when I meet with other Christians for discipleship is a plea for genuine friendship. From my conversations with other pastors, it seems that “How do I fit in” is among the most frequently asked questions in pastoral counseling. What should be our answer to the idea of AI chatbots? This is too short of a blog post to go in-depth. But broadly speaking, it will not be enough to teach and believe that virtual friendship isn’t the answer or that it’s off limits. The church must offer a positive vision of friendship if we hope to resist the strong cultural winds of synthetic, AI relationships in the near future.
So what is the purpose of friendship for the Christian church? We have the oft quoted verse from Proverbs 27:17, “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” Or Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians where he describes the function of relationships in the church—“Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.” Friendship takes on an entirely different texture for Christians—friends are a means of perseverance. As odd as AI friends may seem to a secular materialist, so much more to a Christian who understand from the Bible that the Christian company we keep will help us to get to heaven. Whoever is behind programming the AI bots will never have that as the goal.
We ought not to think about friendship as the world does. We should not “optimize” for friendship. In the church, there are often more options than we’re willing to admit. Some of the most encouraging friends turn out to be people with very little in common with us from an earthly perspective. Don’t get me wrong—there’s an ease among friends who have similar interests and goals, but if the goal of friendship is perseverance in following Jesus, God will use all kinds of surprising people to help you get to heaven. It’s this goal of biblical friendship—mutual encouragement in discipleship for the ultimate purpose of perseverance—that renders the church without excuse for turning to bots for friendship. God has sovereignly placed you in a particular local church—and he’s placed fellow members there so that Christians will never be lonely in your walk with Jesus. In the church, you find friends who are looking out for your best interests. And so, with God’s help, press deeper into the purpose of friendship, which will often mean making friends with unlikely people. You might be surprised who your truest friends turn out to be.
