Under Rachel Held Evans’ post, Better conversations between churched and un-churched Christians, Lynn makes an excellent comment:
“There was a time when I wouldn’t have believed it wasn’t possible
for people on either side of this divide to avoid hurting each other,
but then I met this family at the last church I went to. For almost a
year, they patiently let me ask honest and definitely heretical
questions in the small group they ran. And when I decided that I needed
to leave because I just didn’t believe what the church and its
denomination believed, they didn’t beat down my door and demand I come
back. After a while, I just started getting e-mails – ‘We haven’t seen
you around, and we miss you. How about coffee this week?’ ‘Do you have
dinner plans for Friday?’ ‘So we’re having a family movie night.
Interested?’
“And the crazy thing is that they actually just wanted to get
together – without questioning my theology or my decision to stop
attending church. They’ve never used it as an excuse to ask me how my
‘walk with the Lord’ is going.
“I still think this kind of friendship is very rare, but it’s good to
be reminded that other Christians can totally surprise you. Little by
little, it chips away at my cynicism.”
I agree with Lynn that this kind of no-strings-attached friendship is
rare (including in terms of how I live my own life), but it’s beautiful
when it does happen. I also appreciate Lynn’s comment because
it reminds me of how many Christians handle a person who leaves the
church or who has not shown up to church or a small group for a while.
They either ignore the person altogether and don’t call or write, as if
the person doesn’t exist or matter, or they pressure the person to come
back, whether that person wants to do so or not. But I think that Lynn
did well to present a third way: offer a no-strings-attached
friendship.