How to Build Christian Friendship — Spurgeon on Holy Friendships
⏱ 14 min read
You can list the names of the friends you used to be close with, and the list does not match the calendar anymore. The friend from university who has moved cities four times. The friend from your first job who got married and slowly disappeared into the household. The friend from the early-mothering years who is now in a different stage of life. The small Bible study you were in for three years, which is no longer a Bible study. The church you joined hoping for the kind of slow holy company you read about in the New Testament, and which has turned out to be a Sunday gathering and not, yet, a friendship.
This is not unusual. The shape of midlife is, for many Christian women, a slow narrowing of the old set of friendships and an unhurried search for what the next set might look like. Most of the writing on how to build Christian friendship online is about being a better friend — about reaching out more, planning more, being more present. That advice is not wrong, but it sits on the surface. Underneath the question is a quieter one. What kind of friendship is a Christian friendship actually meant to be — and what daily practice in me makes it possible to receive one when it comes? Charles Spurgeon, who pastored a congregation of thousands and yet wrote tenderly about the small handful of holy friendships that carried him through forty years of preaching, walked this ground in three passages worth a slow evening. The Everspring Devotional for Women in Their 40s carries this kind of reading into a daily companion for the woman whose social ground has been shifting. For now — read slowly. (If the loneliness underneath the question has begun to feel like more than thinning friendships, the companion can a Christian be depressed — Spurgeon on the minister’s fainting fits walks the next page. The slow why Christian fasting still matters — Chrysostom’s plain defence holds another part of the same hidden country, and what happens when you die as a Christian — Baxter on the saints’ rest is the long view of where the communion of saints is finally going.)
Spurgeon was, by the standards of any century, a busy man — preaching twice on Sundays, running a pastors’ college, writing constantly, raising twin sons, and tending a chronically ill wife. The handful of holy friendships he maintained across his life were not accidents. They were the result of small daily practices in him that made room for the friendships when they came, and that fed them once they were there. The slow reading below is about those practices, more than about finding friends.
The first passage — the heart in right tune
Spurgeon, in one of his published meditations, gave a small image for what the Christian’s heart is meant to be doing all the time, which turns out to be the foundation for every holy friendship that ever follows.
“Come, then, my Lord, and give me Thy love with Thy grace. Take good heed, Christian, that thine own heart is in right tune, that when the fingers of mercy touch the strings, they may resound with full notes of communion.”
— Charles Spurgeon
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
The image is musical. The heart is a stringed instrument. The Christian’s small daily work is not to play the instrument. The work is to keep it in tune — the patient daily adjustment that lets the instrument be ready when something arrives that wants to play it. Spurgeon’s primary referent here is the touch of God’s fingers of mercy — but the image holds for friendship too, because Christian friendship is, in Spurgeon’s understanding, one of the ways God plays the strings.
The relevance to how to build Christian friendship is exact. The woman whose heart has not been kept in tune cannot, when a slow good friendship begins to arrive, receive it well. The strings are dull. The chord, when struck, makes a smaller sound than the moment was offering. The new friend says something true and kind, and the un-tuned heart hears it muffled. The new friend is patient with a small fault, and the un-tuned heart receives the patience as condescension. The slow daily work is the tuning — sitting with the verse, writing the honest sentence, letting the breath have one longer exhale at the kitchen sink, allowing one small good thing to be noticed each evening — and the tuning is what makes the strings ready for the full notes of communion when a holy friend arrives in the room.
This is the first thing to say about how to build Christian friendship. The friendship is not the foundation. The heart in right tune is the foundation. The friendship is built on top of it. The woman who has been keeping her heart in tune — slowly, daily, without anyone watching — becomes a woman whom holy friendships find easy to land near, because there is a chair in her, ready for the sitting. The woman whose heart has not been tuned for years can do everything right on the surface — show up to the small group, invite people over, send the texts — and still find the friendships oddly stalled, because the strings are not yet ready to resound when the moment comes.
The good news, which Spurgeon does not say loudly but is true, is that the tuning is daily and small. You do not have to wait until your heart is finished before friendship can land. You only have to be at the work. The tuning is the practice. The playing is what He does, through the friend He sends, through the verse that arrives in conversation, through the moment of unexpected understanding over a cup of tea on a Wednesday evening. (If the journal practice that does the tuning has been a struggle for you, the companion what to write in a Christian journal when you feel blank walks fifty honest prompts for the days the page has been hard.)
The somatic — for the body that has been carrying it
Pause here. Loneliness — and the long thinning of old friendships that did not exactly end, but did not exactly continue either — lives in the body. The chest narrows. The shoulders quietly draw in. The body learns, over years, to occupy less space when other bodies are nearby, because the social ground has been uncertain, and the body has been guarding itself.
Sit somewhere quiet. Both feet flat on the floor. Place both hands, lightly, on the upper arms — your own. A small self-holding. The shoulders, you will notice, have been forward for some time. The collarbones have been small and narrow. The body has been folded inward, gently and chronically, in a way that other bodies could read across the room without knowing they were reading.
On a slow inhale, let the shoulders move back by a small amount — not by trying to straighten the posture, but by stopping the small ongoing inward folding. Let the collarbones widen. Let the chest, between the shoulders, open by half an inch. On the exhale, let it stay there. Take one more slow inhale into the small new openness. One more longer exhale. Then take the hands away.
The body did not need to do anything. It needed the acknowledgement that the chest has been narrowed for company that has not been arriving — and that the chest is allowed to widen for company that may yet come. Holy friendship lands more easily on a body that has stopped, even briefly, folding itself away. The widening, by itself, is a small piece of how to build Christian friendship — before any text has been sent or any invitation extended.
The second passage — the cool twilight
Spurgeon, in Morning and Evening, wrote a sentence about evening fellowship that names, almost without trying, the kind of presence holy friendship is finally about.
“Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth. O that he would walk with me; I am ready to give up my whole heart and mind to him, and every other thought is hushed. I am only asking what he delights to give. I am sure that he will condescend to have fellowship with me, for he has given me his Holy Spirit to abide with me forever. Sweet is the cool twilight, when every star seems like the eye of heaven, and the cool wind is as the breath of celestial love.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Read it twice. Slowly.
The picture is an evening one. A man, in the open air after a long day, standing in the cool twilight, with the stars beginning to be visible. He is speaking to God as a friend. O that he would walk with me. I am ready to give up my whole heart and mind to him. Every other thought is hushed. The friendship he is naming is, first, vertical — Christ as the slow companion of his evening — but the shape of the friendship is the shape every holy human friendship borrows from. Walk with me. Hush every other thought. Be the one whose presence is the small unhurried good of this evening.
The line worth keeping near the page is every other thought is hushed. This is what holy friendship is, finally, about. It is not the friendship of constant texting. It is not the friendship of efficient logistics. It is the friendship in which, when you are together, every other thought is hushed — the work, the to-do list, the small social anxieties, the performance — and the two of you can sit in the cool twilight of a slow conversation, with the small attention of one paying close to the other, and the cool wind of celestial love moving quietly between you.
The modern Christian woman has often forgotten what this kind of friendship looks like, because the social shape of midlife — fast lunches, group texts, scheduled Zooms — has been the only available shape for years. Holy friendship is slower than that. It happens in long conversations that did not have an agenda. It happens on walks. It happens at kitchen tables late in the evening when the children have gone to bed and nothing is on television. It happens at the speed at which the every other thought is hushed is possible.
This is the second thing to say about how to build Christian friendship. You will not build it in the fifteen-minute coffee window between school drop-off and the office. You will not build it on a Zoom call with the camera on, where you are quietly performing being-a-good-friend while the kettle boils in the kitchen. You will build it in the small unhurried evenings where a single conversation is allowed to take three hours, because nothing else has been scheduled into the corner of that evening, and the two of you have given each other the rare gift of every other thought hushed. The Christian woman who wants to build this kind of friendship has to first protect the time it requires. The slowness is the soil. The friendship grows in it.
The Everspring Devotional for Women in Their 40s was built around this kind of slow evening — one short passage each night, a verse held next to the day, room for the honest sentence about the small social weather of the day. The journal will not, by itself, give you the friend. It will give you the kind of evening practice that, slowly, makes you the friend other women find easy to be slow near.
(The sibling article in this Father-Analysis cluster sits at how to handle conflict as a Christian — De Sales on peaceful confrontation. Friendship and conflict are the same skill from two angles; the two walks belong together.)
The third passage — the Spirit who brings the fruit
Spurgeon, in his Gleanings among the Sheaves, wrote a small Trinitarian sentence that names where the actual love between Christians finally comes from.
“Thou, O Father, art the source of all grace, all love and mercy towards us. Thou, O Son, art the channel of Thy Father’s mercy, and without Thee Thy Father’s love could never flow to us. And Thou, O Spirit, art He who enables us to receive that divine virtue which flows from the fountain-head, the Father, through Christ the channel, and which, by Thy means, enters into our heart, and there abides, and brings forth its glorious fruit.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Gleanings among the Sheaves
Read it once at speed. Then read it again, slowly.
The image is hydrological. The Father is the source. The Son is the channel. The Spirit is the one who enables you to receive the water that has been flowing the whole time. The water, once received, enters into the heart, and there abides, and brings forth its glorious fruit. The fruit, in the New Testament list, is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance. Every one of those is a quality holy friendship is built out of.
The relevance to how to build Christian friendship is the relevance of the last clause. Brings forth its glorious fruit. The friendship is the fruit of the water that has been received. The friendship is not produced by your direct effort to make a friendship. The friendship is produced by the Spirit’s slow work in your heart, which produces the love, the patience, the kindness, the slowness — and which then, when the right woman is in the room, becomes the friendship, without your having had to engineer the becoming.
This is profoundly freeing, and it is the third thing to say about how to build Christian friendship. You are not asked to manufacture the friendship. You are asked to abide under the channel of the Father’s love — to keep yourself, slowly, in the small daily place where the water is flowing — and the fruit will, in time, be produced. Some of the fruit will be the friendships themselves. Some of it will be your own small new capacity to receive a friend well when she arrives. Some of it will be the way old hurt friendships, slowly, become possible to repair, because the Spirit has been quietly softening the place in you that the hurt had hardened.
For the woman whose social ground is currently sparse — Spurgeon is gentle. The sparseness is not a verdict. The sparseness may be the season in which the Spirit is doing the deeper work of receiving, so that when the friendships come — and they will come — the fruit they produce in you, and in the women God sends, is glorious in a way the noisier friendships of earlier life were not. The slow abiding is the work. The friendships are the fruit. The two are not the same thing, and you do not have to do the second one. You only have to be at the first.
What the slow reading will do over a year
If you sit with Spurgeon’s three passages — one a month for three months — and then the question how to build Christian friendship as your slow companion for the rest of the year, what happens is not dramatic. The friends do not arrive in the post on Friday. What happens is that the shape of your interior changes.
The heart, slowly, becomes in right tune — ready to resound when a friend’s words touch its strings. The body, slowly, stops folding itself away. The evenings, slowly, become slow enough that every other thought hushed becomes a thing you know how to do, and other women can feel, when they are with you, that the hushing is possible in your company. The Spirit, slowly, brings forth the fruit — and the fruit is, over months, the woman you become, in whose presence holy friendship finds it natural to land.
By the end of a year, you will have one or two friendships you did not have at the beginning. Or you will have the same friendships you had, but they will have deepened into the holy thing — slower, sweeter, more capable of carrying weight. Or you will have one — only one — but the one will be the kind your grandmother had, the kind that lasts decades, the kind a woman is willing to drive across a city in the rain for, the kind that walks her through dying.
The slow reading does not promise crowds of friends. Spurgeon never had crowds of close friends — he had a handful. The handful held him for forty years. The handful is what the slow reading is making you ready for. The handful is more than enough.
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A daily home for the slow practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Devotional for Women in Their 40s. Each evening, one short passage and a verse, with room for the honest sentence — a small daily place to keep the heart in right tune, while the holy friendships are quietly being prepared.
The Everspring Devotional for Women in Their 40s carries Spurgeon’s slow vocabulary — the heart in right tune, the cool twilight of unhurried company, the Spirit’s slow bringing of the fruit — into a daily companion for the woman whose social ground is shifting, without rushing and without pretending the holy friendships can be manufactured by effort alone.
