These are examples of friendship forged in the context of serving in ministry together. Such friendships are also repeatedly among those at the center of controversy and debate in recent days. Men and women serve together in the church in a variety of ways. Sometimes friendships naturally develop. The Bible makes clear that this is good and right.
Yet when friendships between men and women in the church are discouraged or viewed automatically with suspicion, this attitude, paradoxically, creates situations riper for sin and abuse. Cloaking what might otherwise be a normal, healthy, even casual friendship in the language of “ministry” saddles the relationship with baggage and incurs the risk of spiritual abuse. If people can’t just be friends, after all, then they have to define the relationship some other way.
Someone recently observed that maybe evangelicals have so much trouble with friendship between men and women because our view of marriage today is focused too much on sex and not enough on friendship.
I would suggest the opposite: The modern companionate model of marriage so emphasizes friendship that when a spouse inevitably fails to fulfill all of our friendship needs, and we seek fulfillment of those needs elsewhere, the resulting friendships are conflated with sexual relationship.
In other words, perhaps because we have overlapped marriage with friendship so much, we don’t know how to have opposite-sex friendships that aren’t inherently sexual. A spouse ought to be a friend, to be sure. But “friend” — even “best friend” — is a demotion from “husband” or “wife.”
Wide, varied friendships of varying depths and lifespans are healthy and good — and biblical. I have book friends, movie friends, theology friends, author friends, news junkie friends, funny meme sharing friends, childhood friends, social media friends, dog friends, “Wordle” friends and work friends, to name a few.
Some of these friends are men. Some are women. None of my friends share all of these interests. My husband shares some but not all of these interests.
All friendships require limits of various kinds, even same-sex friendships.
The Billy Graham rule is no help to those whose sin occurs in a homosexual liaison, after all. And while I’m at it, it doesn’t always take two to tango: How many strict advocates of the rule watch porn? Technology has introduced increasingly intimate forms of connection: text messages, Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs. These complications have been the source of recent controversies about contacts between men and women that make the Billy Graham Rule’s ban on sharing airspace somewhat moot.
Opposite-sex friendships have particular calls for wisdom and guardrails. But so, too, familial relationships need healthy boundaries. This is true of all relationships, of which friendships are just one kind.
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