How Christian Friendship Keeps Us Accountable

There are many benefits to Christian friendship, from making us smarter to teaching us how to love. Another potent benefit of friendship is its ability to make us better people. A good friendship can form our character in three powerful ways.

Friends Form the Atmosphere of Our Lives

Our friendships form the atmosphere of our lives. Success coaches often tell us that if we want to be successful, we need to surround ourselves with successful people. There is a lot to that.

I saw the truth of this statement as a school teacher. In my first teaching experience as a student teacher, my compatriots often sat in the faculty lounge and complained bitterly about their students. For many of them, it was a release of tension from an admittedly difficult and thankless job (we really don’t value our teachers enough). But I found that breathing that atmosphere was quite literally poisonous to my own attitude. In fact, my supervising teacher sat me down toward the end of the semester and said, “Jeff – I’ve noticed that you seem to have lost your joy of teaching as the semester went on. Do you think you need to reconsider if teaching is the right career for you?” I attributed the change in my disposition to the stress at the end of the semester.

However, when I got my first full-time teaching position I discovered that the environment of this new school was much more positive. Struggles with students were seen as problems to be solved rather than as pains to be endured. There was a palatable desire to create a positive sense of teamwork not only among the faculty but also between the staff and the students. The stresses of the job were the same. The thanklessness was there – I can’t tell you how many times parents blamed good, self-sacrificing teachers for their children’s failure to learn. But all of this was taken in stride. Thanks to this environment I became a better teacher.

What is true in our professional lives is also true of our personal relationships. This is why it is so important to be conscious and deliberate about the friends that we keep. Form the atmosphere of your life – don’t let it be formed for you. Surround yourself with the kind of people you want to become. Build up a habit of forming solid Christian friendship. No, the friends that we make are not completely a matter of choice. But we can exercise a degree of control – and that degree of control can make all the difference in the atmosphere in which we find our souls breathing.

Friends Can Offer Us Correction

So that’s an indirect effect that our friends can have on our character development. But a true friend will also help us much more directly. A good friend, with whom we’ve built up trust and commitment, gains our permission to say what needs to be said about our character. They have earned the right – and the duty – to criticize us when we go astray, to seek our good even when we hate to hear it. Even when what they say may wound our self-esteem or our emotional well-being, it is the wound of a healer. OF course, the correction of a true friend would not be brutal. Love never uses truth as a weapon.

Christian Friendship Keep Us Accountable

Very related to the gift of correction is the gift of accountability. Friends keep us true to who we claim to be. They don’t let us get away with hypocrisy. If we want to make real change in our lives, there is no better person to ask to keep us accountable than a friend who really knows us. Our friends know about our strengths and weaknesses. They know the excuses we are likely to make for ourselves. Despite their great intimacy with us, our friends are also far enough distant from us to keep a level of objectivity. They can cast impartial judgment on the progress we’re making – or on the lack thereof.

Friends keep us accountable in less obvious ways too. The environment of our friendships include expectations and standards. We want to be the people our friends expect us to be. There is nothing worse than disappointing a friend. Our friends can also inspire us to become better than we are. We get comfortable with our families and expect them to accept us as we are. But we want to impress our friends. They may know our weaknesses, but we want them to think the best of us. So we try to become our best.

Surround yourself with people who inspire you to become the best person you can become.

Fortunately for us, building Christian friendship is a skill that we can learn – and learning that skill opens us to the grace of Charity that in turn empowers us to love even more completely. That’s called cooperating with grace.

Brought to you by Jeffrey S. Arrowood at From the Abbey, dedicated to helping you rediscover the JOY of learning and living your faith so you can grow in intimacy with God.