Dan J. Brennan

A Single Perspective

I met Doug Webster when he came to the first Sacred Friendship Gathering in 2012. I am excited to share Doug's ongoing reflections in his own jounrey as a single man. 

In the past when I've shared about cross gender friendships, I've generally encountered two different responses. Some think friendships between men and women are a no-brainer and wonder why there is even a need to talk about them. On the other hand, I've had friends tell me, "You don't know what it's like to be married." That's quite true, I don't. But I also think many of my married friends don't know what it's like to be single at different stages in life. When I was in my twenties, I was discontent not having a girlfriend. But now, most of my peers are married, some for over a decade, and many have kids. I recognize the possibility that I may never marry, and struggle to find community in my life.

When I was younger, friendships seemed to come naturally. I didn't have to give them much thought. But after I left school, I found that friendships required more intentionality to maintain. One of the biggest challenges of my life now is finding deep, consistent friendships. I know there are many people who care about me, yet there are few who are available to interact with me on a regular basis.

 

Mentoring and Cross Gender Friendship

I am honored and thrilled to have Suzannah Paul contribute a guest post to this month's series of guest posts on  friendship between men and women. 

Suzannah writes love letters to the broken, beautiful Church at The Smitten Word and A Deeper Story and tweets feminist criticism and the life bucolic @suzannahpaul.

Should men and women be friends? Should they mentor each other?

 I suppose it depends: should humans be friends? Are women human? Are men?

 Of course we believe men and women are human. How ridiculous! And yet, our language betrays us: 

• She's a temptation and a stumbling block: tantalizing (or unappealing) body parts existing for the gaze, satisfaction, and control of men. 

• He's an animal, governed by his physical nature. He can't even help himself (or be expected to.)

This sort of reductivism hurts all of us, especially women. We are made to feel ashamed of our bodies and sexuality, impossibly expected to divorce ourselves from them, and then blamed when men objectify, dehumanize, and abuse us.

The ironic thing is that friendship between men and women actually serves to heal some of these destructive patterns and assumptions, but friendship itself is so debased both in Christian cultures that exalt marriage to relational primacy and a culture-at-large that demonizes the alleged “friendzone.”

 

Divorce Recovery: Healing and Discerning Rebounds and Cross-Gender Friendships

Jim Stillwell is a pastor and counselor. Since 1993, he has been helping recently

divorced people move on to relational healing. Over 3,000 people have gone through

Jim's seven week divorce recovery workshop which Jim does twice a year in

Lexington Kentucky.

 

At what point can a recently divorced person date? Under what

conditions can a recently divorced person have friends of the

opposite sex? How much time is needed or healing from divorce? How can you tell the

 difference between a healthy friendship with someone of the opposite sex and a

“rebound relationship?”

 

Since divorce recovery work has been a central focus of my ministry for the past

twenty-one years, I hear these questions often. I also encounter situations where

perhaps someone should be asking these questions and they are not. There are also  

situations where I am asking these questions before the person I am talking with is

really ready to hear them. But it is a conversation worth having, and one that can help

you prevent lots of “train wrecks” in your relational and emotional life as a person

attempting to recover from recent divorce.

 

What Are Male-Female Friendships For? My Clarifying Response to Anna Broadway & Her.meneutics

First of all, I’m grateful that Her.meneutics blog continues to seek what is good, beautiful, and healthy in male-female friendship. I have appreciated that this blog has continued to have an open mind about friendship between the sexes instead of fearing the phenomenon altogether. I also have greatly appreciated that Her.meneutics continues to approach the subject with care and discretion. I also appreciate Anna Broadway’s wrestling through inevitable minefields associated with this subject.

With great interest I read her as she respectfully engaged Jonalyn Fincher and me. Primarily, Broadway directed her focus toward my good friend Jonalyn, but I thought I would add a few clarifying responding thoughts. As I read Anna’s contribution I thought about our unique journeys in attempting to integrate sexuality and male-female friendship. This is such a vast, deep and complex subject and phenomenon.

Here are a couple of thoughts to clarify. 

 

Deconstructing Temptations Men Face

Honored and blessed that therapist Ryan Thomas Neace joins therapists Ellen Haroutunian and Jean Holthaus in writing a guest post on my blog this month. The evangelical sub-culture has encouraged men to fear non-romantic closeness with women. Ryan wrote an incredible post last year that caught the attention of many Christian men: Consecrated Sexual Attraction. It later became a HuffPost article.

Ryan Thomas Neace holds degrees in Religion and Marriage & Family Therapy, and identifies as a post-evangelical Christian with heavy leanings toward contemplative practice. He is a Licensed Professional Counselor in Virginia and Missouri, and board certified as a Clinical Mental Health Counselor. He founded Change, Inc., where he is currently in private counseling practice, helping folks with anxiety, depression, addictions, relationships, difficulties related to teen years, co-dependence, sexuality/gender, and sexual orientation. He also frequently works at the intersection of spirituality/religion with all of these things. Among his spiritual heroes are Henri Nouwen, Brother Roger of Taize, Richard Rohr, Thomas a Kempis, Thomas Merton, St. John of the Cross, St. Therese of Lisieux, Wendell Berry, Jim Wallis, and Brian McLaren. Ryan is delighted to live in the city of St. Louis, Missouri, with his wife, two children, and three cats. Read his personal blog here.

Recently, I attended an evangelical Christian Men’s Conference that, for the most part, I enjoyed.  It’s just that the parts I didn’t enjoy were about what it means to be a Christian man.

 I knew I was in for a rough ride when one of the workshop speakers, the head of a ministry called, “Man Up God’s Way,” asked from the stage how many of the men “had to get [their] testicles back from [their] wives” just to get some time away to attend the conference.  Of course, he was obvious and a relative outlier.  Few in the large group seemed to appreciate the coarse and misogynistic inference.

 

Busting Myths and Substituting New Realities

I've known Amy Martin for about four years. She's been a great help behind the scenes in our last two Sacred Friendship Gatherings. Last year she wrote this great post on attraction and shame over here. I am thrilled that Amy wanted to write a guest post for this month. 

Lately, our family has had a bit of an obsession watching Mythbusters, a science entertainment television series created for the Discovery Chanel. Other than what I can only assume is a prerequisite to blow something up every show, the basic outline goes something like this: Find common myth, test common myth, confirm common myth as “plausible,” “confirmed,” or “busted.”

 

With it’s messes, explosions and sometimes unbelievable lengths they go to to test an urban legend, it’s entertaining to be sure, but what I really love is the spirit of the show which looks at something commonly assumed to be true and replies, “Really? Let’s test that.” Maybe my resonance with the spirit of Mythbusters has something to do with the way I’m wired, well-exampled a mere 4 years into my life when our preschool class made homemade donuts. Ms. Pat warned us with a seriousness I’d not seen in her sweet preschool-teacher demeanor before, “Do not touch the donut fryer, it’s VERY HOT.” Now, I wasn’t an impulsive child in the least, but I was curious, and skeptical of any assumptions - and Ms. Pat seemed pretty darned convinced of this one. I sat there on my miniature chair, 4-year-old cogs sifting, sorting, weighing, my blond pigtails behind me and the donut fryer right in front of me,  “Really? What is very hot?” I wondered to myself.

 

I got a blister on the tip of my finger that day. Donut fryers are very hot: Confirmed.

 

I would go through my childhood, adolescence and into adulthood constantly sifting, sorting, weighing and questioning why things were the way they were, and why people believed the things they believed. Plausible? Confirmed? Busted? I needed to know because I soon figured out that sometimes the adults were wrong, and not only that, sometimes they were so dead wrong, that a misunderstanding was blocking a better way to do something, or a more in-depth view of a situation or a person. I could not stop asking, Is this true? And if it’s not, what if identifying and shedding that belief meant something could be better? I did all of this quietly most of the time because I quickly found out, (especially as a girl, and especially in the church) that voicing new ideas about old things, no matter how dysfunctional, would get you pushed to the fringes faster than a finger gets a blister touching a hot donut fryer. The questions went underground, but the myth-busting continued.

 

Pastoral Wisdom on Male-Female Friendship

Here is a recap of these powerful posts by five different pastors this week.

Friendship as Spiritual Formation by Kathy Escobar

"These four things–power, shame, independence, and fear–are what Jesus calls us to break down so we can get to the better thing–love.  Humility, grace, trust, and peace (the key elements of friendship) are all part of love and antidotes to power, shame, independence, and fear."

In the Spirit of Friendship by Brian Cobb

"Friends?  Yes, of course, I have female friends.  No, we’re not just friends.  Come on, now.  Just deprecates friendship itself. I don’t have any just friends (even though they are justified people) of either biological designation.  And close friendships usually start with a spiritual connection.  It’s something we perceive in each other.  Pains to be touched with healing, needs to be filled, all the highs and lows of life to be shared, dreams and hopes and eternity.  And we trust that the potentials of our relationship are a gift from God, even as God gifts us for and with each other."

Created for Something More by Beth Bramstedt

"The goal is not simply to have men and women working side by side on the same committees or leading small groups together. To fully live out the interdependent nature of our Triune God, we need to understand and be understood by each other. We need to know and be known, love and be loved. We need to be friends." 

Trust, Space-Making, and Image Spectrums

"Pastoral relationships between men and women can suffer a similar fate when boundaries have a dominating force over the relationship.  Where there is fear, there is no mutual trust.  Where there is no trust, there can be no ministry.  Building trust is process of hundreds of small positive interactions.  Yet sadly, sometimes trust does not progress solely because we are afraid of the other gender and afraid of ourselves with the other gender." 

Beyond the Rules to Freedom: Five Things We Learned About Cross-Gender Friendship by Happy Thorp

"Mark and I have both seen cross-gender friendship go south in the absence of healthy boundaries,  clear communication, and emotional maturity. Healthy crossgender friendships just aren’t possible without all three of those things - but there’s something about healthy friendships that God uses to mend our hearts from all kinds of brokenness."

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Beyond the Rules to Freedom: 5 Things We’ve Learned About Cross-Gender Friendship

Oh the power of positive, redemptive, trust-filled stories! I am so thrilled to introduce

you to my friend, Happy Thorp, associate pastor of Torch Church in Illinois. I am

deeply blessed that Happy is contributing to pastors week. This is another story that 

shows how forming deep relationships and trust move past an anxiety-driven

avoidant-bound evangelical culture. 

Happy currently serves as an assistant to Torch’s lead pastor, Mark Carter. They are

both passionate about God’s word, and about seeing all of His people - both those

that are still lost and those that  already know themselves found - made whole and

holy. Neither one of them dreamed when they set out five years ago with a handful of

other people to plant a church that their shared passion for ministry would lead

to friendship - but it did! You can read more from Happy about friendship on

her website, Simple Felicity.

 

Trust, Space-Making and Image Spectrums

Ed Stetzer's rules (Avoid Any Hint) or hospitable trust and space making? I'm really honored and excited about introducing you to Ty Grigg. Sheila and I are members of the church Ty co-pastors. Two of my closest female friends go to the same church and Ty knows both of them. He knows our deep friendships. In fact, he officiated the wedding of one my closest friends, Susanne Osborne Calhoun in a ceremony that I participated in, too. I've come to know and deeply respect Ty as he has practiced trust and hospitality toward me and my closest female friendships. 

Ty is a co-pastor at Life on the Vine Christian Community in the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago. He also has a certificate in spiritual direction from the C. John Weborg Center for Spiritual Direction. He has been married to Laura for almost seven years and he gets to be a stay-at-home father to their 20 month old boy a couple days a week. He blogs at www.tendingflame.wordpress.com and contributes at missioalliance.org/blog. He drinks a lot of coffee (chemex pour overs being the preferred method) and his goal this summer is to plant a garden.

I’m grateful for the invitation by Dan to write on such an important subject.  I am writing as one who has friends who are women, co-ministry partners who are women, pastoral colleagues who are women, and members of my church (who are women!).  Cross-gender friendships and relationships are not a “Will I or won’t I?” question but more “How will I relate with women?”  I start with looking at it through a pastoral
relationship but realizing that much of the same applies to friendship as well.  In pastoral care and spiritual direction (both giving and receiving it), communicating trust rather than fear, making hospitable space, and expecting to see God in the diverse spectrum of masculinity and femininity are ways of answering this question, “How will I be a pastor and friend to women?” 

Created for Something More

I'm honored to know Beth Bramstedt. She is an associate pastor of a large flourishing evangelical church, Woodcrest Chapel. She is a leader, trailblazer, and friend. Beth is married to Chris and they have two teenage sons, Brandon and Chandler

“I never felt called to preach. I just volunteered,” writes Andy Stanley in the introduction to his book “Communicating for a Change.”

I like to say I never volunteered to preach; I got volunteered.