It’s almost impossible for me to describe the feeling I had when I finished reading Chloe Lynch’s Ecclesial Leadership as Friendship. She has done the unthinkable! Lynch, an evangelical theologian has given theologians an outstanding contribution to a theology of friendship.
She pushes the limits of Christian friendship as a new frontier for leadership with unprecedented (and I don’t use that word flippantly) boldness. But wait. At the
same time, precisely because she does this as a female scholar she provocatively points us to the fullness in cross-gender friendship!
At least part of my struggle to describe the fullness I feel about Lynch’s book here is her profound interest in friendship as worthy of deep theological reflection. My own interest in theology took an unexpected turn when I began to develop friendships with women. What do women think about Christian friendship? What are their experiences?
I’m pretty sure the first female author I discovered was Joan Chittister and her book, The Friendship of Women. Joan’s introduction alone fired my imagination about women’s thinking about friendship. It left me with a desire to read more about friendship including a hunger to know what women think about friendship.
My next female author I discovered was Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel’s Rediscovering Friendship: Awakening to the Promise and Power of Women’s friendship. Her approach was different than Chittister’s. But boy, did she open up for me new horizons!!! To not only think about friendship but also how a woman can reflect deeply about friendship with God and what it means for everyday life and friendships.
I don’t remember the precise time I found out about Janice Raymond’s A Passion for Friends but if my memory has it right, I read it within the same season I read Chittister and Moltmann-Wendel but after those two. Raymond envisioned stunning possibilities for female friendship in a male-centered world.
Although the book was a passionate feminist argument for female friendship, her book provoked me to dream of a possibility where a woman might write about platonic passion for male-female friendships.
All three of these women shared something in common. They were deep female thinkers who questioned the male-centeredness in friendship thinking. These women did not passively comply with longstanding male answers to friendship. They shared a hunger, a powerful desire to question centuries-old male ideas about friendship.
They also shared something else in common. None of them would identify as an evangelical. Chittister came out of the Catholic tradition. Moltmann-Wendel, more Protestant than evangelical.
Reading Chittister, Moltmann-Wendel, and Raymond introduced me to a whole new world of women who dared to provoke us to deep questioning about how Christians have thought about friendships. They provoked me to question how Christian male thinkers have relegated friendship to be as meaningful as a flea on a camel.
A couple of years after that I read Mary Hunt’s Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Friendship. She too, shined the light on scarcity in male theology on friendship: “Everyone has friends, but by reading contemporary theology one would never know it.”
I have continued to keep my eye open since then to female deep thinkers who have provoked deep questioning regarding the link to theology and friendship. Janet Tibbetts Schulenberg, Helen Oppenheimer, Sharon Ringe, Madeleine L ’Engle, Marilyn Friedman, Kathy Escobar, Stephanie Paulsell, Mary DeTurris Poust, Carmen Caltagirone, Marilyn Yalom, Lillian Comas-Diaz, and Lisa Gee are some of the women who have provocatively stirred my curiosity.
It goes without saying but I want to say it anyway to be clear: I have also been deeply shaped by women who were courageously questioning other male-centric areas of knowledge and domain. But here I am drawing attention to the special intersection of women thinkers, theology, and friendship.
When I went public with cross-gender friendship, I anticipated women who were evangelical egalitarians to enthusiastically jump on board. That would not be the case. I did meet women though, who were evangelical, nones who were once evangelical, and women outside the evangelical faith.
For ten plus years I have waited for egalitarian theology—women and/or men—to step into the frontlines and put forth a theology of friendship. There are probably a number of reasons why but egalitarians have bypassed the entire friendship conversation.
I am thrilled to say that is no longer the case.
Lynch has stepped forward to give us an exceptionally deep theological reflection on friendship. You heard the saying “To boldly go where no man has gone before?” Lynch does this through deep questioning of “lead first, be a friend second.”
She’s not simply an egalitarian asking us to theologically reflect on friendship as we’ve never done before. She provocatively takes us deep inside the evangelical establishment to claim leadership through friendship.
