True Friendship: Walking Shoulder to Shoulder by Vaughan Roberts is a book that explains what real friendship is and how to pursue it. Each chapter describes a different aspect of friendship: how it is crucial, close, constant, candid, careful, and Christ-centered.
He writes because true friendship is a crucial part of life, and the consequences of missing it are perilous. He writes, “We live in interwoven networks of terminally casual relationships. We live with the delusion that we know one another, but we really don’t. We call our easygoing, self-protective, and often theologically platitudinous conversations ‘fellowship,’ but they seldom ever reach the threshold of true fellowship. We know cold demographic details about one another (married or single, type of job, number of kids, general location of housing, etc.), but we know little about the struggle of faith that is waged every day behind well-maintained personal boundaries.”
He then goes to Scripture to describe the kind of friendship we need and how to pursue it. He encourages us to ask ourselves, “What kind of friend am I?” It can be tempting when studying a topic like friendship to be discouraged by what we are missing. Roberts effectively turns our attention to what we can do to be a real friend to others, not only to acquire friendships, but also to maintain them.
If you are feeling lonely, or if you have concerns about the current state of your friendships, read this book to help shape your thinking and your pursuit of friendship according to the truths of Scripture.
“In a culture where online communications and communities can be set up in seconds, it is striking that loneliness is still rampant. Even in the church, a place where we might hope for an oasis of love and acceptance, we can find interactions awkward and superficial. It’s for this reason that Vaughan Roberts takes us back to the Bible, and challenges us to consider our need for true friendship. He’s both honest and clear in his approach as he shows us that knowing and being known by God is the hope we need to begin to deal with the sickness of our ‘self–love’ society.”
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