The Very Rev Albert Bogle relects on the lessons of the ‘Cell Church Movement’.

FRIENDSHIP is at the heart of the Gospel and indeed friendship with God and our neighbour is the sole purpose of the story of salvation.

So what has happened that we seem to have lost the art of maintaining and sustaining friendships in our congregations? I remember as divinity students we were told by a well meaning professor not to make deep friendships within the congregation.

Now I know he was trying to save us from the hurt and misunderstanding that can often accompany friendships that go wrong. But he was wrong. There is always a cost to friendship. Our trust and our integrity will no doubt on occasions be compromised, but Jesus is our role model and mentor. He had a diferent view of friendship. He modelled friendship. He invites his followers to become his friends.

When I talk about friendship I don’t mean developing strategies to become a welcoming and friendly congregation, that goes without saying. What I’m talking about is making friends that goes far beyond simply saluting each other on a Sunday morning or a weekday in the town.

What I want us to relect upon in this article is the words of Jesus in the upper room. The words that were spoken around the breaking of bread and the washing of feet. The words that said: “I no longer call you servants but friends”. This conversation is included in the same discourse, where Jesus talks about friends being willing to lay down their lives for each other. In this discourse Jesus is open and willing to share and make known with his companions everything he had heard from God his Father. Such depth of sharing puts a whole new meaning on the phrase from the collect for purity “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid”. Now in Christ God is opening up the secrets of the ages. Out of sharing grace and benevolence God is admitting to his circle of friendship the followers of Jesus. We now stand with Abraham as friends of God. The story of salvation rings down through the ages. We now who call ourselves Christians are committed to a new understanding of friendship.

The thing is it is almost impossible to develop deep, long and lasting friendships with people we only recognise from behind.

The structure and architecture of many of our church buildings are not designed to encourage friendship. If we are going to take friendship seriously we need to develop additional models of worship alongside the current way we do church. This will in almost all cases invite us to re-arrange the architecture. And perhaps also consider what it means to go small in order to go deep.

The Church Without Walls Report quoted research from the German Institute of Church Development highlighting statistics from 1000 growing churches across the globe. These stats show that the multiplication of small groups had a profound efect on developing and deepening relationships within the churches. The small group creates a feeling of belonging to each other and the body of Christ. The report sums this up in the following sentence. “Human nature seems to require diferent dimensions of belonging: the small group for support and intimacy, the medium sized group to share in tasks and the larger gatherings for inspiration and celebration.”

The typical Church of Scotland model has focused on the congregation as the basic unit to the exclusion of the cell and the celebration. As we begin to re-imagine church we need to learn the lessons of the Cell Church Movement. They have shown that to begin small and go deep with a few people, in time the gospel spreads and there is a multiplication of groups. In many ways it is following Jesus’ own pattern of investing in twelve people. What would happen if we started to encourage small groups to be established in our congregations or perhaps our communities? The research shows that they may well multiply.

Now it also appears that there is a shortage of opportunities to celebrate in larger numbers.

The stats show that the multiplication of small groups have a profound efect on developing and deepening relationships within churches.

Heart and Soul is the only annual outlet for the Church of Scotland to share in worship and celebration. Perhaps we need to re-invent presbyteries to become communities of worshipping people rather than ‘a collection of administrative units for servicing the system of committees and regulations.’

So what I’m suggesting is in order to deepen friendships within the Church locally we require our Kirk Sessions to consider how the development of cell congregation and local celebration might be applied to the life of the local church.

The Very Rev Albert Bogle is a Pioneer Minister of Sanctuary First Church Online at www.sanctuaryirst.org.uk