Friendship, More Important Than You Imagine

Tomorrow is friend day at church! I hope you’ve been prayerfully considering who to invite to church. If you haven’t asked anyone yet, there is still time!
 
Recently, I audited the messages I’ve preached since we started Arborway a little over seven years ago. I have preached about 350 sermons equaling over 200 hours of content. In all those sermons, I have preached several times on romantic and marriage relationships, once on relationships with our co-workers, a few times on familial relationships, several times on church community, and of course, I speak every Sunday about our relationship with God. Plus, we just finished a series about loving our next-door neighbors! Yet, there was one relationship type with a major gap: Friendship. So, in our ramp-up to Thanksgiving, tomorrow we are starting a four-part series called “Friendsgiving."
 
If you are unfamiliar, a “Friendsgiving,” is like Thanksgiving, except rather than having it with family, it’s mostly friends. For those of us who call Boston home and are far from family, Friendsgiving has been an emotional lifesaver. Because of that, it has become an annual tradition for many. In fact, some people celebrate both Thanksgiving with family and Friendsgiving with friends every year.
 
You see, if you’ve lived in this town for long enough, Boston can be a really lonely place. Yesterday I met a man on the street from Philadelphia who was truly distraught over how lonely Boston can be. It really wears you down over time. Some of us (I say "Us," because I'm right there with you) have all but given up on real friendship in Boston.
 
I hope this new series will help us slow down the frenetic nature of life in the city, and be reminded of the value of friendship again. But I don’t want it to end for us in a value assessment. I'm going to challenge us to either continue to pursue friendship or learn to pursue friendship again. It’s more essential than you might imagine.
 
So I hope you will join us tomorrow as we discover the foundation of friendship. I can’t wait to worship with you, and I can’t wait to meet your friends!