Have We Forgotten About Friendship?
THE SHOCK ABSORBER
There's a moment that happens in churches, every single week. Someone walks through the door. They're warmly greeted. They sit in a service, sing the songs, hear the sermon, shake some hands. And then they drive home alone and think: I don't know if I actually belong there.
It's not that the church was unfriendly. It's not that nobody spoke to them. It's that something was missing, a layer of relationship that sits somewhere between "fellow Sunday morning acquaintance" and "person I call when my life falls apart."
Bonhoeffer and the Ecclesiology of Friendship
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is best known for Life Together, his meditation on Christian community written in 1938.
What makes Bonhoeffer's extensive contribution to Christian thought somewhat unique is that he see friendship as an ecclesial category. That means he treats friendship as a legitimate lens through which to understand what the church actually is, not just a nice add-on to the real ecclesiology.
This matters more than it might first appear. The New Testament doesn't use the word "friendship" as a primary metaphor for the church. Paul reaches for family language, brothers and sisters. He uses body language, house language. These are rich, theologically loaded metaphors that tell us something true about what it means to be the people of God together.
Jesus, speaking to his disciples in John 15, says: "No longer do I call you servants... I have called you friends."
The Three, The Twelve, The Seventy-Two, The One-Twenty
Here's where Bonhoeffer's framework gets genuinely useful those of us in church. He takes Jesus' own relational pattern as a model, not prescriptively, but descriptively, and uses it to map out what healthy community actually looks like.
Jesus had his three: Peter, James and John. These were the disciples present at the Transfiguration, in the Garden of Gethsemane, at the most intimate and searing moments of his ministry. They were his closest friends.
Around them were the twelve, the disciples who travelled with him through his entire public ministry. A small, committed community of people who knew each other deeply.
Then there were the seventy-two, whom Jesus sent out in pairs in Luke 10, a medium-sized missional group, moving together, sharing purpose, going two by two into the towns ahead of him.
And beyond them, approximately 120 followers are gathered in Jerusalem near the end of Jesus' ministry — the larger community that would become the first church at Pentecost.
Bonhoeffer sees in this pattern a framework for friendship that is expansive rather than cliquey. You don't have to choose between intimacy with a few and connection with many. The circles can co-exist.
The Layer Most Churches Have Lost
Here's the diagnosis that's worth sitting with if you lead a church. Most Western churches are reasonably good at two of these four circles.
They're good at the 120, the gathered Sunday community where people can experience the breadth of the body of Christ, hear the Word preached, worship together. They're reasonably good at the 12, the small group, the Bible study, the missional community of 10 to 15 people who know each other's names and a bit of each other's stories.
Some people are fortunate enough to have the three: two or three friends with whom they're genuinely open, vulnerable, accountable and known.
But the 72? That medium-sized group of 50 to 70 people who share a common identity, a common purpose, and enough relational history to speak into each other's lives with real weight? In most Western churches, that layer has quietly disappeared.
And its absence is felt, even if people can't name what's missing. It's felt as a kind of low-grade loneliness. A sense of being part of something without quite belonging to it. Of knowing faces without knowing people.
The 150 number
Robin Dunbar is a British anthropologist whose research into the cognitive limits of human social relationships has become one of the most cited ideas in pop sociology. The Dunbar Number — roughly 150 — represents the upper limit of stable social relationships the human brain can maintain at once.
But Dunbar doesn't just give us the 150. He gives us layers, which he calls the "friendship onion": roughly 5 people in your support clique, 15 in your sympathy group, 50 in your barbecue group, and 150 in your active network.
The overlap with Bonhoeffer's circles is striking. And it's not accidental.
If Dunbar is right that there are biological limits to human relationship, that our brains are wired for concentric circles of decreasing intimacy and increasing size, then Bonhoeffer isn't just drawing on a beautiful reading of the Gospels. He's describing something true about what it means to be human.
Theologians would say this makes sense: we are body-soul composites. What is true biologically and what is true theologically aren't in competition. They're describing the same reality from different angles. And the fact that a sociologist and a German theologian arrived at similar maps of human relationship — one from evolutionary biology, one from the life of Jesus — is worth paying attention to.
The Cultural Problem
It's worth asking why this particular layer — the 72, the medium-sized missional community — has been so hard to sustain in Western churches. The answer isn't simply that church leaders haven't been thoughtful enough. It runs deeper than that.
The argument is that Anglo Western culture was the first to experience the full force of the Industrial Revolution, which didn't just change how people worked. It fundamentally restructured how people related. Pre-industrial life was village life. Extended family meant something. You knew your neighbours because your livelihood depended on them. Community wasn't an aspiration, it was a survival strategy.
The Industrial Revolution moved people off the land and into cities, into factories, into machine-mediated work. It broke apart extended families. It created the conditions for radical individualism. British colonialism, exported that individualism to the other side of the world, often stripping people of even the attenuated family connections they had left.
This is why, the theory goes, Anglo Western Christians often experience the family metaphor for church as more distant than it sounds. When Paul says "brothers and sisters," he's reaching for the most intimate, obligation-laden language in the Greco-Roman world. In that cultural context, your sibling had a greater claim on your calendar and resources than your spouse. The language was confronting in its closeness.
Hellerman's book When the Church Was a Family makes this a compelling case. The early church's use of brother-sister language wasn't soft and sentimental. It was a radical claim about obligation, loyalty and belonging.
But in 21st century Western culture, where many people have distant or difficult relationships with their siblings, the family metaphor can slide in the opposite direction. It gives people an excuse not to be close.
Friendship language, by contrast, is confronting in a different way. It implies choice. It implies enjoyment. It implies real relationship, not just nominal kinship. And for a generation shaped more by Friends and How I Met Your Mother than by extended family gatherings, friendship language may actually carry more of the weight Paul intended than family language does.
Teenagers on E-Bikes Are Ahead of the Church
Here's an unexpected data point. For several years, cultural commentators were noting the disappearance of distinctive youth subculture. Young people were online, atomised, relating through screens to an infinite audience of strangers. The pack was gone.
Suddenly, at least in cities like Sydney, teenagers are outside again, riding in groups of 50 on e-bikes, spontaneously forming medium-sized communities of shared activity, identity and purpose. An American influencer visited Sydney recently and 50 kids got on e-bikes and rode with him across the Harbour Bridge. The pack is back.
Teenagers, it turns out, intuitively understand Bonhoeffer's circles. They have their three close mates. They have their small group. And they crave the 72, the medium-sized community of shared culture, shared experience, shared belonging. They know how to do this.
Adults have largely forgotten it though. Somewhere between finishing school and navigating career and family, the medium-sized friendship group gets quietly dropped. It feels like a drain. Or a threat. Or just logistically impossible.
But it doesn't have to be. And churches are uniquely positioned to recover it.
A Challenge Worth Taking Seriously
Most people in your church already have a three, a twelve and a 120. What's missing is the language of friendship across all of those circles — and the intentionality to cultivate the layer in the middle.
So here's the question to sit with: what would change about the way you show up at church this weekend if you walked in thinking of the people there not just as fellow congregation members, or even as brothers and sisters in Christ, but as friends?
What would change about your expectations of them? Your conversations with them? Your willingness to be known by them and to know them?
Bonhoeffer spent his final years, under the shadow of execution, writing letters to his friends about the nature of friendship. He wasn't doing theology for its own sake. He was insisting, against the most brutal evidence imaginable, that the quality of our relationships with one another matters — that it is, in fact, an ecclesial matter. A church matter.
The church has an opportunity to be the place in a fragmented, individualistic, screen-mediated world where people find all four circles. Where the three is cultivated, the twelve is nourished, the 72 is recovered, and the 120 is held together by something deeper than pleasant familiarity.
Listen to the full conversation on the Shock Absorber podcast. For more on theology, strategy, and practice in ministry, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or email joel@shockabsorber.com.
Discussed on this episode:
The Lesser of Two Weevils - Master and Commander
When Church Was a Family, by Joesph Hellerman
Dunbar's Number
Soul Revival Church is an Anglican church in the Sutherland Shire and Ryde.