Related articles and links |  1 of 3

Richard Lamb is the author of The Pursuit of God in the Company of Friends. He is a long-time InterVarsity Christian Fellowship staff member and has served at Stanford, U. C. Santa Cruz, Harvard, Boston University, Boston College and Brandeis. Lamb now supervises their ministry in the western United States

One of the things that you establish in this book is that you were not a natural people person. Doing something in the company of friends was really more of a learned behavior than a natural behavior for you.

In fact, I was trained as a scientist in college. I would have to say somebody else might have called me a nerd back then. I became involved in a Christian fellowship in college and that became a very vital shaping experience.

I would come to the InterVarsity Fellowship meetings on my own and leave on my own, and I was both committed but also detached.

I want to get to the very thesis that you're establishing. How would you describe the basic point of this book?

Well, these two things are attractive to us: the pursuit of God and the company of friends. They're not alone. These things have an interplay with one another. The one reinforces the other and vice versa. I think if you were to query people about what the pursuit of God involves, you might come up with fairly individualistic answers like deepening in prayer, growing in my relationship with God, spending more time reading the scriptures.

On the one hand, community is a very attractive notion. Friendship is a very attractive notion. But I think even in churches we can often find that we don't have language to talk about things that are closest to our hearts in our relationship with God. And so I'm trying to connect those two very attractive concepts together in a single process that I think is the process Jesus used with his disciples.

Community is a buzz word. Everybody is talking about community. What essentially are people missing when they talk about community in the Christian community today?

I'm not sure if there's one thing. But part of the answer involves understanding what I think are three essential and kind of irreducible components of community. Community involves a move outward, a move inward, and a relational glue that keeps us together. I call the move outward partnership in mission; the move inward is accountability, depth of relationship; and the glue, the relational glue is friendship.

This book is a series of stories about the painful experiences you've had in learning these lessons. And one of them has to do with starting a church in Cambridge. Tell us a little bit about the Cambridge church, how it represents so many of the principles you're talking about here, and how it became a place where you could be shaped.

I'm in touch with a lot of people who are InterVarsity alumni. And we had a sense that there would be a place for a new church to emerge that would have a kind of a charismatic focus, but not a kind of high Pentecostalism, if that makes sense, a kind of an academic Vineyard.

We gathered together, and our belief was there's a lot of firepower here. We're serious Christians, we're eager, ready to rock and roll, planting a new church. Bur our team had the hardest time getting off the ground. There was conflict and judgment and relational tension. And at one point, one of the key people in the group said, we're hoping that this church will attract hundreds, but our ability to be a small group that lives out what we believe is going to be essential to our ability to have anything to offer to dozens, let alone hundreds.

next page... |  1 of 3

November (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47