Dear Substack Community: Today’s Substack will look really different and hopefully feel different on screen. I return, again, to capture my free write and hit publish. Today’s Saturday post is actually being written on Friday afternoon, and I will schedule this for Saturday morning at 9am ET. So, the content will be a fresh free write, but because I’ve got really important meetings this weekend with the community church I pastor, I want to make sure my Saturday post gets written and I want to give everything to the visioning meetings we are having this weekend. Stan Mitchell is on his way to Alfred to help us understand what it might mean to take the church to the future. Whose future? What future?
Years ago, when I was in seminary, my teacher, Dr. Nancy Elizabeth Bedford taught me about friendship. It’s a theological concept that I have sought to embody in becoming a theologian and pastor. I talk with everyone. I explore conversations with those who find themselves in the center of power and those who find themselves at the edges of the edges of power. I am drawn to the bleeding peripheries of empire, and friendship is how I navigate the world.
With Stan Mitchell coming to help us, it is another example of how a theology of friendship has shaped my life and work. I want to write on friendship today and try to expand our vision for relationships at the end of empire.
Thank you for being here! Here’s to the quiet revolution of togetherness!
Day 31: The Power of Friendship
Jesus called his disciples friends. He chose love over hierarchy. How might your friendships be a source of transformation?
🌿 Saturday Substack | Friendship as Sacred Resistance
The Theology of Friendship: Generative Relationality in a Fractured World
This week I’ve been thinking about friendship—not just as comfort or companionship, but as call. Every call has a practice, or should! So, I am thinking about friendship not only as call, but also as a theological practice—as a counter-narrative to the individualism that saturates so much of modern life.
Friendship has saved me over and over, again.
In a world that teaches us to compete, isolate, and perform, friendship invites us to share, rest, and become.
It was Dr. Nikki Young who really showed me the ethics of friendship through collaboration. I recall many times writing in Denver on a shared Google doc working on women of color ethics. Nikki modeled to me how to share power and how to love the life of the mind. Nikki continues to teach me about friendship as part of our character of becoming.
The practice of friendship is often tied to one’s orientation to life and the future. Do we yearn for a practice of togetherness, or do we quietly ignore our longing for true belonging? What kind of friends do we have? Who are the people we call friends?
I have always had this experience that because I write about my life so publicly that people feel like they know me. I nurture a kind of intimacy through writing, through the stories I share. When I am in person with people giving talks, I lean into being present with people to offer a fold of intimacy in a world that prefers isolation and fragmentation.
This practice of mine—this unveiling my imperfections, how conscripted I am to supremacy culture—is part of how I make theory through auto-ethnographic constructions of a theory-praxis. I come to this work from reading Gloria Anzaldúa for the past 25 years. I am learning that words build worlds, and what kind of world do we want to build together through friendship?
I remember Nikki telling me that my partner at the time was oriented to whiteness. Up til that point, I had been reading a lot of work written by women of color, and this was an opportunity for me to begin to read about whiteness and the function of the logic of white supremacy and other forms of supremacy culture. This journey into logics of whiteness, settler-colonialism, and the theologies of that time and the critiques of that theology is the work that I do and has been what has shaped me over the last 25 years. I became a theologian when I knew I had to continue to study the questions I had, and I continue to become a theologian as I listen to the stories of the underside of history at the edges of the bleeding periphery of empire—in hyper colonized sites of empire, and at dinner tables around Western New York.
During a visit to Chicago before the pandemic, I sat down for coffee with my teacher, Dr. Nancy Elizabeth Bedford, and we talked about whether I could ever be partnered with a white person whose orientation is whiteness. This question and our friendship has been ever guiding me into the waters of a decolonial imagination and how one might free oneself from the trappings of the logics of white Christian supremacy. I remain grateful for Nancy and our lo cotidiano that we share with one another.
Lo cotidiano is a phrase in Spanish that translates to the everydayness, and Latino theologies and many other theologies of culture are framed by lo cotidiano. My own work is a kind of lo cotidiano in the pace of poco a poco.
Time is what nurtures friendship. I learn each day where the edges of people are and what they trust and don’t trust. Folks here fear open conflict and are tied to perfectionism. I try to remind people that life is messy; humans are messy. Life as a democratic project is not neat and tidy, and keeping things neat and tidy and in high order is a larger symptom of white Christian supremacy. Time is not linear; time is becoming. Let your relationships take the evolution they need to take, so that you can begin to nurture a network of trust. Friendships don’t last without the attention to Networks of Trust. People are uncomfortable when I tell the painful truth about how transactional we are with each other. People don’t like to feel uncomfortable, and I get it! When I walk into a room full of white folks, I am often uncomfortable, because I know there are expectations of my behavior. The academy is like this; the business world is like this; churches are often like this, and the family is often like this. When we lean into time and the connective work of nurturing Networks of Trust, we learn to have a practice with one another. One of the things that I think we have abandoned in our efforts to return to life together is a shared practice. As we leave the Information Age and step into the Age of Imagination and embrace the wisdom economy, let us take the time to nurture real friendship, which means telling the painful truth of logics that undergird our shared reality and refusing to let the weaponization of kindness stop you.
🔍 Theological Frame: Dr. Nancy Elizabeth Bedford
Dr. Nancy Elizabeth Bedford writes about amistad (friendship) as a vital theological category, one that refuses hierarchy and embraces mutual becoming. Friendship, for her, is not sentimentality—it’s a praxis of equity, a way of reimagining community through reciprocity, vulnerability, and shared power. This is what frames my ecclesiology or theology of the church. Friendship, as a practice for mutual becoming, is also the pulse of the local church. So, how might friendship reframe our church practices in generative ways?
In her liberative theological work, Bedford argues that friendship is a key site of theological imagination:
It resists domination by flattening hierarchies.
It offers an alternative to transactional relationships.
It makes space for mystery, patience, and transformation over time.
It is deeply generative—it gives birth to new solidarities, new insights, new selves.
As she writes, “God’s preferential option for the poor is lived out in friendships that cross boundaries and call us into accountability.”
🌱 Generative Relationality (A Theo-Poetic Response to Bedford)
I’ve experienced this in my own life—especially in friendships that defy easy categories.
Friendships where theology is woven into late-night texts and shared meals.
Where care isn’t earned, but given freely.
Where difference isn’t erased, but held with curiosity and grace.
Generative relationality is not about agreement.
It’s about becoming more ourselves in relationship.
It’s about showing up even when the world is burning.
It’s about allowing love to be messy, unfinished, and real.
Friendship is found in the in-between spaces where cracks appear and fugitive hopes are imagined.
✨An Invitation / Practice
So this weekend, I’m asking:
What friendships have shaped your becoming?
Where are you being invited into deeper reciprocity?
How might you embody generative relationality—not just in friendship, but in community, in movement, in faith?
Let’s honor the friendships that have made us, challenged us, and softened us.
Let’s make space for the holy practice of walking each other home.
The Closing Line:
May we never underestimate the sacred power of a friend who sees us and still stays.
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