Shari Oosting:
When is the word “friendship” not enough to describe a relationship between two people? What happens when ordinary friendships become something deeper, something more sacred, something we might even dare to call holy? In this episode, Victoria Atkinson White shares from her new book, Holy Friendships: Nurturing Relationships That Sustain Pastors and Leaders. Listen in to learn about the nature of these holy friendships, how they're formed, their benefits for Christian leaders, and how these deep and mutual friendships might be a key tool in revitalizing the lives of those who lead. Atkinson White is the managing director of grants at Leadership Education at Duke Divinity School, where she works with Christian leaders representing institutions across the United States.

You are listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Victoria, thank you so much for talking with me today.

Victoria Atkinson White:
Absolutely. I'm excited to be here.

Shari Oosting:
So today we're talking about a topic that I think will sound familiar to most people: we're talking about friendship. But you put an interesting twist on friendship in approaching it through the eyes of holiness. So, Holy Friendships is the name of your book. What are holy friends?

Victoria Atkinson White:
Holy friendships are mutual and sacred relationships deeply formed in God's love. That's my definition that I came up with through interviewing a number of incredible pairs and triads and groups of holy friends over the last five years who were gracious enough to let me listen in on their conversations about how their holy friendships have affected their personal, professional lives, their communities, their churches, their families. And there's a couple of key terms in that definition, mutual and sacred relationships deeply formed in God's love, that should probably be unpacked.

“Sacred” means “set apart.” It is something like the Holy of Holies—it is a different space. They are belonging to God. Sacred. Mutual. Mutual means there is a connection between the two people who are in the friendship that this is something that is different—this is something that is special. Holy friends know that they are holy friends with one another. They talk about it, they acknowledge it. They know that this is a particular friendship that they use to hold each other accountable, to encourage one another, to support one another. It's different from, say, someone that you just see only occasionally, and it's a very casual conversations about the weather, or just easy things about your work, or very casual topics. Holy friends are the types of folks who go into those deep dive conversations with you. You might see them all the time if you're particularly lucky, or they might be the kinds of folks that you connect with only every once in a while, but when you do, it's like you pick up right where you were the last time you were together.

Shari Oosting:
Those are pretty special relationships.

Victoria Atkinson White:
They are.

Shari Oosting:
Can you tease out a little bit more what makes a holy friendship different from regular friendship? You mentioned that it is different—it's not the person you see walking down the sidewalk or casually at work. But, can you talk a little bit more about what makes them so different?

Victoria Atkinson White:
Sure. One of the things that holy friends do is they pay really close attention to who it is we've been, who we are, and who it is we say we want to be, alongside who it is that God is calling us to be. There's a story in the book: I was complaining to a friend that I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I don't know if anybody has ever wondered that—I tend to wonder that every once in a while, and I was complaining about that and said, "I just don't know what I want to be when I grow up!" And he paused, which he is known for doing, and he said, "Okay, let's talk about who you want to be while you're growing up."

And I just thought, "You know, I kind of just wanted to complain and I wanted you to come alongside me and say, 'You know, I don't know what I want to be when I grow up, and let's just go adopt a bunch of dogs and raise them on a farm out in the middle of Colorado and have a great life.'" Instead, this friend challenged me to be the person that I have said I want to be in this life as a follower of Jesus Christ. This friend said, essentially, "How are you going to know what you're going to be? You don't really have control over that in this moment. You are still determining that. However, what you do have control over, Victoria, is who you're going to be. That's something that you can determine right now." That is something that a holy friend does that I would say a casual lunch buddy wouldn't necessarily do for us, because our holy friends are calling us into that person that God is shaping us to be.

Shari Oosting:
Yeah, and it seems like it takes a lot of vulnerability and a lot of trust to have somebody tell you that you're not asking the right question about your life.

Victoria Atkinson White:
It does. It was also kind of rude in the best way. He interrupted a place where I wanted to be frustrated, and he knew that I was better than that in that moment, and so he called me to a better place.

Shari Oosting:
I love that idea, that holy friends can be kind of rude. That's beautiful. [laughs] So, you rely on a few different relationship models that help you shape the way that you're thinking about holy friendship. Can you talk about a few of them and how they kind of led you to land where you did, which I think parses out a little bit more the way that you think about different kinds of friends and different kinds of friendship?

Victoria Atkinson White:
Sure. I was deeply drawn to Robin Dunbar's work and Marc Dunkelman's work. And Marc Dunkelman in The Vanishing Neighbor talks about rings of relationships that we have in society. And when you mesh the two together in kind of a “mosh pot” of circles of relationships, you kind of have those who are closest to you, your kind of one-to-five core people in the center of your life. And then you have a ring that goes outside of that—that might be your family members or your close friends, say like the top five people that you text in your phone. And then outside of that is a circle of people that we would typically call our community, and those would be the person that you always go to to check out your groceries at the grocery store, or the people that you meet up with casually for lunch. That's what Dunkelman calls our community. And then outside of that are the people that you kind of have periphery relationships with.

What Dunkelman says is that that tier that is the community is disappearing within our society and that that is causing a lot of strife within our relationships because it's that tier of relationships there within the community that we simply don't have, but we rely on those for connections. And we don't value those relationships as much as we used to. And especially with COVID and the other pandemics that are affecting our lives, we have allowed our lives to get smaller and smaller. And so that inner circle of ours has gotten tighter. And then the circle right outside of that where we have our closer people has also gotten tighter. And some of that happened because it literally physically had to—we were in the early days of COVID, afraid to physically be with people, and so it was a matter of survival to keep our circles small.

At the same time, the smaller we keep those circles, the more isolated and lonely we feel. And so, one of the things that I've done with those two models of circles is I have reframed them in my own version and instead of having solid circles, like Dunkelman and Dunbar do, my circles are kind of dashed lines. They are porous. Because to me, it's really important that people be able to move in and out of certain circles. So, if in my inner circle are, say, my closest family members and my holy friends, who I see as my chosen family members, then in the circle right outside of that would be those I consider to be good friends, my very close colleagues, the people at church that I feel particularly close to. When something happens in my life in a particular area, there might be someone from one of those outer circles who moves closer to the center for a season.

There's a story in the book about my friend whose mother died, and he and I have always been really, really close, but I haven't experienced the death of a parent. And so, when his mom died, he needed to spend a lot of time with people who had had that experience and who could identify with that and who knew exactly what he was experiencing. And so, I knew that this was a seasonal thing and I just backed up a bit and gave him the space that he needed, said that I would be here and be supportive as we figured out was right for our relationship. And, for about six months, he was particularly close to a number of different people who had experienced what he had. And then as he came to a different stage in his grief, our friendship came back to where it had been. It changed some because he had changed.

Shari Oosting:
So in your third chapter, you use a line that I really love. You say, "Ultimately, holy friends are our story editors." Can you talk more about what you mean by that?

Victoria Atkinson White:
What our holy friends do is they hear the stories that we play in our head over and over again. While they may be true, they don't always need to be interpreted in the same way. As time goes on, those stories can be seen through different lenses of our lives, through different experiences, so that we can learn different things from them. What our holy friends do is they take those recordings and they help us interpret them through the different experiences that we have in our lives. And what that does is it not only frees me up from some of the voices that are in my head in those recordings, it can also bring forgiveness to those whose voices those were in the very beginning. So, our story editors are those who hear those stories and help us re-narrate them in more healthy and proactive ways so that we can grow and move forward.

Shari Oosting:
That's super helpful. I love that idea that it can fuel forgiveness and reinterpretation of our most common storylines. My guess is that a lot of people listening are hearing echoes of other relationships they might have, whether with a therapist or a spiritual director or a social worker. So, can you talk a little bit about what distinguishes—what are holy friendships not? Because I don't think you have those kind of professional relationships in mind. Can you talk about that?

Victoria Atkinson White:
Sure. One of the things that definitely sets holy friendships apart from relationships like your therapist or your coach or your spiritual director, is that in the definition, holy friendships are spiritual and sacred relationships deeply formed in God's love. That “formed” word is important because to me it connects to formation. This is a way that we are being formed in God's love. We are being formed to be the person that God is creating us to be. To me that means that these relationships are two things. One, they're not transactional, and two, they're not hierarchical. If you are paying someone to be in conversation with you, to tell you things, like a therapist or a coach or a spiritual director, even if it's about the most holy, beautiful, intimate topics, that is still a transactional relationship. And so to me, that doesn't leave the space and the vulnerability to be able to be truly authentically mutual in that friendship.

There's also a hierarchy when you are paying someone. There is the person being paid and there is the person who is paying. That's also true in like a mentorship. Now, a lot of folks would argue with me on the mentorship one and say, "Well, don't you think that in a mentorship it could grow to the point of a holy friendship?" Oh, most definitely! However, at the time that most mentorships are created, there is someone that has more power or more knowledge, and it is their job to bestow that, to ingrain that into the person that they are mentoring. At the same time, we need them all. I hope everyone who is listening has a spiritual director, a coach, a therapist, and holy friends because we need them all.

Shari Oosting:
That web of relationships that have different kinds of meaning and purpose—yeah, that's really helpful. So, it strikes me, Victoria, that you talk about vulnerability and trust, friends who are able to be even a little bit rude or help you rewrite your story—and it strikes me that those relationships might be easier with people who feel familiar, who—maybe people who share a socioeconomic place or share a profession. But do you see holy friendships always emerging between people who have a lot in common, or do you also see them emerging between people who are very different from one another?

Victoria Atkinson White:
I see both because it is easier to nurture relationships with people who are the same as us. It's easy to fall into conversations and to patterns of behavior with them. At the same time, it is incredibly important that we nurture relationships with people who are different from us politically, racially, theologically, different kinds of life experiences. Because if we don't, we fall into echo chambers where all we are hearing are the same thoughts that we have and practicing the same beliefs that we have and going to the same stores. And eventually everything starts to look the same, and that's not what the world looks like! That's not what beloved community looks like! That's not what the family of God looks like! And so, I want to encourage folks to nurture relationships with people who look different from you, who sound different, who think different from you because you will all be richer for it.

Shari Oosting:
In the book, you share an interview with people that you call Rose and Carlisle, who are both church planters, but who are quite different from each other. Can you talk a little bit about their story? Because I feel like that really unpacks what you're talking about.

Victoria Atkinson White:
Rose and Carlisle are fantastic! So, one of them is a womanist pastor and the other is the pastor of a LGBTQAI+ church start. And they're about 50 miles apart and they're both in the same denomination and started about the same time. And—they had conversations together in the beginning of their friendship and as they were beginning these churches about the kinds of folks that they wanted to serve. So, in their conversations together, Carlisle—who is white—says to Rose, "I want to start a church that is LGBTQAI+ affirming, and I want it to be a place where folks of all races feel comfortable." And Rose asks her, "Who do you have helping you? How's that going to happen?" And Carlisle says, "Well, it's just me. I'm going to do that." And Rose very assertively and kindly says, "You can't do that. You need to have people who look like the people that you want to invite coming alongside you."

And Carlisle never meant any harm. Carlisle was excited about spreading the love of Jesus and starting this church. And they needed each other to be able to have these hard conversations about what it looks like to try to serve different kinds of people. Holy friends are able to do that with one another in these really tenuous topics—be able to come to one another and say hard things, and it actually strengthens the friendship rather than weakens it.

Shari Oosting:
And would you say that mutuality here—the nature of their friendship being mutual—doesn't necessarily mean that they're equal in every way?

Victoria Atkinson White:
Absolutely. The mutuality there means that they're both committed to the friendship. They are both in this because they love each other and they love God, and they know that the other's vocation contributes to bearing witness to God's reign on earth. And so, they are invested in the other's success and flourishing because they know that it matters. There's a telos to that relationship. And so, the mutuality has nothing to do with equality and so much more about the way that they are committed to one another in the holy friendship.

Shari Oosting:
I think it's safe to say that a lot of people long for these kinds of relationships, but they don't always feel easy or even attainable. So, talk a little bit—I guess we could maybe call this strategy—but what does it take to, one, initiate a holy friendship? What does it take to sustain one? Let's say somebody would say to you, "I've never had a holy friend. I've never had a holy friendship."

Victoria Atkinson White:
There's a couple of different ways I talk about it in the book. Sometimes holy friendships are created through longevity, through the length of a relationship. Sometimes folks have been in a relationship with someone since, say, kindergarten. And so, it's that knowing all of the stories that have happened throughout their lives and they've traveled it together. Sometimes holy friendships are formed out of a crucible event. You went to seminary together and you shaped different parts of your faith at the same time together. Or you went through a tragedy together. Or you were in a pod together during the early days of COVID—some kind of a crucible event.

And then sometimes holy friendships are identified in what Malcolm Gladwell calls a “blink.” There is something that your soul recognizes in the soul of another, and you recognize a kinship and a heart connection, and you simply—both!—you recognize there's a mutual connection there and you see that there is destined to be a holy friendship there—and it's one of those things that's hard to describe, but you know it when you see it. And that's just three ways that I mention in the books. I am certain that there are a number of more ways that you can initiate and nurture holy friendships.

Shari Oosting:
What would you say to people who are like, "Wow, that sounds great. I do not have time."

Victoria Atkinson White:
I would say to them—then, you are neglecting part of your job as a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Because holy friendships are not a luxury. Holy friendships are a necessity for our sustainability and our flourishing. We have to have them enable to do our job well.

Shari Oosting:
I also work with a lot of Christian leaders, and I think loneliness and isolation inhibits people from doing the good work God's called them to do.

Victoria Atkinson White:
It definitely does. In fact, there are studies that say that aside from smoking, social isolation is the biggest threat to our health, which that's really, really scary to me. And so, it's important to me that folks hear—because sometimes I've had folks who say, "I'm an introvert, and Victoria, this whole idea terrifies me," and I get that. I'm not saying that you have to have three, ten , twenty holy friends. If you just have one—some people are a one friend type of person, and they are close to that person and they receive what they need and they give it back to one another, and so it's a very mutual relationship. I don't need for you to have a lot of them. I just want you to have one of them because I truly believe that these relationships are what sustain us.

Shari Oosting:
Yeah, that's a good word for us to end on. Thank you so much for talking to me today, Victoria.

Victoria Atkinson White:
Absolutely. It was a joy.

Shari Oosting:
You've been listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary. Interviews are conducted by me, Shari Oosting. Our editorial and production staff include Nathanael Hood and Byron Walker. Like what you're hearing? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app. And don't forget to leave us a review. Even better, share an episode with a friend. The Distillery is a production of Continuing Education at Princeton Theological Seminary. Until next time, thanks for listening.