No one teaches us how to make friends.I’ve been saying that for a while, and it was a recurring theme during our Friendship Lab for Churches launch event (<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.friendshiplab.org/blog/watch-the-launch-of-friendship-lab-for-churches/">watch the full launch replay</a>), broadcast live from The Old Chapel. Hundreds of leaders from a dozen denominations across the UK, US, Australia, Canada and Singapore joined us live and via replay. Here are six ideas from the night with some practical steps you can try in your church this month. If you want to know how to build community in your church, or how to help adults make friends at church, start here.<blockquote>Quick Summary:To strengthen belonging and community in your church, teach friendship as a skill instead of expecting it to happen on its own. Name the barriers your people face, train them to start conversations and make invitations, give small groups a shared mission, and offer a structured friendship course such as Friendship Lab for Churches. Belonging grows when people form real friendships, not just attend the same services.</blockquote><h2 id="76866784-ed8a-46fd-97b6-87f4a9db03b3" data-toc-id="76866784-ed8a-46fd-97b6-87f4a9db03b3" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">1. Name the Friendship Barriers For Your People</h2>When we asked what stops adults forming close friendships in church, answers came flooding into the chat: busyness, tiredness, a lack of trust, fear of being judged, fear of rejection, and more. My co-host Lois Fulton shared the difficulties of making friends for those who have children with special needs. “My five year old son is non-verbal but incredibly active, and he loves to run. If somebody wants to make friends with me, they have to come to my house, or put their running shoes on and talk while I’m chasing my kid!”This is a tremendous teaching opportunity just waiting for a sermon series.About <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.barna.com/research/mettes-lonely-americans/">one in five people</a> in church are regularly lonely, and few have been asked why. While we’ve done a pretty good job of teaching people how to date well, build families, and serve others, few people surveyed can remember hearing teaching on friendship. Loneliness in church is more common than most leaders expect, but friendship is a skill we can teach. If you need to make the case to your leadership team, here are <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.friendshiplab.org/blog/why-your-church-should-prioritise-friendship/">seven research-backed reasons</a> your church should prioritise adult friendship, not just fellowship.Try this:<ul><li>Ask your congregation or small group members to name their biggest barrier to friendship. You’ll be surprised at what you hear.</li><li>Turn the recurring themes into a bible study on friendship or a teaching series. It will resonate both with your people and visitors you welcome from the community.</li></ul><h2 id="ae214957-e25d-4029-b11b-57c1cbe7c165" data-toc-id="ae214957-e25d-4029-b11b-57c1cbe7c165" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">2. Stop Expecting Friendship to ‘Just Happen’: Teach Friendship Skills</h2>When his senior pastor approached him about running Friendship Lab in their 3000-member church, Grant Sylvester of Calgary’s First Alliance Church was sceptical. “I thought, a course on how to make a friend?” he confessed during our launch. “But 15 minutes into the material, I was sold.” Another leader expressed a similar sentiment to me. Why is it that we understand the need to run training on marriage and parenting skills but not on friendship?Because we believe the myth that friendship should happen ‘organically’.While this may have happened in childhood, once we leave the built-in friendship structures of school, university and the family home, we have to be intentional about friend-making. That is why making friends as an adult takes skill, not luck.The downside of the ‘friendship should just happen’ myth is that when it doesn’t happen, people can feel defective. I’ve had people tell me they’re obviously ‘no good’ at friendship or are somehow unworthy because it hasn’t happened for them. And so they withdraw.By teaching people how to initiate contact, make invitations, and take a genuine interest in others, we can empower people to form friendships. Beautiful things happen when we do.Stephanie and Jolene met through Friendship Lab. A coffee that began as a homework exercise became a close friendship, and now they run the course together. Watch their story:<div class="iframe-wrapper" style="display: flex; justify-content: flex-start;"><iframe src="https://iframe.mediadelivery.net/embed/431082/21333d7b-52f9-4e8f-834e-fc05a9094bf1?autoplay=false" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true" style="max-width: 100%; text-align: left;"></iframe></div>Try this:<ul><li>Challenge your people to initiate one invitation this month, such as a coffee meet-up, a walk or a meal. Share stories of people who made that first move.</li><li>Share the Confident Invitations approach we use in the Friendship Lab Course: a) Suggest a specific activity and date (“How about a walk on Saturday?”), b) Express a desire to see the person (“I’d really love to see you.”), c) Invite negotiation in case they can’t make the event or time (“If that doesn’t work, let me know what does.”)</li></ul><h2 id="8a4110d6-e414-4283-85d6-f846ae5bf3ef" data-toc-id="8a4110d6-e414-4283-85d6-f846ae5bf3ef" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">3. Train Your Church in ‘Enlightened Small Talk’ to Help Newcomers Connect</h2>How many times have you left a work event or party and realised that no one asked you a single question? Probably more times than you’d like to remember. When that experience happens on a Sunday morning we can feel even more ignored.Small talk is the first step in making friends as an adult, and it helps us find shared interests and common ground.Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Small talk only becomes an enemy of intimacy when we ask the same lazy questions week after week. By training our people in ‘enlightened small talk’ – asking questions that tap into emotion, meaning and personality rather than bare facts – we’ll see deeper connections form faster.Try this:<ul><li>Teach your people these easy tweaks to typical small talk questions. Instead of “What do you do?” ask “What’s exciting you at the moment?” Instead of “How was your week?” ask “What was the highlight of your week?” Each moves a conversation safely into more emotive, personal territory.</li><li>Use our curated Conversation Cards at your next small group or lunch. You can download them inside our free preview session.</li></ul><h2 id="d3dda600-ae0d-41a6-bb18-e1f50db10838" data-toc-id="d3dda600-ae0d-41a6-bb18-e1f50db10838" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">4. Strengthen Community in Church Through Shared Life and Adventure</h2>We were treated to some brilliant ideas during our launch night. Author and poet Phil Knox reminded us of the radical nature of Jesus calling his followers ‘friends’. “There’s no other record of any rabbi in the first century calling their disciples friends,” he noted. This relational basis of Christianity is why many people find faith through a friend. “The gospel spreads at the speed of relationship,” he said, adding:While people visit churches for many reasons, they stay for one: relationship.Missiologist Alan Hirsch picked up on what this means for a church’s mission. “Shared life comes first,” he told us, “and mission flows out of it.” The incarnation is the model. “Jesus moves into the neighbourhood and he eats, walks, listens, touches, weeps, celebrates, stays,” Alan said. We live in a culture starved of this kind of presence. “Our technologies extend our reach across the globe, but they stunt our capacity to be present.”To this radical identity and shared life, Alan encouraged us to add what he called ‘communitas’ – a bond forged through “adventure, risk, challenge, ordeal, disruption.” Like a football team that works together to achieve goals, communitas is developed between church members when we engage in meaningful, missional ventures.Try this:<ul><li>Give your small group a shared mission project for a month, such as a community clean-up, a street meal or a food bank shift.</li><li>Plan a day when your church simply “stays” in a neighbourhood, with no agenda except to be present for the community, befriending, listening, serving, praying.</li><li>Build friendship skills into your outreach and mission teams.</li></ul><h2 id="09fefab7-651f-408e-81ac-70a17fa9400f" data-toc-id="09fefab7-651f-408e-81ac-70a17fa9400f" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">5. Be Confident in What Your Church Offers: Belonging</h2>Mark Sayers, leader of Red Church in Melbourne, unpacked the causes of our friendship recession. “We’ve been encouraged to pursue the ideology of individualism, placing freedom and autonomy above deep connection,” he told us. Social media connects us “at a thin and weak level, and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.friendshiplab.org/blog/an-ai-friend-wont-cure-your-loneliness">chatbots </a>will only make this worse.” But the simple activities of your church provide opportunities for people to connect. “The chat after church, the Wednesday night discipleship dinner – this stuff is now valuable because it’s becoming so scarce for so many people.”Belonging grows through close friendships, and your church already runs the gatherings where they start.It reminds me of the feedback we’ve heard from churches running Friendship Lab recently. “We had several people with no church background join the course,” one leader told me. “One man said it was the first time he’d been invited into someone’s home in a decade. Another woman signed up for a Bible study after doing Friendship Lab. Others who’d been on the fringes of church got more fully involved.”We’re hearing this happen time and again. After his first session, one person approached the leader. “I’ve done lots of courses,” he said, “but there’s something different about this one. There’s a lot of love in the air.” That group enjoyed the community they experienced during Friendship Lab so much, they didn’t want to stop meeting when it ended. So they stayed on to do the Alpha Course and explore Christian faith.Try this:<ul><li>Invite newcomers, neighbours and other contacts to do a course like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.friendshiplab.org/churches">Friendship Lab</a>. People are waiting for a no-pressure opportunity to connect.</li><li>Have a next-step plan ready for Alpha, Christianity Explored or similar, for those interested in exploring further.</li></ul><div style="display: flex;"><a href="https://www.friendshiplab.org/churches" target="_blank"><img src="https://ezycourse.b-cdn.net/3966/cmw2qmesgftg101xvcymzc9yx.jpg" alt="image" style="position: relative; height: auto; cursor: pointer; margin: 0px auto;"></a></div><h2 id="ace0764d-666e-41e8-b14f-5abecf6aaf83" data-toc-id="ace0764d-666e-41e8-b14f-5abecf6aaf83" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">6. Try Some Friendship Experiments</h2>On the night, singer-songwriter Andy Flannagan performed 1000m Wide, a song written for us. It describes a life of huge reach and no depth, then ends with a call to choose a few real friends over an anonymous social media crowd. How do we begin to do that?Grant Sylvester’s advice was simple: try what we’ve been talking about. “Call it an experiment, call it whatever you need to call it, but give it an opportunity.” Speaking of his experience running Friendship Lab for Churches, he said, “I’d encourage every church leader to at least try running it once. My sense is they’ll want to use it again and again.”Years in the making, we’re excited about <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.friendshiplab.org/churches/">Friendship Lab for Churches</a>, our new six session small group course for developing friendship and belonging, comprising 17 short videos, a participant workbook, leader’s guide, and customisable promotional assets.Imagine what a difference we could make in a lonely world by empowering our people and our community to try a few friendship experimentsPick one experiment from this list and try it this week, and strengthen community in your church. When you want something more structured, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://www.friendshiplab.org/churches">watch Session 1</a> of Friendship Lab for Churches free.<hr><h2 id="560ee1d3-b4e8-42ae-b655-19fc6fe36920" data-toc-id="560ee1d3-b4e8-42ae-b655-19fc6fe36920" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">Friendship in Church: Quick Answers</h2><h3 id="a66f8af9-2b98-4552-8c83-7d3f1cd92523" data-toc-id="a66f8af9-2b98-4552-8c83-7d3f1cd92523" style="text-align: left; font-size: 20px; line-height: 1.2;">How do adults make friends at church?</h3>Adults make friends at church when someone makes the first specific invitation and the church gives them regular time together. A walk on Saturday morning, a small group or a shared project turns acquaintances into friends.<h3 id="ad4478a6-a47f-4fb1-a93a-2e04ca78bb9e" data-toc-id="ad4478a6-a47f-4fb1-a93a-2e04ca78bb9e" style="text-align: left; font-size: 20px; line-height: 1.2;">Why is making friends so difficult in church?</h3>Church members most often name busyness, tiredness, a lack of trust, and fear of being judged or rejected. Many also assume friendship should happen naturally, so they blame themselves when it doesn't.<h3 id="a6fa45c5-4d2d-4dd8-b62c-6818192c09dc" data-toc-id="a6fa45c5-4d2d-4dd8-b62c-6818192c09dc" style="text-align: left; font-size: 20px; line-height: 1.2;">How can a church help people build deeper friendships?</h3>Teach friendship skills such as inviting, asking better questions and showing genuine interest, then give people regular chances to practise them. A six-session course like Friendship Lab for Churches does this in a small group.

One in five people in church are regularly lonely, yet few have been taught how to make friends. Discover six practical ways to build belonging and help adult friendships flourish in your church.

How to Build Belonging and Adult Friendships in Your Church: 6 Practical Ways

1. Name the Friendship Barriers For Your People

2. Stop Expecting Friendship to ‘Just Happen’: Teach Friendship Skills

3. Train Your Church in ‘Enlightened Small Talk’ to Help Newcomers Connect

4. Strengthen Community in Church Through Shared Life and Adventure

5. Be Confident in What Your Church Offers: Belonging

Why is making friends so difficult in church?

How can a church help people build deeper friendships?

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How to Build Belonging and Adult Friendships in Your Church: 6 Practical Ways

How to Build Belonging and Adult Friendships in Your Church: 6 Practical Ways

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