November (Web-only) 2003

ARTICLE TOOLS

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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 ...