How do we decide who is a friend or can be a new friend? It involves much more than an intellectual analysis of suitability. 

Sometimes having a common background makes it easier, however building a friendship takes place with a much more subtle and hard to describe process. In part, it is a connection between people at both a head and heart level. Signs of friendship include personal warmth, a shared commitment and an investment in companionship and growth.

Jesus describes, in John 15: 12-17, to his followers as they live out the command to love, as friends, no longer servants. His friends know (heart and head) what the Master is doing. In this process of friendship, fruit is produced and the direction of the command to his friends to love one another.  

There are many passages in the New Testament that call us as the people (friends) of Jesus into relationships of compassionate, renewing and forgiving love. 

The Ecumenical journey which had it formal beginnings in the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh has at its heart a desire that churches and Christian communities would experience unity through appreciating and valuing difference and experience warm unity in the common naming of Jesus Christ as God. 

The work of the Ecumenical movement includes deepening our understanding of each other, doing as much as we can together and taking common action could be described as evidence of the ‘friends of Jesus’ at work! 

At the beginning of September, the World Council of Churches (WCC) General Assembly will gather and explore the theme ‘Christ's love moves the world to reconciliation and unity’. It is a warm and hopeful theme. It invites us all into a deeper experience of relationship. 

This is something we pray for and that in our being together in the NCCA that we continue to grow together as the friends of Jesus – that the world, through our unity might believe.

There is a rich reservoir of resources prepared for the WCC Assembly. I encourage you to check them out on the WCC website Assembly resource page 

Rev. John Gilmore

NCCA President