How Many "Friends" Do You Have?

Since you are almost certainly reading this on a computer, you are probably somewhat familiar with Facebook; if you aren’t here’s a link to my page: http://www.facebook.com/8stringster?ref=profile#/?ref=home. Anyway, everyone who is linked to your Facebook page is known as a “friend,” and they can all see whatever you write about or any pictures you might post, as well as other people’s comments on your comments. If you want to invite someone to link to your Facebook page, you “friend” them (yes, “friend” is now a verb), and that person decides whether or not they want to be your Facebook friend. In a lot of ways it’s like being in Junior High all over again, only without the acne.
Well, here’s a shocker: it turns out that not of all your Facebook friends are real friends. This is based on the scientific observation, first made nearly 20 years ago by anthropologist Robin Dunbar, that the human brain can handle no more than 150 friends, that is, “relationships in which a person knows how each friend relates to every other friend. They are people you care about and contact at least once a year.” You can read more about it in a short article from The Times of London: http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6999879.ece Dunbar began this work before the rise of social networking sites like Facebook, but he has recently extended his research to discover if the new technology has enabled us to transcend this barrier. Turns out that it hasn’t: “The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world,” said Dunbar. Whether online or face-to-face, we tend to self-organize into groups of about 150 because “social cohesion tends to deteriorate as groups become larger.”
So it’s really no surprise that so many churches have about 150 members, and it shouldn’t surprise us that even in a growing area it’s very difficult to grow beyond 150, unless we’re willing to give ups something. We like knowing everyone we go to church with, and if the church gets too large, we start complaining that it doesn’t feel like our church anymore. As someone remarked, when people say, “this is a friendly church,” what they often mean is, “all my friends are here.”
The challenge for us as churches is to move beyond the friendship circle, not necessarily to make new friends if your quota is already full, but to make disciples. That means thinking of people in a whole new way: not first of all as my friends, but as friends of Jesus. That, it seems, is what Jesus wants: “No one has greater love than this,” he says, “to lay down one's life for one's friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” (John 15:13-15)
It’s a good thing Jesus isn’t limited by the 150-friend rule, isn’t it?