I can tell you everything. No one understands me like you.
I don’t know what I would do without you.
I’m so glad we struggle with the same sins. It lets me know I’m not alone.
Perhaps some traces of these statements seem familiar to all of us, but when they characterize the tenor of our relationships, we have a problem. Codependency arises from an epidemic – a crisis that has quietly crept into our churches. Rosaria Butterfield calls this the “loneliness crisis.”
I interviewed Rosaria Butterfield, author of The Gospel Comes with a House Key, on the theme of codependency. Many have responded to the rise of codependency by encouraging various boundaries in friendships, but Rosaria believes the problem (and solution) lies on a deeper level. “Idols serve a purpose; they plug a hole,” Rosaria explains. “They were born because people live in tragic and dangerous solitude.” This crisis “is not a question of borders”. Boundaries perpetuate our hearts’ fondness for idols and allow a “culture of childhood” to flourish in our churches. She tells us we must “face the crisis of loneliness” by filling the hole with more than just each other.
Am I in a codependent friendship?
According to Rosaria, we form a codependent relationship—“make an idol out of a friend”—when we: “(1) ask that person to be something more than they should be, and (2) ask that this person for loving me more than they should be. she should see me as some sort of savior. An idol is born, Rosaria warns, “from the fact that this relationship is not mediated by Jesus Christ.” When we “desire something for a person that God does not desire for them, or desire that person to view us in a way that God does not want us to be,” we have crossed the threshold of brotherly affection into become a distorted cult.
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Rosaria guides us beyond changes in the structure of our churches and families to identify and eliminate underlying, distorted views of ourselves and Christ. We need a mental shift for healthy relationships in the Church in four key areas: sin, identity, discipleship, and repentance.
Friendships built around sin
Three problems with our understanding of sin fuel the wildfire of codependency: our ignorance of our own sin, the perception of sin in our world, and our “sin in common” mentality.
“Sin is predatory. I don’t think Christians really think about it. They think, ‘I have it under control,'” Rosaria says. But we must know the way in which “Adam made the thumbprint on us” and if we do not know what that means, we must rely on our brothers and sisters in Christ to tell us where we should watch out for temptation . And feelings – the “precursor of our actions” – are not immune to temptation. Feelings can often subtly give rise to a codependent relationship because we don’t compare them to God’s word to filter out their fleshly origin.
We must also recognize how Satan fans the flame of codependency to potentially become a “homosexual fulfillment of idolatry.” In a sexually charged world, “homosexuality has even become an icon of progressivism,” making gentler forms of codependency acceptable. But if we are aware of the way homosexuality has been normalized in our world, we can remember that the Bible’s taboo against it is not there to harm or embarrass us, but to protect us – for our good and for the glory of God.
And sin should not bind believers. This role belongs to Christ. Rosaria warns,
Maturity is not having a group of people come together because of a particular imprint of Adam on them. That’s not maturity. It is anti-maturity. Maturity is where we know each other’s sin patterns well enough that part of being our brother’s keeper is looking out for others in this way. We make sure there is a healthy distance. We don’t set people up to fail and then abandon them when they fail.
When we suggest that sin marks our commonality, we easily become “hardened by the deception of sin” (Hebrews 3:13) – we rely on an “everyone does it” mentality. But we should not be satisfied with common sin. We rejoice in our common Savior. God calls us to exhort one another in Christ (Hebrews 3:13). We serve the Lord together and have difficult conversations. We don’t feel comfortable with our sin because our brothers and sisters “do it too.” We exhort another, by the power of the Holy Spirit, and we kill him. Together.
Identity in Christ, not in each other
Do we place our identity in anyone other than Christ, whether it is ourselves or each other?
“The clearer we are that our primary relationship is with the Lord, the less likely we are to ask others to view us as their savior or to view them as our savior. » Rosaria reminds us: “We must all turn to Jesus. We are in union with Christ. The Bible teaches that we are indeed all sons of God through faith, all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:27-28). Christ lives in us and our lives are an outpouring of that identity and reality (Galatians 2:20). When we replace the Savior with mini-saviors, we have unknowingly dragged others with us into an identity crisis.
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We must also be careful, Rosaria warns, not to use our identity as an opportunity to live in false freedom. “One of the most dangerous things for believers is to engage in anything and simply assume that because they are believers that they are Christ-centered in what they do.” We must be aware that we walk in true Christian freedom, which Rosaria describes as “the freedom not to sin.” It is in fact “for freedom that Christ has freed us” (Galatians 5:1), to make us “live as free people” (1 Peter 2:16), walking in our Christian identity.
Family Discipleship
A skewed view of discipleship also perpetuates codependency. Rosaria advocates for continued discipleship in the Church, but encourages us to understand its true goals and parameters.
Discipleship serves to accomplish “a specific task” focused on building the Church, to “walk in strength and liberty in the Lord, to be free from idols and patterns of sin.” Its goal is “not to create dependence, hijacking the spiritual life of others, but to help people get started.” Therefore we “proclaim (Christ), warning everyone, and teaching everyone in all wisdom, that we may present to everyone mature in Christ» (Colossians 1:28).
Rosaria challenges us to question, or at a minimum, cautiously enter into individual discipleship relationships because of their potential to replace the object of our affections and endanger our identity in Christ. She gives a serious warning as to why. “A discipleship relationship can be claustrophobic,” Rosaria says. “This can make it seem like I can tell X anything, but only X. This creates the (codependency) problem.” Instead, she advocates anchoring discipleship in our family devotions. In his mind, either we “use family devotions as a way to mark God’s family, to create safe intimacy, to encourage sanctified relationships,” or our church will have to “do a lot of counseling on the other side of the thread “. of idolatry. »
One-on-one relationships—under the supervision of an elder and for a specific reason—do not necessarily result in codependent relationships, but Rosaria suggests that “discipleship is a process natural growth of the functioning of the Christian family. Christian family life is the heartbeat of discipleship:
We need to do something about the cultivation of discipleship. When people ask me, “How many women are you discipling?” do you know what the answer is? Zero. I disciple my children. And then there are several men and women at our table in the evening. And there is mutual discipleship going on. And from there, I have occasions where we will talk because something is happening and someone can help us.
The Bible speaks of community relationships: “I see Titus 2 in a community way. I see older women and younger women solving problems together, not individually. It also refers to Jesus with his disciples. “There’s some one-on-one time, but even those have some sort of group setting.”
Have we created a problem in the Church with our emphasis on one-time discipleship? Maybe. But as we grow in how we function as God’s family, our ability to train one another will flourish. And as Rosaria rightly points out, we should constantly pray “that all our friendships may be sanctified.”
Is repentance necessary?
Rosaria’s guidance has formulated a number of questions to help us assess the health of our relationships and determine whether repentance is necessary:
- Are all of our interactions with our friend individual?
- Does our friend have a community outside of us?
- Is our friend suggesting that we are the only ones who know X about him? Or make comments like, “You’re the only person I can talk to or who can understand me”?
- Are other members of the Church – including Church leaders – aware of our discipleship relationships, especially those that may tend in a codependent direction?
- What are our own temptations to sin? Are they similar to the temptations of our friend?
- Is flattery a regular part of what we hear from our friend? If so, how do we respond? Are we easily lifted up by words of affirmation or flattery?
- Are we aware of a desire to be seen by our friend in a particular way. God doesn’t want us to be seen or lifted up?
When we evaluate a relationship as codependent, Rosaria offers us hope: “Nothing sanctifies a friendship like repentance. » We “(turn) to God from idols” (1 Thessalonians 1:9) – we repent. And Rosaria tells us to ask our friends for forgiveness: we confess to them that we have used our friendship to “fuel our pride” and that we “tried to make them indispensable,” without regard for our Savior and His blood. Repentance must be the first step. And then, by the power of the Spirit, we change.
The real cure
There is someone who understands us like no one else. There is a model that we cannot live without. There is someone who never leaves us and never abandons us. There is someone who cherishes us beyond our understanding.
If idols plug the holes, as Rosaria explains, let’s fill the holes. Boundaries will not cure codependency. But Christ can. By its power, if we begin to dig into the hidden sickness of displaced identities and misunderstandings about sin, discipleship, and repentance, codependency will no longer allow the crisis of loneliness to torment our churches.