Friendship Can Save the World

Book excerpt: God uses diverse friendships to fulfill his miraculous will in the world. In an increasingly polarized world, our collective ability to navigate friendships with people whose backgrounds, experiences, and views differ from our own has diminished. Along the way, valuing diversity has come to be seen by many Christians as a secular pursuit. However, we love and serve a diverse God (being three unique persons himself) who taught us to love those we tend to have a hard time loving: outsiders, enemies, foreigners, the poor, and the weak. In Friendship Can Save the World, Carrie and Morgan Stephens offer an invigorating retelling of Ruth, Boaz, and Naomi to help us love people unlike us. Weaving in real life stories from their multiethnic, multigenerational, and socioeconomically diverse church, they highlight the power of unique friendships in God’s greater missional story. Readers will find inspiration to love and be loved more courageously as we all forge a path into a more redemptive future.