Unlikely Friends: How God Uses Boundary-Crossing Friendships to Transform the World

Conceived as a Festschrift to honour the work of Dana Robert, celebrated scholar of world Christianity and missiology at Boston University, Unlikely Friends makes a significant contribution in its own right to recalibrating mission studies through the lens of friendship. Taken together, the fifteen chapters of this volume develop a theme that found fullest expression in Robert’s latest monograph, Faithful Friendships, published in 2019 but which has implicitly guided much of her scholarship to date. Friendship, it turns out, is a vital hermeneutical key to unlocking the rich tapestry of encounters that make up the history of global mission. This volume, like Dana Robert’s own work, both sheds critical light on actual missionary practices otherwise obscured by official narratives and prompts readers to consider how those same practices of grass roots, boundary-crossing friendships might transform their own participation in the missio Dei.While the final section of the book provides an interesting glimpse into the person and work of Dana Robert, not least through testimonials from fifteen of her colleagues and students, it is the first three sections—‘The Power of Friendship’, ‘The Problems with Friendship’, and ‘The Practice of Friendship’—where the volume’s substantial argument is developed. In various ways, each author seeks to illustrate Robert’s thesis in Faithful Friendships, that friendships—especially friendships made by followers of Jesus across boundaries of culture and ethnicity—are both ordinary and revolutionary. They are ordinary in that such friendships inevitably occur wherever human life is lived unencumbered by the stranglehold of colonial and paternalistic tendencies; they are revolutionary in that such friendships are living embodiments of the healing and transforming arrival of the Kingdom of God.Each chapter explores the theme of friendship in relation to the author’s own missional experience or disciplinary expertise. The result is a diverse set of reflections, tracing the significance of friendships in missional work in every corner of the world, in cross-cultural urban settings, in interfaith relations, and among transnational deaf communities, to cite just some of the contexts considered. Despite the range of subject matter, the essays are consistently well written, and all evidence the careful interpretation of missional practice in context, which is the hallmark of Dana Robert’s own work.A few recurrent insights are noteworthy. First, the book repeatedly illustrates a dynamic understanding of global Christianity; as Mark Noll puts it in his chapter, influenced by Robert’s own work, Christianity is ‘a dynamic global system of mutual influences flowing back and forth across vast regions, immense periods of time, and cultures of great diversity’ (11). The variety of boundary-crossing friendships traced by the chapters underscores this important characterization. Second, boundary-crossing friendship is often closely associated with the sharing of food. This, of course, is hardly surprising, given the boundary-crossing meals shared by Jesus; but it is, nevertheless, borne out by stories of friendship from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Zimbabwe, and inner-city Boston. Third, focusing on friendship offers the possibility of unpicking narratives of colonialism, racism, and paternalism, and replacing them with authentic stories of empowerment. Importantly, none of the friendships described in this volume were merely instrumental or tokenistic. Friendships—especially boundary-crossing friendships—flourish only as they grow out of genuine spatial, relational, and spiritual ties. When such friendships grow, they inevitably challenge the systems and structures that seek to (dis)order reality otherwise.Appropriately, as a celebration of the work of Dana Robert, Unlikely Friends develops an outlook that is thoroughly Methodist and Wesleyan in flavour. The essays are grounded in reflection on the practice of mission, demonstrating a theological intuition about friendship that grows from observing the networked relationships of missional communities. Moreover, the authors collectively agree that boundary-crossing friendship is not only possible, but that it is enabled and, indeed, mandated by the gospel. Such an expansive approach to boundary-crossing mission is worthy of reflection on and embodiment by any scholar or practitioner in the Wesleyan tradition.Unlikely Friends is one of those rare volumes that successfully brings together a diverse set of essays into a coherent whole, both expanding the reader’s horizons with numerous new vistas, and inviting critical reflection on the reader’s own missional practice. As such, the book accomplishes its role as a Festschrift for Dana Robert, both illustrating her insights and thesis about friendship and mission in global Christianity, and inspiring others to prove that thesis by forging friendships that can become ‘a primary channel through which the transformational power of the gospel flows’ (139).

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