The Ancient Wisdom Modern Churches Ignore: Anselm on Friendship and Belonging

The Medieval Crisis That Mirrors Today: Isolation in Full Sanctuaries

Saint Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) faced a relational crisis that modern churches would immediately recognize: spiritual isolation despite constant community living, and the breakdown of authentic belonging within institutions designed to facilitate it.

In the 11th century, Anselm wrote anguished letters to distant friends: "Sweet to me, sweetest friend, are the gifts of your sweetness, but they cannot begin to console my desolate heart for its want of your love."

He also observed something tragic: monks living in the same monastery, gathering daily for prayer and meals, yet remaining spiritually isolated from one another.

This medieval crisis is the modern church's crisis. The Koine Greek word "ekklesia" literally means "called out community" - yet churches with hundreds or thousands of attendees often produce the opposite: isolation despite proximity.

Anselm's solution? Recover the theology and practice of authentic spiritual friendship rooted in Christ.

A Monk's Letters That Expose Our Loneliness

Anselm's correspondence reveals emotional intensity that shocks modern readers. He speaks of spiritual longing, of missing friends, of pain at separation. He uses language of love (dilectio, amor) normally reserved for romantic relationships. He expresses anguish at the thought of friends drifting spiritually.

To one companion, he wrote: "Since thy spirit and mine can never bear to be absent from each other, but unceasingly are intertwined; we mutually need nothing from each other, save that we are not together in bodily presence."

The pain is palpable. Yet it reveals something extraordinary: Anselm understood friendship not as a luxury but as essential to spiritual life and formation.

For Anselm, the absence of beloved friends wasn't merely inconvenient. It was spiritually destabilizing.

This medieval monk's insight speaks directly to contemporary churches where believers sit in the same pews yet remain unknown. They join the same congregation yet lack authentic belonging.

Anselm would have recognized such institutional isolation as a spiritual emergency.

Faith Seeking Understanding Through Friendship: Anselm's Vision

Anselm is famous in philosophy for his ontological argument. Yet scholars studying his life increasingly recognize his deepest passion: friendship rooted in Christ.

Pastor and theologian Gavin Ortlund, who wrote a scholarly commentary on Anselm's Proslogion and created a video titled "Anselm on Friendship: What the Modern World is Missing," observes:

"Anselm on friendship reveals one of our culture's biggest blind spots: systemic loneliness."

This matters because Anselm's theology of friendship was not peripheral to his faith. It was central.

Anselm's original title for his Proslogion was "Faith Seeking Understanding" (fides quaerens intellectum). But Ortlund argues that for Anselm, this faith seeking understanding was always happening within a framework of spiritual friendship rooted in community.

Anselm was not a solitary philosopher reasoning abstractly about God. He was a Christian friend seeking to know God more deeply while remaining intimately connected to his monastic community. His theology was lived theology, practiced through relationships.

When Anselm wrote his meditations on God, he did so not as an isolated intellect but as a monk devoted to his brothers. The spiritual content is inseparable from the relational context.

Four Essential Elements of Anselm's Theology of Friendship

1. Friendship Is About Spiritual Intimacy, Not Affinity

In contemporary culture, friendship is defined by:

• Shared interests
• Geographic proximity
• Similar life stage
• Common preferences

Anselm would have rejected this framework entirely. His friendships:

• Crossed vast distances (letters traveled by medieval messenger)
• Bridged demographic boundaries (monks, aristocrats, queens, women, men)
• Persisted despite separation and circumstance

What held Anselm's friendships together was something far deeper: shared devotion to Christ and mutual commitment to each other's spiritual growth.

In a letter to a friend facing political danger, Anselm wrote: "Do not let the tumultuous world distract you. Remember that we are bound together in Christ, and our friendship is grounded in a reality that no earthly power can shake."

This is Anselm's conviction that true friendship transcends circumstance because it is rooted in the eternal.

Modern church application: Programs designed to "build community" often attempt to manufacture friendship through affinity (young professionals, empty nesters, parents of toddlers). But Anselm insists believers from different generations, socioeconomic backgrounds, and life circumstances need intentional relational weaving because diversity creates richer opportunities for spiritual growth.

2. Friendship Requires Vulnerability and Emotional Honesty

Anselm's letters are shocking in their emotional intensity. He speaks of:

• Spiritual longing
• Missing friends
• Pain at separation
• Anguish at friends straying spiritually

He uses intimate language that would seem scandalous by modern evangelical standards. Yet Anselm rejected false piety. His conviction: genuine spiritual friendship requires emotional transparency.

You cannot truly know someone if you maintain protective walls. You cannot encourage someone toward Christ if you hide your own struggles.

In one letter to a friend Anselm suspected was compromising spiritually, he poured out his heart: "My soul is anxious for you. Day and night I am disturbed by concern for your salvation. This is not abstract pastoral duty speaking. This is one friend who loves another telling you plainly: you are drifting, and it is breaking my heart."

That is vulnerability. That is the kind of relational honesty modern churches often lack.

Research on small groups confirms: churches with the highest spiritual formation impact are those where members move beyond surface-level discussion to genuine vulnerability. Yet many church environments remain emotionally sterile.

Anselm would challenge this as insufficiently Christian. True friendship requires courage to be known and to know others deeply, including in their struggles and doubts.

3. Friendship Creates Spiritual Accountability

Anselm understood that friends are not merely pleasant companions. They are partners in spiritual formation with responsibility to speak truth to one another about matters of ultimate importance.

His letters reveal this repeatedly. When Anselm heard a young nobleman was becoming entangled in worldly pursuits, he wrote with directness:

"My beloved, your choices are destroying your soul. I cannot remain silent out of false friendship. True friendship compels me to tell you this plainly."

Yet Anselm's directness was always rooted in love. He was not harsh. He was urgent.

This is what modern churches have largely lost: the conviction that spiritual friends have not just permission but obligation to speak into each other's lives with truth and urgency.

Contemporary culture brands this "judgmental." But Anselm understood it as the highest form of love: "If you truly love someone, you cannot afford to remain silent when they are veering toward spiritual destruction."

4. Friendship Points Beyond Itself to the Beatific Vision

Anselm's vision of friendship extended beyond this life. In his theological meditation on eternal glory, Anselm contemplated the friendships believers would enjoy in heaven:

"Does it not follow that a certain marvelous and all-encompassing friendship shall prevail amongst the souls in heaven? By means of this unitive and unanimous friendship, each will embrace the other with sincere fervor of love."

This is crucial: Earthly friendships are not an end in themselves. They are foretaste of and preparation for the eternal communion believers will experience in God's presence.

When two friends grow together spiritually, pray for one another, and encourage each other toward holiness, they are not just enjoying pleasant companionship. They are participating in the very reality that will characterize eternal life: perfect communion with God and with one another in God.

This transforms how believers approach friendship. It is not optional social activity. It is spiritual formation with eternal significance.

The Ekklesia Solution: How Medieval Monasticism Created Belonging

Anselm lived in a monastic context where friendship and spiritual community were not incidental. They were structural.

The Rule of Saint Benedict, which governed Anselm's community at Bec, explicitly emphasized:

• Mutual care and accountability
• Vulnerability and confession
• Regular gathering for prayer, meals, and shared work
• Intentional knowledge of one another

Monks lived together. Ate together. Prayed together. Worked alongside one another. They had nowhere to hide. And because they had nowhere to hide, they became deeply known.

The Rule emphasized: "Each one is personally responsible for cooperating with the One who is 'powerful enough to reform what in us is deformed.' We need each other's support too, as example, help and friend."

Notice the structure: monks were intentionally positioned to know one another, to see each other's weaknesses, and to support each other's spiritual growth through witness, example, and friendship.

Modern churches often assume that relational community will happen organically. Anselm and the medieval monastics knew otherwise. Community requires structure.

This did not mean programs manufactured by professionals. It meant rhythms and gatherings and expectations that made deep knowing practically unavoidable:

• Daily prayer together
• Shared meals
• Work assignments in pairs or small groups
• Spiritual direction where monks could speak honestly about interior struggles

These structures were not imposed externally as rules. They were embraced because monks recognized that spiritual formation cannot happen in isolation.

The Modern Church's Friendship Crisis: Isolation Within Full Congregations

Contemporary churches often operate with an unstated assumption: friendship is something people do on their own time, outside the church's purview. The church's job is programs, teaching, and a welcoming environment. Whether people form deep spiritual friendships is their personal responsibility.

Result? Many believers remain profoundly isolated despite regular church attendance.

Research confirms what Anselm would have predicted:

New member isolation: A young adult visits a church for the first time. Attends for several weeks. Shakes hands with greeters. Joins a program. But forms no genuine friendships. After two months, quietly stops attending.

Crisis without community: A long-time member experiences job loss, marriage struggle, or health crisis. This person has attended for years but lacks deep relationships. Processes the struggle alone. Eventually leaves rather than reveal vulnerability.

Small group dissociation: Members gather weekly for Bible study but conversations stay intellectual. No one shares real struggles. No one confesses sin. No one points one another toward Christ.

Generational disconnection: Young adults connect with peers but lack relationships with mature believers. Intergenerational transmission of faith never happens.

Result: Churches filled with people experiencing what one researcher called "loneliness in a crowded congregation."

Members who do not form at least two to three meaningful relationships within a congregation are at high risk of disengagement. Yet many churches have no systematic way of knowing who is isolated until they've already left.

What Gavin Ortlund Discovered in Anselm

Gavin Ortlund's work on Anselm has surfaced something remarkable: in an era of widespread loneliness, medieval Christianity offers surprising wisdom.

Ortlund created a video specifically titled "Anselm on Friendship: What the Modern World is Missing." In it, he observes that if a modern person stepped into a medieval monastery, they would encounter something shockingly different from contemporary church culture:

Frequency of contact: Daily gathering, shared meals, regular prayer together (not weekly services with anonymity possible).

Emotional honesty: Monks discussing struggles, doubts, spiritual battles openly (not polite cheerfulness maintained).

Accountability: Spiritual direction relationships, community oversight of individual formation (not private, isolated spirituality).

Permanence: The understanding that the community will persist, requiring members to work through conflicts rather than flee (not optional attendance where difficult relationships prompt departure).

All of this created the conditions for genuine friendship, mutual knowledge, and spiritual transformation through relational community.

Ortlund argues: Anselm's example challenges churches to recover something lost: the conviction that friendship is not optional, not peripheral, but central to Christian faith and formation.

A Practical Problem: How Churches Leave Friends Isolated

If Anselm's theology of friendship is correct, then isolation within the church is not merely unfortunate. It is a spiritual failure.

Yet most churches lack systems to know who is isolated. They can measure:

• Attendance
• Financial giving
• Program participation

But they cannot easily answer:

• Who in this congregation knows fewer than two other members meaningfully?
• Which new members have been attending for three months without forming friendships?
• Which long-time members are experiencing life crises without community support?
• Which believers lack accountability relationships where they are known and challenged?

Without this visibility, pastoral care becomes reactive. The pastor notices someone is hurting after they've already started drifting. By then, the relational infrastructure necessary to hold them accountable has deteriorated.

Anselm would have insisted this is intolerable. In his community, such isolation would have been noticed within weeks. The abbot would have intervened. A mentor would have been assigned. The isolated person would have been drawn into relational community with intentionality and urgency.

Building Anselm's Vision in Contemporary Churches

Recovering Anselm's theology of friendship requires structural changes. Not because people are unwilling to form friendships, but because modern church structures often make deep friendship incidental rather than central.

1. Make Frequency of Contact Intentional

Anselm's monks gathered multiple times daily. Modern churches gather weekly. This structural limitation shapes what friendship is possible.

Yet frequency need not mean identical logistics. The goal is regular, ongoing relational contact that makes genuine knowing practically inevitable.

This might look like:

• Small groups meeting weekly (not monthly)
• Intergenerational gatherings beyond formal programming
• Ministry partnerships where believers serve alongside one another regularly
• Mentoring relationships with consistent, scheduled contact
• Informal gatherings (meals, coffee, recreation) that are normalized and frequent

2. Create Space for Emotional Honesty

Many churches unconsciously maintain professional cheerfulness. People show up, smile, exchange pleasantries, and leave. Deep sharing happens, if at all, only in carefully controlled settings.

Anselm would have rejected this as inauthentic and spiritually harmful.

Believers need permission and space to be honest about struggles, doubts, and spiritual battles.

This requires:

• Leadership modeling vulnerability from the pulpit
• Smaller, safer spaces where vulnerability feels appropriate
• Regular opportunities for believers to be known emotionally and spiritually

3. Embrace Accountability as an Expression of Love

Modern churches often shy away from accountability. It feels intrusive or controlling. Yet Anselm insisted that true friends cannot remain silent when they see one another drifting spiritually.

This does not mean harsh judgment. It means genuine concern expressed with courage. When a friend is compromising spiritually, a true friend speaks.

Churches need to recover the language of spiritual accountability as an expression of caring friendship, not intrusive judgment.

4. Track Relational Health Systematically

If relational community is essential (as Anselm believed), then churches should know who is and is not in genuine relational connection.

Questions to answer:

• Can every member name at least two to three people in the congregation who genuinely know them?
• Which new members have been attending for three months but remain relationally isolated?
• Which long-time members lack accountability relationships where they are regularly seen and known?
• Which believers are experiencing life stress without communal support?

Tools like FlockConnect help churches answer these questions, creating visibility into relational health and enabling pastoral intervention before isolation becomes permanent.

5. Preach the Theology of Friendship

Make it clear from the pulpit that Christian friendship is not optional. It is constitutive of Christian faith.

Reference Anselm's understanding of friendship. Teach on "one another" passages that assume relational community. Make it theologically clear that believers need one another.

When the pastor articulates why friendship matters spiritually, members are more likely to prioritize it practically.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What did Anselm teach about friendship that differs from modern understanding?

A: Anselm taught that true friendship must be rooted in Christ and aimed at mutual spiritual growth, not based primarily on affinity or preference. He understood friendship as essential to spiritual formation, not optional social activity. His emotional intensity about friendship and his conviction that friends must speak truth to one another stand in sharp contrast to modern church casualness about community.

Q: How does the medieval monastery model apply to modern churches?

A: Medieval monasticism created frequent contact (daily prayer and meals), emotional honesty (confession and spiritual direction), accountability (community oversight of spiritual life), and permanence (commitment to stay and work through difficulties). While modern churches cannot replicate medieval logistics, they can apply these principles through intentional structures: regular small group gathering, mentoring relationships, leadership vulnerability, and systematic tracking of relational health.

Q: Why did Anselm emphasize that friends must speak truth even when it's uncomfortable?

A: Anselm believed that allowing a friend to drift spiritually without intervention was a betrayal of friendship. Speaking truth in love is not judgment; it is the highest expression of care. Modern churches that avoid this accountability miss a central dimension of spiritual friendship and abandon their friends to spiritual destruction.

Q: How does the Koine Greek word "ekklesia" relate to Anselm's vision?

A: "Ekklesia" literally means "called out community" - an organic assembly, not an audience. Anselm's theology of friendship aligns with this: the church is meant to be a relational organism where members are woven together through Christ. Modern churches often violate this by functioning as audiences rather than ekklesia.

Q: What is the connection between Anselm's friendship theology and contemporary church isolation?

A: Anselm diagnosed that institutions could gather people regularly without creating genuine belonging. Medieval monasteries had this problem. Modern churches have it severely. Anselm's solution was intentional structures that made authentic friendship practically unavoidable. His insights directly address why contemporary churches produce isolated members despite full sanctuaries.

Q: How can FlockConnect help churches recover Anselm's vision?

A: FlockConnect maps relationships and tracks member connections in real-time. This visibility enables pastors to identify isolation before it leads to disengagement, then intervene with the intentional relational care (mentoring, accountability, community integration) that Anselm understood as essential to spiritual formation.

Related Reading:

• Augustine's Warning to the Modern Church: Why Friendship Without God Leaves Members Isolated
• The Early Church Model: How Authentic Community Shapes Discipleship and Spiritual Growth
• How to Identify Isolated Church Members Before They Leave

About FlockConnect

FlockConnect is a Church Relationship Manager (ChRM) designed to help pastors identify isolated members before they quietly leave. Unlike traditional church management systems, FlockConnect adds the "relationship layer" by tracking member connections, mapping relational health, and providing AI-driven suggestions for meaningful connection.

Built on research showing that church members need 5+ meaningful connections to stay invested, FlockConnect helps pastors:

• Identify isolated members proactively
• Track relationship health across the congregation
• Get AI suggestions for intentional connection
• Prevent member attrition through relational care
• Complement existing ChMS platforms (Planning Center, Breeze, Subsplash)

Learn more: FlockConnect.com

About This Article

This post draws on Anselm of Canterbury's letters and theological writings, Gavin Ortlund's scholarship on Anselm (including his video "Anselm on Friendship: What the Modern World is Missing" and commentary on the Proslogion), medieval monastic theology, the Greek origin of "ekklesia," and contemporary research on spiritual formation and relational community.

Anselm's life demonstrates that spiritual friendship was not peripheral to Christian faith in the medieval period. It was central. The vulnerability, emotional intensity, and spiritual urgency of his letters reveal a commitment to relational knowing that modern churches have largely abandoned.

Recovering this conviction could transform how churches approach community, discipleship, and spiritual formation.

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