First, there was Ewart: we ran and tousled our way to the village primary school where we lined up in 'standards', learnt 'tonic sol-fa' and admired the older boys, clattering and skidding their way around the playground in hob-nailed boots, striking sparks as they encountered each corner of the relay-race. Ewart smelt faintly of apples and warm grey flannel. He had an amazing capacity to keep interesting things about his person: an old conker, bits of string, a couple of 'bun pennies', a broken penknife and, most daring of all, a few live matches. He also had a grey, steel bomb, held together with elastic bands which, loaded with caps, we hurled into the air and watched with riotous excitement as it landed in the road and exploded. We wore grey hats and snake-belts, and socks which dangled around our ankles, and played together endlessly in the long summer afternoons of childhood, making dens in the bracken, throwing stones at wasps' nests and thinking, stupidly, that if we climbed the trees we wouldn't be stung – but we had the stings and the marks of the blue-bag to prove us wrong.

You will have gathered that Ewart was my best childhood friend. He had a capacity to be relaxed and mischievous which was entrancing. Actually, It wasn't until I began thinking about this address that I came to realise how much we learn about friendship from our earliest years. I could talk for hours about the village where I grew up: a place somehow redolent of Laurie Lee and Dylan Thomas, though miles away from them geographically.

Do you know the opening lines of Dylan Thomas's short story Extraordinary Little Cough? –

One afternoon, in a particularly bright and glowing August, some years before I knew I was happy, George Hooping, whom we called Little Cough, Sidney Evans, Dan Davies and I sat on the roof of a lorry travelling to the end of the Peninsula. It was a tall, six-wheeled roof from which we could spit on the roofs of passing cars and throw our apple stumps at women on the pavement.

Now haul your minds away from your own memories of childhood and those escapades, whether in north London or Barley or Biggleswade, and take your minds back two thousand years to the earliest years of Christ's life - to that village, Nazareth, huddled in a fold of the hills and only just down the road from the brand new town of Sepphoris. The Gospels tell us nothing, nothing at all, of Christ's childhood, except for a fleeting reference in Luke to a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The non-canonical Gospels have legends about Him turning clay into sparrows but other than that, nothing. Nor do we have any inkling about Paul's childhood, though because many of his metaphors are urban (whereas Jesus' were rural), we can assume that he was 'pavements' rather than 'fields'. In both cases, who were their Ewart equivalents? From whom did they learn the rough and tumble joy of friendship?

I ask the question because of the passage set for the Gospel two Sundays ago; it included these lines:

This is my commandment: love one another, as I have loved you. There is no greater love than this, that a man should lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends, if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is about. I have called you friends, because I have disclosed to you everything I heard from my Father. [John 15:12-15]

I am not by nature a statistician but I decided to check how often the word 'friend' occurs in the New Testament. The results surprised me: in Mark there is not a single reference to the word 'friend' (the Greek word is philos); in Matthew there is only one reference; in Luke there are fourteen references; in John there are six references, three of which are found in the passage I have just read. In the epistles attributed to Paul, there is not one reference to the word 'friend' – and I find that, I have to say, a little sad. Is there no reference because Paul found friendships difficult? It is dangerous to build a hypothesis on the absence of evidence – but it may be of some significance. And yet, by contrast, one cannot help bringing to mind the episode when Paul said farewell to the elders at Miletus; you will remember the story:

'And now I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which has power to build you up and give you your heritage among all those whom God has made his own … all along I showed you that it is our duty to help the weak in this way, by hard work, and that we should keep in mind the words of the Lord Jesus who himself said, 'Happiness lies more in giving than receiving.' As he finished speaking, he knelt down with them all and prayed. There were loud cries of sorrow from them all, as they folded Paul in their arms and kissed him; what distressed them most was his saying that they would never see his face again. [Acts 20:32-38]

That sounds like a man surrounded by friends.

Well, why all the emphasis in this Synod address on friendship? I have concentrated on it because I have been struck recently by two things. Firstly, in the letters written to me about Malcolm Lesiter's departure from this diocese after thirty-seven years of loyal and devoted service, a number of them have said how much they will miss his friendly advice – and that is a great and loving tribute – and secondly, because it chimes in with what I sense in many churches around the diocese (many, but not all), that there is a palpable sense of friendship within the congregation.

I believe, as you may have gathered, that friendship is one of the underrated joys of human existence and, in church circles, is downplayed in favour of harder-edged, assertive talk of mission and outreach. And yet, and yet – is not friendship one of God's most loving gifts? And who are we to downplay the word when Christ, Himself, refers to His disciples as His 'friends' ('I call you servants no longer, but friends'). Think of yourself in those terms and it may change your perception of Him. I say all this, not only to try to reinstate friendship as a joyful gift from God, but also as a way of trying to reinstate, re-emphasise and give thanks for friendship as a characteristic of church life. Our churches, if they are not quietly and unselfconsciously places of friendship, are missing part of the beauty of God's love. Let me quote from Paul's letter to the Church in Ephesus:

Have done with all spite and bad temper, with rage, insults and slander, with evil of any kind. Be generous to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you. [Ephesians 4:31]

To be a community of generosity, tender-heartedness and forgiveness, is good news in itself, and it is that kind of community to which we are all called, that kind of community which we should all try to create. Friendship is not a virtue specific to Christianity - but without it, our Christianity becomes bleak and joyless. If friendship really is a characteristic of your Church, in quiet simplicity, give thanks for it; if not, pray for the grace to help create it. And finally, if your Church is not a place where children can learn and revel in friendship, where else will friendship be learnt?

One day, I must tell you about Ewart and me in the church choir and our ocular experiments with a red-hot tortoise stove – but that can wait.

© Christopher William Herbert, 2003