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To explain what I mean by "very interactive, intimate, and personal friend", let me quote some excerpts from T.M. Luhrmann's book When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God.

From the book's synopsis:

Combined with scientific research that studies the effect that intensely practiced prayer can have on the mind, When God Talks Back examines how normal, sensible people—from college students to accountants to housewives, all functioning perfectly well within our society—can attest to having the signs and wonders of the supernatural become as quotidian and as ordinary as laundry.

From the book itself:

I set out many years ago to understand how God becomes real for modern people. I chose an example of the style of Christianity that would seem to make the cognitive burden of belief most difficult: the evangelical Christianity in which God is thought to be present as a person in someone’s everyday life, and in which God’s supernatural power is thought to be immediately accessible by that person. The Vineyard Christian Fellowship is a new denomination, a few decades old, and it represents this shift in the American imagination of God. These Christians speak as if God interacts with them like a friend. He speaks to them. He listens to them. He acts when they pray to him about little mundane things, because he cares. This kind of Christianity seems almost absurdly vivid to someone who grew up in a mainstream Protestant church; when I first encountered it, I imagined that people thought of God as if he were a supernatural buddy with a thunderbolt.

The Americans in this church are ordinary Americans. They are typically middle class, but one finds very wealthy and very poor people in the congregations. They are typically white, but the congregations include many minorities. Most participants are college-educated. The church took form in California, but there are now more than six hundred churches across the country and as many as fifteen hundred around the world. The Vineyard is arguably the most successful example of what one sociologist has called new paradigm Protestantism, the infusion of a more intensely expressive spirituality into white, middle-class Christianity. This style of spirituality has also been called neo-Pentecostal because it represents the adoption of a Pentecostal ethos, and its flamboyant emphasis on the direct experience of God, into a form acceptable to the white mainstream. Another name is renewalist. According to a recent survey, nearly one-quarter of all Americans embrace a Christian spirituality in which congregants experience God immediately, directly, and personally. The Vineyard typifies this powerful new impulse in American spirituality.

The reason people have their notebooks out during sermons isn’t because the sermon is about God, the way a college lecture is about the American Revolution or the poems of Emily Dickinson. Rather, the pastor’s sermon teaches the congregation to use the Bible to relate to God, both as a God of power and as a best friend. Church is a class in which you learn how to hear what God has to say. The pastor teaches that when you are intimate and personal with a supernatural being, God speaks to you. Not all the time and usually not audibly, but in as real and as practical a way as if you were sitting down to coffee with a puzzle you had to solve.

Elaine told me that she was trying to hear God speak in the little things, so that she could hear his voice when it really counted. She began to ask him what she should wear every morning. The Sunday we spoke, God told her—as she experienced it—to wear the blue shirt. But when she put it on, her bra showed, so she took off the blue shirt and put on a black one. When she arrived at church, she was standing around with the worship team. The pastor walked by, smiled, and said (she reported), “I see you are all wearing blue today.” Elaine told me this story to illustrate how mortified she was at having not taken God seriously. The real point, of course, was that Elaine—a deeply committed Christian who had repeatedly explained to me that every word of the Bible was accurate—did not, as she stared at her closet, treat her inference about what God was thinking (“wear the blue shirt”) as an actual insight into divine intention. She thought she had just imagined it.

The evangelical interest in the direct personal experience of God exploded in the 1960s. Americans have always been religious, but every so often our religious enthusiasm seems to crest. Historians have called these periods of religious excitement “great awakenings.” They appear (more or less) from 1730 to 1760, 1800 to 1840, 1890 to 1930, and 1965 to the present. During these decades, Americans were more likely to have had unusual spiritual experiences in which they fainted, spoke in tongues, saw visions, and so forth, and they were more likely to seek out and publicly celebrate these changes in consciousness as proof of God’s living presence in their lives. These are not, of course, the only times when God has inflamed the American senses. Throughout the twentieth century, there were American churches that encouraged and even relied on unusual spiritual phenomena. Pentecostalism was born in Los Angeles in the early twentieth century and continued to grow over the decades. Southern Baptist churches encouraged richly spiritual experience well before the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, America does seem to have periods when great spiritual passion enters many humble homes. We are, scholars suggest, in such a period now.


What is an overview of Christian views on the practice of relating to God as a very interactive, intimate, and personal friend?

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    This question instantly brought to mind the 20th century acerbic saying that, in some Protestant circles, "The Almighty has become the Almatey."
    – Anne
    Commented Jun 18 at 9:39
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    @Anne That's funny; I think especially to Australians who like to say "mate" for "friend". Commented Jun 18 at 18:55

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God is our father, who sees us as beloved children:

Ephesians 5:1: Follow God’s example, therefore, as dearly loved children

And Jesus teaches us to ask the Father for anything we desire:

Matthew 7:7-11: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!

Jesus calls us friends:

John 15:15: I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.

As well as God's co-workers:

1 Corinthians 3:9: For we are co-workers in God’s service

The Church is the bride of Christ, who selflessly loves the Church at great cost to himself:

Ephesians 5:25-33 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.

There are so many other Biblical passages that show we are meant to have a close relationship with God, with analogies taken from all sorts of human relationships. Someone who keeps God at a distance, who feels like God is only a king, judge, or master rather than a father and friend, is unlikely to have fully understood the Gospel and taken on its implications in their lives.

But this has to be balanced with another important Biblical concept: the fear of God. This doesn't mean that we are to feel terror at God, but that we respect, honour, revere, and awe him. This is not a concept that Christians are good at expressing and teaching; "fear" in English just doesn't have the right connotations.

But I think one of the best ways this has been communicated is by C. S. Lewis, who portrays Jesus as Aslan, the lion king of Narnia.

"Who is Aslan?" asked Susan.

"Aslan?" said Mr Beaver. "Why, don't you know? He's the King."

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"Is - is he a man?" asked Lucy,

"Aslan a man!" said Mr Beaver sternly. "Certainly not. I tell you he is the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-beyond-the-Sea. Don't you know who is the King of Beasts? Aslan is a lion - the Lion, the great Lion."

"Ooh!" said Susan. "I'd thought he was a man. Is he - quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion."

"That you will, dearie, and no mistake," said Mrs Beaver; "if there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most or else just silly."

"Then he isn't safe?" said Lucy.

"Safe?" said Mr Beaver; "don't you hear what Mrs Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe. 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you."

...

"He's wild, you know. Not like a tame lion."

(From The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, chapters 8, 17)

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I don't know if there is a Catholic view on this matter, so I can only provide a very unscientific view of a Catholic, being me.

I have been taught to view God, but also the angels and the people in heaven, the saints, as more or less interactive, intimate and personal friends. To me it is not strange to speak with God (all three persons), Mother Mary and Saint Bernard (my patron saints), or my guardian angel.

Intimate and personal, yes. Friends? Well, I do feel more reverential to them than to my "worldly" friends, but yes, friends. The interaction is a bit one-sided at first glance, but when you look deeper that isn't entirely the case.

For the statistics mentioned in the question: I am European, not American. Quite normal. Mentally healthy. I am a deacon, so member of the clergy, but most people know me as an accountant of sorts.

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