CONFAB 2002
In the SF Chronicle on December 15th, 2001, I read an article that I found interesting that I cut out to save. The title of the article is, “We seem to be missing 0.8 of a friend.” It seems that a recent Gallup poll discovered that the people living in the West Coast have fewer friends than other regions of the country.
The average person on the West Coast has only 8.7 close personal friends, compared to the national average of 9.5 pals. That’s a .8 of a person! That’s nearly an entire person!
The people in the Midwest had 9.9 friends while Southerners have the most friends—10.8! So if you want to have more friends, you need to move to the South. They have 2.1 more friends than we do! We shouldn’t feel that bad because Easterners are worse than Westerners. People in the East Coast have only 8.2 friends each. That’s .5 of a person less!
For nearly 50 years, Chinese Christian friends through an organization called, CONFAB has been bringing people together to become new friends. From great distances and across oceans to church neighbors down the street or across the Bay Bridge, Chinese Christians have faithfully come to become a part of something that they cannot find on their own. Perhaps we are sensing that there’s this eight-tenth of a friend that we are still looking for and we are hoping that at CONFAB, this friend will be there.
In the book of Hebrews, we find beleaguered Christians who have become weary and tired of the Christian way of life. So the writer of Hebrews calls them to persevere and to remain faithful to Christ. In Hebrews 10, he said,
Let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds,
not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging
one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
Hebrews is saying that we must not neglect the importance of meeting together. We should provoke and challenge each other to come and do good deeds together. And when some who have gotten into a habit of not meeting together, they can be encouraged to come especially as that Day when the Lord comes again.
In this newspaper article it mentioned a psychology professor at UC Berkeley who said the friendship poll results “must mean something, but I don’t know what.” The professor, who asked not to be identified, said that the definition of a close personal friend varies from person to person and that the difference of 0.8 of a friend is “probably not statistically significant”—especially since it would be hard to have a close friendship with anything less than 1.0 friend. Really?
As brothers and sisters in Christ, we do know what it means to be friends. Jesus said,
This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any
longer, but friends.
Through the faithful ministry of CONFAB throughout the past years and today, we have found that eight-tenth of a close personal friend. These friends are here—you and me as well as those who will be coming to San Francisco this June to attend this year’s conference. And in the Spirit of Christ, we no longer need to look for our missing pals because it is Jesus Christ, our Friend who has made us new friends today.
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Dr. Timothy Tseng
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