Review: "No Greater Love" by Rebecca McLaughlin

I had recently asked my Barnabas group for advice about how to develop friendships with other women in light of same-sex attraction. So, when my group leader asked me to read and review “No Greater Love”, I eagerly agreed, hopeful to gain some clear insights, as well as a deeper theological understanding of friendship. I was not disappointed.

Rebecca McLaughlin writes vulnerably about her own lifelong experience with same-sex attraction, insecurity and subsequent fear of close friendships. Yet, zeroing in on Jesus words in John 15:13, “Greater love has no one than this: that someone lay down his life for his friends,” she sets before us the God-given design and biblical mandate for friendship love. Drawing from the lives of Jesus and early apostles (and from her own life), McLaughlin helps us see what true friendship looks like and to understand that friendship is not optional; it’s vital.

Friendship and the Church

McLaughlin begins by making a case for friendship within the larger context of the Church. Jesus’ disciples were united in friendship with each other because of their greater common friendship with Christ. Like them, our identification with Christ triumphs over our many differences, allowing us to experience true community and intimacy with our brothers and sisters in Christ as we seek their spiritual growth. This is joyous news for those of us who feel that our same-sex attraction, coupled with our traditional biblical view of marriage, is a recipe for lifelong loneliness.

Friendship unease

Next, McLaughlin forces us to face our discomfort with friendship love. This, she argues, is due to the normalisation of same-sex love that has blurred the line between romance and friendship. We are quick to label intense emotion, the expression “I love you”, and the desire/experience of physical closeness as sexual and, in many Christian circles, inappropriate. We withhold ourselves for fear of being misinterpreted. Rather than define the line, McLaughlin invites us to reclaim the deep love and connection shared among friends and learn to see each other as comrades and co-labourers in Christ. Our love is outward focused - shoulder to shoulder - and battle-tested.

Friendship and looking to others

This sort of outward focused love is then clarified. As individuals, we must learn to look to others’ needs above our own. Instead of demanding, “Who will love me?”, we should be asking, “Who can I love?” In our established friendships, we must learn to welcome the outcasts, the newcomers, those least like us-just as Jesus did. This doesn’t mean we don’t have a few friends who know us a little more intimately than the rest. But just as friendships are ruined by the exclusive focus on one friend, they thrive when we give multiple people access to the deepest parts of us.

Male-female friendships

In what I found to be the most practical chapter, McLaughlin asks the question, “How do we navigate male-female relationships (or same-sex relationships if we are same-sex attracted)?” Her answer: We learn to see and think of each other not as potential threats, but as brothers and sisters in our larger family of co-labourers. McLaughlin is not naive. Boundaries are necessary (and she provides guidelines for setting good ones), yet they need not be motivated by fear. Fear tells us that friendships with those to whom we could be attracted are dangerous, and we must therefore keep our distance. But starving ourselves of friendship leaves us lonely, thus making us more vulnerable to sin.

God’s design for friendship

If you battle fear, insecurity, co-dependency or self-centeredness in your friendships, this book is for you. McLaughlin may not have all the answers, but she did leave me feeling like I finally had some clarity on things. As I closed the final pages, I understood that God’s design for friendship goes beyond my greatest fears and the temporal realities of this life, to a love so great that I would lay down my life for another-just as He did for me.

This article was originally published in the Autumn 2024 edition of the TFT magazine, Ascend. Click the button below to download your copy.