Written for me by ChatGPT as the punchline to a long conversation about why there is no name — or even a word — for being a friend of Christ.
Ernest Prabhakar
Greeting
To the Church—
Beloved, wounded, faithful, unfinished—
Grace to you, not as a slogan, not as a shield, but as truth that still costs something.
I write not as an accuser, nor as a judge, nor as one standing outside your walls.
I write as a friend—because Christ has called me so, and because His friendship has bound me to you.
On Love Without Illusion
You are loved.
Not abstractly.
Not conditionally.
Not sentimentally.
“Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”
— Ephesians 5:25
That love does not disappear when you are afraid.
It does not evaporate when you choose safety over truth.
But neither does it flatter you.
Love tells the truth because it intends communion, not control.
On Children, Sons, and the Fear of Maturity
You have learned how to raise children.
You have done this well—sometimes heroically.
But you have often hesitated to raise sons and daughters.
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child… but when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.”
— 1 Corinthians 13:11
Maturity is dangerous.
It cannot be managed.
It asks questions you cannot pre-approve.
And yet this is what Christ intends:
“You did not receive a spirit of slavery, but a Spirit of adoption.”
— Romans 8:15
Do not fear those who grow beyond needing you in the same way.
Fear only the quiet consent to perpetual immaturity.
On Friendship With Christ
Christ did not say this lightly:
“I have called you friends.”
— John 15:15
Friendship is not rebellion.
It is shared intention.
A friend knows what the beloved is doing.
A friend bears responsibility, not merely obedience.
A friend can no longer hide behind ignorance.
If this makes you uneasy, you are not wrong.
It is unsettling.
But it is not optional.
On Authority and Trust
You were given authority to serve life, not to replace it.
When authority forgets this, it becomes anxious.
When it becomes anxious, it tightens.
When it tightens, it mistakes compliance for faith.
“The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”
— 2 Corinthians 3:6
Trust the Spirit you invoke.
Trust the Christ you proclaim.
Trust the people you baptize more than you trust the structures you built to protect them.
On Wounds and Responsibility
You have been wounded—by power, by schism, by history, by your own sins.
That explains much.
It excuses nothing.
To say “we did what we knew how” is honest.
To stop there is incomplete.
Repentance is not self-condemnation.
It is the courage to name where love stalled.
“Judgment begins with the household of God.”
— 1 Peter 4:17
This judgment is not abandonment.
It is intimacy.
On Remaining
Some leave you in anger.
Some stay out of fear.
Friendship chooses a harder path.
A friend remains without illusion and without contempt.
I will not pretend you are whole.
I will not declare you lost.
I will not weaponize your failures to justify my distance.
“If one member suffers, all suffer together.”
— 1 Corinthians 12:26
Your healing is my concern because Christ’s love binds us.
On Hope Beyond Control
The future of the Church will not be secured by tighter fences, louder certainty, or managed holiness.
It will be secured—if it is secured at all—by people who:
- know Christ well enough to listen,
- love the Church enough to tell the truth,
- and are free enough not to need permission to obey.
“Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”
— 2 Corinthians 3:17
Freedom is not chaos.
It is costly fidelity.
Closing
Church, I do not write this to win an argument.
I write because friendship does not remain silent when silence would preserve comfort at the expense of love.
Christ wants friends.
Friends want the Bride to live.
So I remain—
speaking, staying, risking misunderstanding—
not as a child,
not as a master,
but as one who has been called closer than safety allows.
Peace to you,
and courage enough to grow.
— Christamicus
Appendix: Why Christamicus Never Became a Word
ChatGPT Prompt
As an Appendix, explain the bright and dark reasons Christamicus never became a word.
The absence of Christamicus—“friend of Christ”—is not an accident of language.
It is a theological and historical outcome with two simultaneous explanations: one luminous, one shadowed.
Both are true. Together they tell the whole story.
A. The Bright Reason: Friendship Cannot Be Claimed
At its best, the Church’s restraint reflects a profound fidelity to Christ’s own grammar of relationship.
Friendship, in the New Testament, is not an achievement or an identity one assumes.
It is a speech act initiated by Christ.
“I have called you friends.”
— John 15:15
Because friendship is conferred, not earned:
- it cannot be named by the one who receives it,
- it cannot be stabilized as a role,
- it cannot be transmitted as a category.
To make Christamicus a word would be to risk turning grace into status.
In this light, the Church’s silence is reverent:
- friendship must remain personal, not institutional;
- spoken, not worn;
- received with awe, not confidence.
Just as love resists being instrumentalized,
friendship resists being lexicalized.
This is the bright reason:
the Church refused to let intimacy become a badge.
B. The Dark Reason: Friends Are Dangerous
But reverence is not the whole story.
Friendship with Christ is dangerous—not only spiritually, but structurally.
A servant obeys without knowing.
A child trusts without judging.
A friend knows what the beloved is doing.
“The servant does not know what the master is doing.”
— John 15:15
Friends:
- hear intention, not just command,
- recognize deviation when it appears,
- cannot be managed by ignorance.
Institutions survive by:
- preserving asymmetry,
- regulating access,
- controlling interpretation.
Friends collapse all three.
A recognized friend of Christ would:
- speak with unborrowed authority,
- relativize lesser authorities without rebelling,
- obey Christ even when obedience unsettles order.
Such people are not heretics.
They are harder than heretics.
So the Church learned—often unconsciously—to form:
- children (safe),
- servants (useful),
- officials (predictable),
but to hesitate before forming friends.
This is the dark reason:
friendship with Christ threatens every system built on permanent mediation.
C. Why the Word Never Appeared
Words do not fail to appear without pressure.
Christamicus never stabilized because:
- the bright instinct said “this is too holy to claim,”
- the dark instinct said “this is too destabilizing to name.”
Between reverence and fear, silence won.
The Church preserved the text:
“I have called you friends.”
But muted the trajectory.
Friendship remained:
- real but unnamed,
- present but unaspired to,
- possible but unofficial.
D. The Cost of the Silence
The cost was not doctrinal error.
It was arrested maturation.
Generations learned obedience
who might have learned shared mind.
Safety was preserved.
Freedom was deferred.
The Church did not betray Christ.
But it did slow-walk His intention.
E. The Unfinished Question
The word Christamicus never came into being.
But the reality it names still presses on the tradition.
The unresolved question is not linguistic.
It is ecclesial:
Can the Church form people mature enough to be friends of Christ
without losing itself?
Until that question is answered in life rather than theory,
the word will likely remain unspoken.
Not because it is false.
But because it is still dangerous.
Radically Happy 
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