Faith Community

Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. No Christian community is more or less than this. Whether it is a brief, single encounter or the daily fellowship of years, Christian community is only this. We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

For my first blog post I thought it would be fitting to discuss the Christian or faith community. We as Christians form part of a family that extends through the generations and accross the globe. This family is never-ending since, as we have seen in the quote above, our family exists only in and through Christ Jesus. To become part of this family is incredibly easy. You only have to accept Jesus as your saviour and join in fellowship with your new family members.

One cannot deny the existance of such an extraordinary family. The reality is that the reason Jesus, our brother, came to earth was out of a need to save His family. He came as the mediator between us and God in order to take our punishment on Himself so we can live in everlasting communion with Him and the Father. It is important to note that this family requires your contribution and participation. A family cannot be whole unless all the family members play their part.

What is my part then? How do I know what to do? I'm new to this family, I don't know how it works!

These are valid concerns that could leave one with a heavy heart. The reality is, however, that the answer to all these concerns are in one simple library: the Bible. Many people see the Bible as a religious tool, or even a weapon. The Bible is not either of those things, it acts as a map we can follow to know how to deal with our situations and how to address these difficult concerns. With the Bible as our map and God as our tour guide, the road to the faith community becomes a walk in the park.

A community is there to support each other and hold each other accountable. It is vital for the Christian community to uphold these values. We have to look after each other, not just physically, but mentally and spiritually. The Christian path can feel lonely and cold at times and it is especially at those moments where we as brothers and sisters need to keep each other company and light a fire.

If you are still unsure what to do in the faith community and how to behave, just take a glance at the life of Jesus. He is the perfect example of what members of a faith community should do. They should open their homes to others, help the sick and poor, sit and eat with the sinners, and teach and guide their fellow believers.

The Christian community is unlike any community found in the world and it is important to not be distracted by worldly ways. Place your focus on Christ and plant your feet in the faith community and you will discover the true reality that is family, love, and grace.

Amen

Keep Your Spiritual Confidence (Psalm 135)

If a community is characterized by division and special interest groups, and by distortions of faith that only champion their particular brand of belief, then you are likely looking at idolatry.

Praise the Lord!    Praise the name of the Lord;    give praise, O servants of the Lord,you who stand in the house of the Lord,    in the courts of the house of our God.Praise the Lord, for the Lord is good;    sing to his name, for he is gracious.For the Lord has chosen Jacob for himself,    Israel as his own possession. For I know that the Lord is great;    our Lord is above all gods.Whatever…

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How to Make/Find Friends as an Adult: A Christian Perspective

Making and finding friends as an adult can be challenging, especially in a busy and often lonely world. However, as Christians, we are called to love God and love others (Mark 12:30-31), and friendship is one of the ways we can express and experience this love. In this article, we will explore some practical tips and biblical principles on how to make and find friends as an adult. 💬 "A man who…

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Finding the Strength to Endure in a Faith Community: Sunday Devotion

Hebrews 10: 23-25   Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching. We can and should have private daily devotions. However, when trials…

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if i see a single one of you pissed that your faves canceled an event or a con appearance because they're striking for fair wages then imma come for you in your sleep 🔪🔪🔪

(direct that fury where it belongs: AMPTP and the execs)

You will certainly be called insecure, -"phobic", toxic, and narrow-minded in a society that purposely refuses to understand, receive, or stand firm on the Word of God. But continue standing with Truth regardless.

-🕊️💕

urban designer muses, 2023

See, in my head there was a golden era of human connection in almost every culture, thrust upon us by the proximity to each other (and our occupation/work) by the very need for safety. safety in numbers, in shared causes of survival of the tribe, a sense of belonging and purpose. It wasn’t so ideal, I know, people died, anyone who didn’t fit in never got to find people who were more like them. I don’t really want that. 

And maybe I’m blessed in modern culture that we have travel and we have technology and we have ways I could find people who think like me, that I’m not stuck with my visionary ideas ricocheting through my head for connection and better greater belonging and purpose that no one asks about meaning the pressure builds up so high that I lose my grip on reality among those ideas I have no way of anything close to implementing all on my own. Maybe I’m blessed I can blog them online and travel to or attend virtually conferences of people who are putting together similar plans. Read books by them. There are 8 billion of us here after all. 

But if you know me you also know I’m terribly skeptical and cynical of all things colonialism, all things industrial revolution, all things Rational Economic Man, all things stoicism that seem to come exclusively from those who like to lord power over others and strip the humanity of all of us until we’re polished shells of people, starting with themselves. None of that connection beyond the superficial, and if that doesn’t meet your needs there’s something wrong with you. I think it’s what leaves us longing, rightly, for something more, spiritual, supernatural, divine. You can see why when this very culture is reflected in faith spaces it’s so much worse than outside: this place that claims to be for people like me who claim to believe in what I do, expects me to be just the same as the culture and the air we breathe. Doesn’t know how to handle me when I’m not. Doesn’t know how to handle any of the people who’ve come through our doors who aren’t actually, I’ve watched so many of them leave, a little piece of me dying every time. And those of us here—we just want connection don’t we? Connection with God and each other. We want that empathetic witness to what we go through in life because we know it isn’t that happy facade at all times. Good. But my theory is this culture has been around so long that we’re all so empty and drained because of it; none of us have the resources to be the first ones to set a culture of vulnerability, when we can’t without having someone to carry our hurts, and there’s no one there who can be that—the natural cycles are out of whack, a lot like the carbon and nutrient cycles of our planet. None of us have the capacity in us to sit there patient and try again and again to slowly help our loved ones feel more comfortable to open up even as we see them stuck in their own heads and shame and the fact that for so much of our weeks, our time, our nervous systems don’t feel that kind of safety and the moments that they do, the hurt just spills out and can’t be communicated maturely in a way that builds strong and vulnerable community. There’s a greater need for support than anyone can give. 

I think in a culture that values individual success and achievement and having space from others when they annoy you instead of working around your needs and threshold and creating healthy boundaries so you can coexist, we don’t think that the average person needs it. We are none of us trained to give that, properly, we’ve not had people be that for us, well, except for God. And when we have that, we don’t see it, because no one has modelled it to us and we don’t think we need it. We don’t realise our community relies on it, little bit by little bit, giving and taking it in a way that creates balance, creates equality in the banks of social capital and tanks of capacity to give, as we invite more people in rather than turn them away. 

Of course to get there we need a lot of emotional maturity and ability to give, through things like therapy and I might also say education. But most of all we need the time and space to dedicate to this in a sustainable manner. I’ve done so in an unsustainable manner before, not realising what I was coming to to fill me up and then pouring out from, had me pouring more and being filled up less until all that was left for me to do was step back and analyse that need. One I saw all around me and everything we did drained us more and the math didn’t add up. We were feeding each other the gospel without ever applying it to address this pressing need that was obvious to me but apparently not everyone else, something that might have us functioning better, reaching out better in love and community and bringing people in, showing the gospel with our lives: we are liberated to connect. We are equipped to show radical love. 

I am now when I pace myself, but something about this community drains me more than it equips me and if it’s a choice between being able to give something sometimes or participate and vaguely give to the community but go away feeling drained and unable to give anywhere else—including the job that I support myself with—I know which one I’m going to choose. For so long I didn’t. 

And somehow I think I’m not the only one. I’m unique in that I’m southeast asian and naturally tend towards more community-centred interaction and collectivist responsibility. I’m unique in that I grew up in western sydney and had that loyal hard work and resourceful problem-solving attitude that doesn’t see community and relationships as transient but rather something to work on building from a very young age. I don’t understand how people cut and run. I don’t understand how they think about what they can get unless their bodies force them to. Part of that is related to my faith too. Maybe it contributes to my curiosity and constant stream of ideas on how we show the gospel to more people and throw off whatever in our culture is unhelpful. Ideas I feel desperate to at least talk about because of all the need around me. That I felt the structures of ministry actually holding me back from meeting. The community I thought I was in exhausting me, no one there to listen when I wanted to fix it, work on it, but I knew I couldn’t do it alone. People who, bless them, felt nothing was wrong and it is such a privilege to feel that from the status quo, not have to invest all your emotional energy into living with the feeling of injustice everywhere. 

I guess we’ve lived in this normalised superficial connection, living in what most of history would consider mansions one for each nuclear family, nucleated, requiring a car and a concrete plan in order to have a deep conversation with someone, actually connect, with anyone who isn’t your parents, children, siblings, or spouse if you’re married. The ecosystem is simply too small to meet our needs and I think we just forgot we have them? No wonder youth love camps so much. It’s a different community setup, something that meets the needs we have that the setup of our settlements have taken away from us. Would it be that we could congregate at the church after work and it only be a minute’s walk home after. Would it be that connecting with this community didn’t take up our entire Sunday, so that we could have some time to do our chores and connect with our family, as well as get our in the community and connect there too. Outreach. But the design of our city functions to keep us as far away from each other as possible. 

Let me unpack that. Basically, we’re designed around cars, which keep us from interacting in transit with those close in proximity to us except in road rage. Our jobs are transient and we don’t live near them, resulting in long and lonely commutes that extend our work days by hours. We’re left with little interaction in our schedules except with those we live with and share facilities with, or those we work with, or do hobbies with if we have time and money for them. Which you have to drive to, like church. Our schedules are organised around work, sleep, whatever we put in them—little incidental interaction and a lot of striving towards what we do for work, doing better at our hobbies, being a better, kinder person to those we live with. And when we do interact outside it’s a show, for the Pinterest house or the Instagram story about our gatherings—not always, but when you’re invited in first, you have to get through these and spend the required money and do the required tidying in hope that someone lets you in deeper as you keep extending the invitation. 

As young adults, we have work and study and hobbies and we long for the connection of camps whether we live with our parents—or we live out of home and struggle to pull together rent so that we can work a bit closer to that. But the locations we can find housing in impact this, impact our access to our loved ones who we are properly close with, we end up shuffled around for work, we can’t live close to the church or other base for community in order that it might have the least barriers (many of us are disabled, neurodivergent, many of us are struggling in different ways and society often doesn’t help us meet our needs) and barriers are just too many. We learn to live without that biblical connection we long for. 

We learn to study and get jobs and maybe afford therapy, but we only live one day at a time. Maybe we get cynical, maybe we struggle more and more socially, maybe we never end up being able to reach out to the new person and maybe we lose the ability to reach out beyond our faith. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it go on and spiral further and I’ve seen many give up on creating a community in which we can heal and let down our guards and actually grow. I’ve seen the way we as a church, people of all ages, hide behind our serving roles—I know this doesn’t work for me. I know I long for more, to do more, to prayerfully sustain myself in community as I do—and I need community who can support me in that, I can’t do it alone. 

So I don’t know what to do except create a vision of a better way to settle and dwell as humans who care for the world—a way that facilitates our caring, a way that optimises our emotional energy and creates the most social capital, academically this is the thing that keeps community organisations and churches going and functioning, even if they also require money donated and we also believe in a supernatural provision—this provision comes in the form of financial yes but mostly social capital. I’ve exhausted myself because I know when I’m fed in community I do have that. But when my needs aren’t met I have to look after myself. I’ve spent so much of my life trying to turn around this freight train of our culture and now I’m doing the smart thing: getting qualified to lay the tracks. 

This is why I can’t at the moment serve in any other way. But I can analyse demographic patterns of poverty and how that flows on in areas of little access to resources and I can analyse the impact of growing up middle class and suddenly being an adult, perhaps a burnt out gifted kid, who suddenly has to work for the most basic things. I can analyse how these areas, the areas many of us might move to and be surprised, have higher rates of domestic violence mental illness and greater need for the gospel and its implicit empathetic witness to our pain and captivity, but less resources to pour this out. I can analyse how people who don’t interact with those experiencing these things and learn their stories tend to blame them or not believe their needs. I can weave these strings together as I come up with ideas, it’s what I do best. 

But as I zoom into a group of young people who don’t know how to have the leadership and emotional maturity to create a spiritually mature group—a demographic in social poverty who have grown up, the first generation outside a few selective schools academically, pressured to perform and view any kind of productivity and performance over connection—not to invest in social capital, not to invest in each other when our pressures on our time of study and work are too much. Both men and women now, it used to only be men. I don’t know what anyone else has been ordained to do, but for me I can rebel against the world by using my productivity to build relationships. Build community. And maybe that’s the thing we all need to be convicted of. Rooted in the convictions we have, but actually making a difference in the choices that we make: a practical theology, not just a belief

"Reviving Faith Locally and Nationally: Igniting the Flame of Revivals"

   Although the Renaissance and Reformation eras are considered the beginning of the spread of the word of God throughout the world, revivals that would periodically occur were not only the Holy Spirit’s showers that would water the seeds that had been sown but also the occasions when God would awaken men and women from their sleep and prepare them to carry out His work effectively.    Revivals…

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Welcome to The Crossway Blog. Feel free to ask questions about the Christian faith, even if they are difficult questions or question you might feel should not be asked. There are no wrong or bad questions and this community exists to help guide everyone with these questions and with difficult themes. I will, from my side, try my best to answer the questions according to the Word and message of God.

What Do You Long For?

Everything that exists, had a beginning in the possibility of longing for it.

Indeed, what do you long for? Before anything ever came into being, it was dreamed for. Everything that exists, had a beginning in the possibility of longing for it. I think it is inappropriate for me to ask you such a question, without first telling you what it is I long for. And there are so many things that I long for! Yet, I offer just a few of them… I am a hospital chaplain. I dream of a…

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"In community we work out our connectedness to God, to one another, and to ourselves. It is in community where we find out who we really are. It is life with another that shows my impatience and life with another that demonstrates my possessiveness and life with another that gives notice to my nagging devotion to the self. Life with someone else, in other words, doesn’t show me nearly as much about his or her shortcomings as it does about my own. In human relationships I learn how to soften my hard spots and how to reconcile and how to care for someone else besides myself. In human relationships I learn that theory is no substitute for love. It is easy to talk about the love of God; it is another thing to practice it."

- Joan Chittister

Finding the Strength to Endure in a Faith Community: Sunday Devotion

Hebrews 10: 23-25   Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching. We can and should have private daily devotions. However, when trials…

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It comes a day and a time when pacified ideologies of inclusion must be faced with true. Because in the wake of much turmoil, much hate, and much disharmony lies chaotic confusion often caused by a lack of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding.

Today, and I'm sure in the past, many Christians and those who profess a claim that they are believers in God often have a distorted view of who He is. Scripture means nothing to a lot of people who have called themselves believers aside from receiving what it is he/she wants.

Many even now with what's going on in the land of Israel, where God has chosen as his people, do not understand the reason many are prioritizing prayer for Israel. It's not about being desensitized from others who are hurting or suffering from this tragic moment in history. But has everything to do with wanting peace in the land of Israel based on what is written in scripture.

So many people have become utterly lost from the truth. End-time prophecy isn't the sweet satisfying message Christians wish to hear. The truth of God's wrath doesn't gain the same hand claps as sowing a large "seed" to receive a church building or a house.

It's time we get candid about the Word of God because the truth is it isn't based upon our emotional feelings or political correctness. There's so much misinformation that has people confused. But there's a theological answer available to God's children through His Holy Spirit of Truth in Jesus's name.

People would say now more than ever, but the reality is now, like always and forever people need truth. God is not a man who should lie. He allowed us to have both His Word and His Holy Ghost that we may obtain knowledge, wisdom, and understanding of His Truth.

It won't ever change. Not even for this current culture. People on this earth will make things sound good, and will even use scripture in a way to accredit their lies. That's why Christians must know the Word of God for themselves.

While those upbeat sermons about a new house, a new car, God not wanting you financially perplexed, and how anything you do is okay may sound good. The Bible lets us know that while you may be blessed financially, with a house, and clothes it's not the mission.

Today, it is time to grow in Christ. It's time to get back to sound biblical doctrine. Lives depend upon truth. Untainted, tough, profound truth is a must. Because the mission is and always has been about redemption in the blood of Jesus. It's our mission to spread His gospel to this dying and very lost world.

🕊️💕

¹⁷ “You can throw us into the blazing furnace. The God we serve is able to save us from the furnace and your power. If He does this, it is good. ¹⁸ But even if God does not save us, we want you, our king, to know this: We will not serve your gods. We will not worship the gold statue you have set up.”

—‭‭Daniel 3:17-18

Writing Accessibility PSA

Please avoid using long strings of characters as line breaks in your writing - these are not screen reader/TTS friendly!

Every ‘°’ will be read as ‘degree’ - can you imagine how long it takes to read out a string of 25? Let alone more complicated combinations of characters (eg. imagine listening to TTS read out ~*~ |°| ~*~ multiple times per line break)?

A good rule of thumb is to stick with short, 2-3 character line breaks (eg. I don’t find — or *** too egregious to listen to). Your readers can tell there’s been a scene change whether you use two or twenty em-dashes, but if you use twenty, some of us might have to listen for 30 seconds to read the next scene. If you’re more concerned about aesthetics, you can insert an image of your aesthetically pleasing line break with alt text simply reading ‘line break’ for accessibility.

Don’t feel bad if this is something you’ve never thought about before - now you know better and can make your writing more accessible moving forward!

I would like to invite any other screenreader users to add their own thoughts or preferences to this post. We’re not a monolith and there’s a variety to how different softwares interact with repeating character strings and images with alt text, so there’s bound to be some conflicting opinions on what I’ve suggested above. Let’s try to make the stories we share accessible for everyone :]