Lent 2024: True Fasting

At the Matthew 25 Initiative, we desire to see the unseen and the marginalized treasured.

This Lenten season, we will be telling the stories of the least of these through 40 days of Anglican-informed, inspiring, beautiful, and theologically robust engagement pieces — in the vein of the church's traditional disciplines of Lent:  prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.

For our third year of Lent, we once again invite you to join us on a journey of normalizing Anglican justice and mercy by thoughtfully engaging in this historic Christian season of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving – this time, through the lens of Isaiah 58:6-12. 

In this passage, the prophet Isaiah speaks God's message that he desires a certain kind of fast. What does it mean for us to engage in the kind of fasting that God has chosen? We are hard pressed to find a passage that is more Lenten in its explicit message orienting our gaze to the path towards Easter. 

Over the coming forty days of Lent, we will unpack a "true fasting," and we will ask the Lord to work in us and through us, on behalf of the least of these, connecting Isaiah 58 in the Old Testament with Matthew 25 in the New Testament.

The 40 pieces of content are inspiring, beautiful, and theologically grounded--provoking reflection on Christ’s heart for those who are vulnerable, trafficked, living in poverty, unhoused, and as refugees and immigrants far from home. The goal is an interweaving of scripture, socio-historic data, stories, saints who show us what it means to be contemplative-activists, prayer, and reflection to shape our souls in Christ-awareness and Christ-likeness.

Our aim is to provide you with rich resources asking the question: how do we engage our neighbors with kingdom "lenses" that nudge us to "draw near" like Christ in our particular time and place?