Is fasting a non-negotiable Christian discipline — or have we turned a sacred practice into a spiritual performance and Instagram trend?

• R

  Reese1w ago

  I did a 40-day Daniel fast three years ago after my wife left. Nobody asked me to. No church program. Just me, God, vegetables, and a whole lot of ugly crying. By week three something broke open in me that twenty years of Sunday services had never touched. I'm not saying fasting is magic. I'm saying God met me there in a way I didn't expect and haven't forgotten.

  187Reply
• M

  Maya1w ago

  I have a complicated relationship with this topic because I struggled with an eating disorder for six years and my church at the time kept doing corporate fasts and I genuinely didn't know how to opt out without explaining my whole medical history to people. Nobody talked about exceptions. Nobody mentioned that obsessive restriction can be a sin of a different kind. The discipline is real but the conversation is dangerously incomplete when we don't acknowledge that fasting can be a serious trigger for some people.

  161Reply
• RR

  Riley R.1w ago

  The question in the title frames this as either sacred OR trendy but that's a false choice. Something can be sacred and get co-opted by culture at the same time. Baptism is sacred. The Lord's Supper is sacred. Both have been cheapened and performed and turned into spectacle in various churches. The answer isn't to abandon the practice — it's to recover its meaning. Fasting is a genuine, ancient, Jesus-endorsed discipline. Do it. Do it quietly. Do it seriously. Stop waiting for your church to program it.

  156Reply
• TR

  Taylor R.1w ago

  Jesus assumed his disciples would fast. Matthew 6:16 — WHEN you fast, not IF. That single word has always settled it for me. We've gotten so comfortable in our Western Christianity that we've quietly dropped every discipline that costs us something physical. Fasting costs you something. Maybe that's why we don't talk about it.

  143Reply
• P

  Priya1w ago

  What bothers me most is how we frame fasting when we do preach it. It always gets turned into a tool for getting things from God. 'Fast and your prayer will be more powerful!' 'Fast to break through in your finances!' That transactional framing is almost worse than not fasting at all. Fasting is about who you are before God, not a spiritual hack to get better results.

  138Reply
• D

  Drew1w ago

  The Instagram thing is 100% real and it bothers me immensely. I've genuinely seen people post 'Day 7 of my fast!! Feeling so close to God 🙏✨' with a photo of their lemon water. That is not fasting. That is a personal brand.

  129Reply
• O

  Omar1w ago

  I spent six months in a monastery as part of a spiritual formation program. The monks fast regularly, moderately, communally, and quietly. There is no performance. No announcement. No one is posting about it. They eat less, they pray more, life continues. It is so normalized it has lost all self-consciousness. That's what a mature fasting culture looks like and it is utterly foreign to American evangelicalism.

  122Reply
• Y

  Yuki1w ago

  Nobody in my Baptist church growing up ever once mentioned fasting. 40 years. Not one sermon. I found out it was even a thing from reading a book in my thirties. That's a massive pastoral failure and I think it explains why so many of us are spiritually shallow — we were only ever given the comfortable parts.

  116Reply
• D2

  Diego 211w ago

  ok but can we be honest that 90% of 'church fasts' are just performance? the pastor announces it sunday, by wednesday everyone's posting what they gave up on facebook, and by friday they're at chick fil a. the whole point was to do it in secret. Matthew 6:17-18 is right there. we literally turned the thing jesus said to do privately into a GROUP ANNOUNCEMENT.

  112Reply
• A2

  Avery 211w ago

  Fasting is one of the three pillars in the Sermon on the Mount — giving, prayer, fasting. We preach on giving constantly. We preach on prayer constantly. Fasting? Crickets. Why are we so comfortable with two legs of the stool and pretend the third doesn't exist?

  105Reply
• SK

  Sam K.1w ago

  If you're a Christian who's never seriously engaged with fasting as a practice, I genuinely want to ask you: what exactly do you think spiritual discipline IS? Because the New Testament picture of following Jesus involves taking up a cross daily. It involves mortifying the flesh. If that sounds harsh or extreme, I'd push back and ask whether you've been sold a version of Christianity that's been deliberately stripped of its most demanding elements so it doesn't offend anyone.

  99Reply
• RL

  Reese L.1w ago

  To the person saying show me a Pauline command — why does everything have to go through Paul? Jesus said it. That should be enough. We don't require a second memo from Paul before we take Jesus seriously.

  94Reply
• A

  Avery1w ago

  God sees the heart AND He gave us the physical practice for a reason. The hunger is the point. The weakness is the point. Something about being bodily empty before God is doing something that 'giving up Twitter' simply does not replicate. I say this having done both.

  91Reply
• MS

  Marco S.1w ago

  ^^^ Thank you for saying this. I've worked in eating disorder recovery ministry for a long time and the number of women who've been spiritually guilted into fasting practices that nearly killed them is not zero. Spiritual directors throughout church history — including the Desert Fathers — acknowledged that fasting was NOT prescribed uniformly and confessors were expected to know their flock. We've lost that wisdom completely.

  88Reply
• I

  Iris1w ago

  Okay the Didache point is strong and I'll grant it. But the Didache also has instructions about baptism and eucharist that most Protestants completely ignore. You can't selectively invoke early church practice only when it supports your argument. Either early church tradition carries weight or it doesn't.

  84Reply
• J

  Jordan1w ago

  What even counts as fasting? My church says giving up social media for Lent is fasting. My grandmother would have laughed herself out of the room. Is abstaining from Netflix a fast? At what point are we just calling every inconvenience a spiritual discipline?

  83Reply
• A

  Alex1w ago

  Genuine question for the people saying fasting is optional: what do you do with the fact that when the disciples couldn't cast out a demon, Jesus said 'this kind only comes out by prayer and fasting'? Some manuscripts don't include 'fasting' there, I know — but enough do that it's worth engaging. Are there spiritual battles that simply require the kind of desperate, embodied seeking that fasting represents? I think yes. And I think we're losing those battles partly because we've abandoned the practice.

  77Reply
• Q2

  Quinn 211w ago

  Theologically speaking, fasting functions in Scripture as an embodied posture of dependence. It's not meritorious — it doesn't earn grace — but it is formative. It trains the will. The body is not incidental to spiritual life; the body IS part of spiritual life. Which is why Paul can talk about 'buffeting' his body and bringing it into subjection. Fasting is one primary tool for that. The church's abandonment of it tracks almost perfectly with the rise of a therapeutic, comfort-centered gospel.

  76Reply
• M

  Marco1w ago

  My honest answer is I've never fasted seriously and I've been a Christian for 31 years. And reading this thread I'm starting to feel a little convicted about that. Not in a guilt-trip way. Just... like I've been avoiding something hard and calling it freedom.

  74Reply
• J

  Jordan1w ago

  The Didache — one of the earliest Christian documents we have, likely 1st or early 2nd century — literally schedules fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays. This is not a medieval invention or a Protestant recovery project. This was the practice of the church from the very beginning. If you disagree with fasting you're not being more biblical, you're being less historically informed.

  72Reply
• L

  Liam1w ago

  The word in the NT for fasting (nēsteia) consistently refers to abstaining from food. Not from social media. Not from coffee. Not from Netflix. I appreciate the pastoral creativity but we shouldn't redefine biblical words to make the practice more palatable. Food fasting was the practice. Let's call other things what they are — media fasts, social fasts — and not pretend they're equivalent.

  67Reply
• I

  Iris1w ago

  To the person asking about beginner fasting — yes, start small. Skip one meal and spend that meal time in prayer. Don't announce it. Don't journal about it publicly. Just you and God and the hunger. It gets easier and it also gets deeper. The irritability is real and it will humble you, which is kind of the whole point.

  58Reply
• O

  Omar1w ago

  we been in a 21 day fast at my church every January for like 8 years. first year it was powerful. now it's just a thing we do in January. i think at this point it's habit not discipline and I don't know if that's better or worse than nothing

  55Reply
• T

  Taylor1w ago

  Counterpoint: spiritual disciplines aren't about the specific physical mechanism, they're about the underlying posture of self-denial and redirecting attention to God. If someone has a medical condition that prohibits food fasting, and they instead cut off the thing that most competes for their attention and affection — why is that automatically lesser? God sees the heart.

  52Reply
• C

  Casey1w ago

  Hard disagree that it's mandatory. Paul lists his own fasting in 2 Corinthians but never commands it universally. The early church fasted, sure, but lots of things the early church did weren't commands for all Christians everywhere forever. Context matters. Show me a clear Pauline imperative to fast and I'll reconsider.

  48Reply
• C

  Casey1w ago

  the 'stripped of its demanding elements' critique is fair but it cuts both ways. people have also added demanding elements God never required and called it holiness. discernment goes in both directions.

  44Reply
• N

  Nina1w ago

  Respectfully, 'my church never mentioned it' isn't a theological argument. Lots of churches fail to teach lots of things. That's a failure of discipleship, not evidence that fasting is optional.

  43Reply
• E

  Elena1w ago

  can we stop pathologizing everything. yes eating disorders are real and serious but using that to dismiss fasting as a practice for everyone is just letting the exception swallow the rule. doctors don't stop prescribing exercise because some people exercise compulsively. use wisdom, have shepherds who know their people, and keep the discipline.

  37Reply
• N

  Nina1w ago

  i tried fasting for the first time last month. skipped breakfast and lunch. by 1pm I was so irritable I snapped at my kids and spent the rest of the day feeling guilty about that instead of drawing close to God. maybe I'm doing it wrong. is there like a beginner version of this

  29Reply
• Q

  Quinn1w ago

  touché honestly

  19Reply

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