Summary
The BibleDocs Ichthys Community is a private (i.e., invite-only) online community designed to give followers of Ichthys.com and related ministries a place to connect with and interact with one another. The BibleDocs Ichthys Bible Study—one of the two BibleDocs Weekly Bible Studies that BibleDocs runs—is associated with this community.
For details on meeting dates and times, joining us in person, and joining us over Zoom, see the overview page for BibleDocs Weekly Bible Studies.
For details on how to join the BibleDocs Ichthys Community group chats, see here.
Overview
The BibleDocs Ichthys Community is a private (i.e., invite-only) online community designed to give followers of Ichthys.com and related ministries a place to connect with and interact with one another.
Those of us who have been involved with this community since the beginning spent some time going back and forth about whether or not to open our community up to the public, and ultimately decided that we wanted to preserve the deep intimacy that a completely private community gives us. In essence, we decided that the closeness we are trying to foster in this community can only be effectively realized if we are all more or less on the same page spiritually, and that means we have to restrict community membership to only those who actively follow Ichthys-adjacent ministries. Over the years, this has kept the community much smaller than it might have otherwise been, but very tight-knit. At time of writing, the BibleDocs Ichthys Community only has about 10 active participants, but all of us are deeply involved in praying for one another and supporting one another in spiritual growth.
Relative to the wider BibleDocs Open Community, the community we have built here is far more personal. For example, we share many more specific details about what is going on in our lives, and have more frequent conversations in the chats about just about everything, since we are some of each other’s closest people spiritually.
Many of the folks who participate in this small family-like community also participate in the wider BibleDocs Open Community too—it is just that the purposes are different. The public BibleDocs Open Community is designed to give people comfortable with making certain presuppositions about inspiration, inerrancy, and sola scriptura a place to discuss exegesis and interpretation in depth, whereas the private BibleDocs Ichthys Community is designed to give Ichthys readers and other folks in the Ichthys orbit a place to talk to each other online, since Ichthys does not itself organize anything along these lines.
The BibleDocs Ichthys Community discussed here is not run by Ichthys.com or Dr. Luginbill, meaning it is an unofficial online community for Ichthys readers. This is not to say that Dr. Luginbill disapproves of it in the least—quite to the contrary, he has regularly sent interested parties our way, and was quite enthusiastic about our efforts to establish this place for Ichthys readers to communicate with one another. It is just important to note that the community is neither organized nor managed by Dr. Luginbill in any way, shape, or form. Instead, I am the primary community administrator (you can read about me here), and moderation duties are shared between myself and a couple other Bible teachers in the group (such as Odii Ariwodo and Jordan Bomberger).
We did invite Dr. Luginbill to participate in the community if he was interested, but he thought it best to let it grow independent from his direct influence.
Joining the BibleDocs Ichthys Community group chats
We support multiple platforms:
Joining this private community happens one of two ways:
- You ask someone in the Ichthys orbit who knows you to vouch for you, and have them send me a request for you to join the community. (This could be Dr. Luginbill himself, some other Ichthys-adjacent Bible teacher, or one of the lay Christian members of the BibleDocs Ichthys Community).
- You contact me cold, and we get to know each other a bit before I add you, if we together determine that you will be a good fit.
The BibleDocs Teachers Community
We have a sub-community within the wider BibleDocs Ichthys Community for men who are Ichthys-adjacent pastor-teachers, so that we can have “how the sausage gets made” type conversations, outside of the view of lay Christians. If you wish to join this teachers community alongside the main Ichthys community, make sure that whoever sends me a request on your behalf to join the BibleDocs Ichthys Community lets me know that you need an invite to the BibleDocs Teachers Community too.
I should note that we do welcome pastor-teachers who are still more in the preparation than production stage of their ministries. The only requirements for joining this teachers community are therefore: 1) You feel called to the formal Church office of pastor-teacher (note that only men can be called in such a way; cf. 1 Timothy 2:12), and 2) You are a follower of Ichthys or some other related ministry in the Ichthys orbit.