Closer than a Sister

I’m excited to tell you about a new project I've been working on with my publisher, Christian Focus Publications. My next book is titled Closer Than a Sister: How Union with Christ helps Friendships to Flourish (Focus for Women) and comes out this fall.

We live in an age where there is less and less face-to-face community. More people work at home than ever before. Our interactions with others most often take place through an intermediary device. We know what our friends are doing moment by moment throughout the day on social media, but seldom do we know what is going on in their heart. All of this makes the concept of friendship hard to define and even more confusing to know how to live out in our daily lives.  

Closer Than a Sister is about Christian community, and more specifically, community among women in the local church. It is about our need for Christian friendship and fellowship—real life, face-to-face relationships. Such friendship begins with our unity in Christ—for our union with Him creates and shapes our unity with others in the Body of Christ.

My book paints a picture of “sisterhood” by looking at descriptions of the church in the New Testament. It helps us see how important community is, what it looks like, and how to cultivate it. Specifically, it describes relationships that involve service, discipleship, encouragement, exhortation, and growth. It also takes a look at some of the challenges we often face in community. My hope for Closer than a Sister is to encourage readers to live out the unity we have through Christ in the local church.

Author Jen Wilkin wrote the foreword to Closer Than a Sister. She wrote: 

"No other kind of friendship can offer the strength of Christian friendship. It is, just as the Bible promises, a ‘cord of three strands, not easily broken’ (Eccles. 4:12), joining those who enter it with the strength of a covenant keeping God. Christina Fox knows that this bond is both sacred and sacrificial. In Closer Than A Sister she offers insight into how we can weave the cords of our friendships to last through any season. Like all good gifts, Christian friendship is to be sought and stewarded with wisdom and grace. The benchmark of lesser friendships will not do. You hold in your hands a primer on how to weave (and allow yourself to be woven into) that blessed tie that binds." 

Stay tuned for more about the book! If your church is interested in hosting a book launch party or in having me come and share about sisterhood in the church, send me a message. And I look forward to telling you more about Closer Than a Sister soon!