About Us

About Christian Fellowship Church, Dubai

Christian Fellowship Church, Dubai, UAE is a local church that was born through the ministry of Bro. Zac Poonen. In 1989, some believers in Dubai, after hearing Zac Poonen’s audio tapes and reading his books became interested in knowing more about the new covenant truths that he was preaching. God then sovereignly arranged for Brother Zac to visit Dubai for meetings, for the first time, in 1990. In subsequent years, he visited Dubai a number of times for meetings and some believers became interested in these truths. Initially, it was mostly Malayalam-speaking believers alone who came to the meetings. But some years later, the Lord broke down the language barrier and drew believers from different communities and backgrounds who were eager to live the new-covenant life. Then these believers became a multi-cultural church, and an expression of the Body of Christ.

The main meeting of Christian Fellowship Church, Dubai (CFC Dubai) is held in English, every Sunday at Sharjah Worship Centre. And weekday meeting is held every Wednesday at 8 pm online (Zoom).
All are welcome.

CFC Dubai is led by three elders – Thomas Koshy , Prince Philipose and Aaron Monteiro who are working in secular jobs in UAE.

Find more about CFC India…

About Zac Poonen

Zac Poonen was formerly an Indian Naval Officer who has been serving the Lord in India for nearly 50 years as a Bible-teacher. He has responsibility for a number of churches in India and abroad He has written more than 25 books and numerous articles in English – which have been translated into many Indian and foreign languages. His messages are available on audio CDs and video DVDs.

That the Bible (66 books) is the inspired and infallible Word of God, the sole and sufficient guide for our life on earth.
That there is one God eternally existent in three Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
In the Deity of our Lord Jesus Christ, His virgin birth, His humanity, His perfectly sinless life, His substitutionary death as an atonement for our sins, His bodily resurrection, His ascension to the Father, and His personal return to the earth for His saints.
That all human beings are dead in sin and utterly lost and that the only way their sins can be forgiven is through repentance and through faith in the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.
In the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit, whereby a person is born again to be a child of God.
That justification is by faith in Christ alone, the evidence of this being good works that glorify God.
In baptism in water, by immersion, after regeneration, in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
In the necessity of being filled with the Holy Spirit continually in order to have power to be witnesses for Christ – by life and by word.
In the resurrection of the righteous to eternal life and the resurrection of the unrighteous to eternal damnation.

For a fuller statement of what we believe, click here.

Our Vision

The Lord planted CFC in Bangalore in August 1975. God gave them the opportunity to reach out to other countries through public meetings, conferences, radio and literature; and also through the distribution of thousands of cassette-tapes, CDs and DVDs and as a result of this ministry CFC-Dubai was formed in the 90’s and many more churches across the world.

As a local church, CFC Dubai’s Vision and burden is to demonstrate, proclaim and spread the missing messages in today’s Christianity and the New Covenant truth’s mentioned below without any compromise both locally and across the world as Dubai is home to more than 200+ nationalities.

Our Specific Calling as a Church is to primarily emphasize the below:

To demonstrate- new wine (the life of Jesus and the Divine nature) in a new wineskin (the local church as an expression of the Body of Christ, built according to the new-covenant pattern). (Matthew 9:17/ 1 Cor 12:12, 27)
To spread the truths related to an overcoming life. (Rev 3:21)
Radical Discipleship (Luke 14:26, 27 and 33)
The security that comes from knowing God as our Father (1 John 3:1, Mat 6:26, John 16:27)
Walking as Jesus walked in His footsteps, the power of the Holy Spirit overflowing from within us and partaking in God’s nature. ( 1 John 2:6)
The way of the cross and New Covenant. (Mat 7:13-14/ Jer 13:31-34, 1 Cor 11:25)
Overcoming all conscious sin, freedom from worldliness and the love of money ( Acts 24:16, James 4:4)
Freedom from discouragement, fear and anxiety (Heb 13:6)
Total obedience to the sermon on the mount (Matt 5, Matt 6 and Matt 7),
Faith that God would do for us everything that he did for Jesus ( John 17:22-23)
Building the local church as a Body. Rom 12:5/ 1 Cor 10:17, 12:27, Eph 4:12, 15-16 ( Encourage everyone to be an active member in the body) Heb 13:3/ Eph 5:23 , 1:22-23 / Col 1:24
To present every man perfect in Christ (Col 1:28, 29).
We seek to make disciples, baptize them and teach all of them to obey all that Jesus commanded (Matt 28:18-20).
Submission to all authorities. (Rom 13:1-6)
Being filled with the Holy Spirit (Eph 5:18)

Evangelism and Disciple-Making

In CFC, we have encouraged all believers to share the gospel with others personally. Thus many have come to Christ and been added to our church in past years.

Because we have a specific calling from God in CFC, we do not get involved with other ministries (such as social work) that might draw away our energies from our primary calling. We don’t want it to be said of us in the last day that “we took care of other people’s fields but did not care for the field the Lord had given us” (See Song of Solomon 1:6). So we leave such other ministries to those who feel called by God to engage in them, recognizing that the Lord has a different calling for each of His children. We have no desire to appear “balanced” in the eyes of other believers, by engaging in multiple ministries. It is God’s calling and approval alone that matters to us.

Because we are a growing church, we have a great responsibility towards the new believers who have joined us and also towards the many children who have grown up in our midst and become adults. All of them need to be made disciples.

New converts and growing children are both signs of a healthy, growing church. The new believers whom God has brought into our midst and our grown-up children are now our new field of work to teach them to obey everything that Jesus taught and to make them wholehearted disciples.

God and Money

In CFC, we adopted a radical attitude in relation to money, because Jesus said that we could not serve both God and money (Luke 16:13) – and we were determined to serve only God. In order to be absolutely above reproach in this matter, we made these practical decisions with regards to money in our ministry:

We decided not to have any paid preachers and not to collect offerings in any meeting. We would preach against the old-covenant law of tithing.
We would teach that all giving of money for the Lord’s work must be done cheerfully and voluntarily.
We would put no pressure on anyone to give any money.
We would send no reports of our work to anyone and we would never make our church’s financial needs known to others.
We would stand against the giving and receiving of dowry and we would encourage everyone to live free from debt (Rom 13:8).

By the grace of God, we have held to these new-covenant standards, right from the beginning. We have faced much opposition and criticism from other Christian groups and churches because of our strong stand on these matters.

But we know what we are standing for – and we will continue to stand firm for these principles until the Lord returns. All our elders support themselves financially just like the apostle Paul did. Paul did receive occasional gifts from some believers. But he was never dependent on anyone’s gifts for his personal needs or for his ministry. He trusted his heavenly Father to supply all of that. This is the stand we have taken too – and it is an integral part of our vision.

It is perfectly right for those who are engaged in the Lord’s ministry to be supported by others – for the Lord Himself has ordained that those who preach the gospel can get their living from the gospel (1 Cor 9:14). But Paul supported himself, because he saw the dishonor that was coming to the Lord’s Name in his time, through preachers who were using their spiritual gifts to accumulate wealth for themselves. So he wanted to be a pure witness for the Lord himself, in the midst of such corruption.

In Dubai, we found a similar situation. So in CFC, we felt the need, like Paul, to be different from the corrupt preachers around us, in money matters – as a testimony for the Lord in our land. This stand that we took has saved us from numerous Balaams, Gehazis and Demases who might otherwise have joined us and corrupted the Lord’s testimony in our midst. We never tell CFC believers how to use their own personal money. They are free to use that entirely as they wish – whether supporting missions or orphanages, or even giving to beggars on the street.

But the offerings given to the Lord in CFC, we use only in line with our vision – to make disciples and to help poor believers (Gal 6:10).

Ministries, Titles and Authority

Ministries: Ephesians 4:11 states that Christ has given gifted men to His church – apostles, prophets, evangelists, teachers and shepherds. The Lord in His goodness has given us all these five ministries in CFC.

But we do not call any brother by these titles or label any brother with them. (Paul called himself “an apostle” only because he wanted people to accept what he wrote as God’s Word. But there is no such need for anyone today).

We believe however in the exercise of these five ministries – and we have seen the glorious results that have come from these ministries being exercised in our midst. That is what is most important for us – and not who fulfills each ministry, for we are all one Body and only servants of each other.

Titles: The only titles that the Lord has permitted us to have are “Brother” and “Servant” (Matt 23: 8, 11). We are all to be “brothers” and “servants”.
Jesus said that when we have obeyed every command that He has given us, we can then call ourselves, “unworthy servants who have only done what our Lord commanded us to do” (See Luke 17:10). This is the title that we must all yearn for.

Submission To Authority : The Bible teaches us “to obey our leaders and to submit to them” (Heb 13:17). And so, we teach those who want to be part of CFC to obey this command of God and to submit to the local elders in church-matters.
We do not compel anyone to do so, for such submission has value only when it comes voluntarily. In some other churches, people are compelled to submit to the authority of a Pope or a priest or a pastor. But in CFC, we do not impose authority on anyone. We give freedom to believers to choose whom they wish to submit to. They can then voluntarily choose to submit to an elder in whom they have confidence, because they want the wisdom and protection that can come to them through such submission. Confidence in an elder is developed as believers observe the way he lives, the way he has brought up his family and how God bears witness to his ministry and on how fervently he loves the Lord, and also try to understand the motive in which he does things.

In the Acts of the Apostles, new converts were all added to local churches. The apostles then appointed elders (plural) over each church (Tit.1:5). Every church had at least two elders, in order to provide a balance in the ministry. These elders were to be spiritual fathers who shepherded the believers and enabled them to grow up to maturity. The elders themselves were in turn guided by the apostles or (in the absence of an apostle) by other more mature elders. This new-covenant pattern is what we have practiced in all the churches linked with CFC too.

Discipline of Believers And Elders : In all good families, fathers discipline their children where necessary. In CFC-related churches also, we believe in disciplining those who continue in sin (as taught in Matt.18:15-17), so that “a little leaven does not leaven the whole lump” (1 Cor 5:6, 7).

If two or three believers bring an accusation against the elder of a church, then the senior elders (and those with apostolic responsibility for that church) will investigate the charge carefully. If the accusation is found to be true, then they will follow the instructions given in 1Timothy 5:19-21: “Do not receive an accusation against an elder except on the basis of two or three witnesses. Those who continue in sin, rebuke in the presence of all, so that the rest also will be fearful of sinning…….Do nothing in a spirit of partiality”

This discipline is exercised without showing partiality to anyone. The elder will be disciplined in a way appropriate to the offence – and the whole church will be informed about it (as taught in the above verses). [As an example of this, we see the Lord telling the apostle John to inform all the churches about His rebuke of the five backslidden elders of churches in Revelation 2 and 3.]

In this matter of discipline, if a brother was given authority by God to appoint an elder in a church, then he can exercise the same authority to discipline and remove that elder if and when that becomes necessary. In the absence of such apostolic authority, the other elders of the church can also exercise this discipline.

However, all discipline is exercised in the spirit of love (as a father would), with the hope of finally restoring the believer (or elder) to the Lord and to the church (2 Cor 2:6-11).

Fellowship Between Local Churches

Churches linked to CFC are not a denomination. We are a fellowship of churches who work together because we all have the same vision. We have no central headquarters. We have no elections for leadership. We have no Superintendent or President. We have no central control of any church-property. Each church is independent under the Lord Himself. So, all appointed elders are answerable directly to the Lord Himself first of all. [This is the new-covenant pattern, as we see in Revelation 1:20, where “each star is in the Lord’s Hand”]. We do not have any dioceses or groups of churches that come under any “bishops” – as some denominations have. No local church-elder has responsibility for any church other than his own. And no elder is asked to submit to the elder of another church.

Paul did not make the churches he planted into a denomination. CFC and the churches linked with us are not a denomination either. Every church that the Lord has planted and linked to CFC, is totally independent – and is led by its own local elders. No-one controls those elders or tells them what to do. The Lord alone is their Head.

Elders may however seek the advice of more mature elders in other churches or from those with an apostolic ministry, when faced with problems in their own church – just like the believers in Corinth contacted Paul when they needed help with problems they had in their midst. Paul’s advice helped them to solve their problems at that time.

We constantly seek to build fellowship among ourselves in CFC-linked churches so that our unity becomes stronger, as one family in the Lord. This is one reason why we have frequent conferences for all churches linked with CFC.

Importance Of Family Life

In CFC, godliness in the family is of fundamental importance. So we have frequent meetings to encourage families to have good husband-wife relationships with mutual love and respect and to bring up their children in the ways of God. Wives are meant by God to be helpers to their husbands.

In CFC, we value their help immensely – to help their husbands in building their families and in the husband’s ministry. In CFC, we teach husbands to be good shepherds to their wives, by going in front of them as examples in every area. Since the daughters of God also can now prophesy, we encourage all sisters in CFC to be filled with the Holy Spirit and to seek for the gift of prophecy (Acts 2:17; Eph 5:18; 1 Cor 14:1) – that is, to share words that encourage and comfort and bless others (as we read in 1 Cor 14:3) – first of all in their own homes to their husband and children, and to other women.

CFC’s Future Leadership

In CFC, we encourage all our younger brothers to be wholehearted, so that God can give grace to some of them to become leaders for the churches in the coming days. Jealousy has been a big problem throughout human history. Cain was jealous of his younger brother Abel, and Saul was jealous of young David. And Christian history is full of examples of “elder brothers” who have been jealous of gifted younger brothers coming up – and have suppressed them. In CFC however, we encourage all elders to look out for godly young brothers with leadership potential and to encourage them and train them. Since there is no such thing as retirement in God’s work, an elder brother in CFC never retires. But just like fathers bring up their “sons” to maturity, and then pull back and let their “sons” run their own lives, older elder brothers in CFC also do the same. Such humble, godly, fatherly elders will continue to be respected and esteemed and consulted by their “spiritual sons” until the end of their lives.

“How good it is to see brothers dwelling together in unity…. It is only there that the Lord commands the blessing of eternal life” (Psa 133:1, 3). “Pay close attention to the specific ministry that you were given by the Lord and make sure you fulfill that” (Col.4:17).

Our Financial Policy

A genuine work of God may use money, but it is never dependent on money. It is dependent only on the power of the Holy Spirit. Where any work is dependent on money, it is not a genuine work of God.

Jesus’ ministry was dependent only on the Holy Spirit. He did accept gifts of money from His followers for His work (Luke 8:2, 3). But He never asked anyone at any time for money and He never made His financial needs known to anyone but His Father. This is the way that any ministry that honors God will work even today.

Jesus was the first physical “Body of Christ” on earth. Today we in the church are called the spiritual “Body of Christ”. And so we seek to follow the example that Jesus Himself set for us in the matter of finances, during His earthly life.

And so, in the four decades that we have existed as a church (since 1975), we have never asked anyone for money for our needs and we have never sent out any prayer-letters hinting about our needs either. We have never taken an offering in our church in Bangalore or in any of the many churches the Lord has planted through us in India and abroad. We only place an offering-box at our church-meetings, for those who wish to give – secretly, cheerfully and voluntarily – for the work of the Lord. We have also offered food and accommodation freely always to all who attend our annual three-day conferences in different parts of India. All the elders in our churches support themselves with earthly jobs (like the apostle Paul did) and none of them is supported financially by the churches. Our books, articles and audio and video messages on the Internet are also available for anyone in the world to read/hear/view freely. We have received everything freely from the Lord and we give it all out to others freely.

All of this ministry certainly requires a lot of money – and we don’t have any millionaires supporting our work in any of our churches. India may be a poor country, but we have sought the kingdom of God first – and God has supplied ALL our needs always. Therefore, we have never been in debt at any time since we commenced our ministry. We have never taken a bank loan or a mortgage for constructing any of our meeting halls. We do not judge other ministries who do things differently from us. But this is the way God has led us. We have sought to follow the example of Jesus Himself – the first “Body of Christ” on earth.

And so when people ask us whether they can give to support this ministry, we ask them to go through this checklist first:

Are you a born-again child of God? Do you agree with our doctrinal statement as given here: What We Believe? It is a great honor and privilege to support the work of God on earth; but that privilege is given only to His born-again children (3 John 7).

Do you have enough money for your family’s needs? Are you sure that your giving will not put your family under any financial strain? You must take care of your family’s needs first (See Mark 7:9-13 and 1 Tim.5:8). Our Father in heaven is very rich and He (like any rich earthly father) does not want any of His children to starve or suffer in any way, just because they gave Him money for His work.

Do you have any large debts to repay? If so, do clear those debts first. God wants His children to live restful lives, free from all debt. We must first give to Caesar what is his, before we can give anything to God, because God does not want us to give Him Caesar’s money, or anyone else’s money (Matt.22:21; Rom.13:8).
(Note: A house-loan is not a “debt” (in the meaning in these verses), because the house is an asset that you posses that is equal in value to the loan taken. For the same reason, a vehicle-loan is also not a debt – provided the vehicle is insured for the value of the loan taken).

Do you have a clear conscience? Have you done your best to be reconciled with those whom you have hurt in any way? God will not accept any offering from anyone who has hurt someone and still not apologized to that person (Matt.5:23, 24)

Are you giving freely and cheerfully – and not under pressure from any man or even from your own conscience? God loves cheerful givers, not reluctant givers. He does not want gifts from those who give under pressure, or who give in order to fulfill some obligation, or who give merely to ease their conscience, or who give in order to get some reward from Him in return (2 Cor.9:7).

Christian Fellowship Church – Dubai