About Us
Who we are
The Faithful Remnant (TFR) is a worldwide congregation of Israelites who hold to the faith as Yahweh first revealed it. Loosely, the wider world might call that faith “Judaeo-Christian,” because we hold Yahweh as our Creator and Yah’shua as our Messiah. We use that label only as a starting point. We are not one more denomination among the many that already carry those names, because we believe most of them have drifted from what their own Creator asked of them, however sincere their members may be.
For many centuries, our brethren have been referred to as Yahweh’s Faithful Remnant - sometimes by those with knowledge, sometimes by those without. Yet our humble faith and teachings have remained unchanged; only the on-line convenience is new, and for this blessed experience, we are truly joyful.
What guides us
The Bible, as written. We read the Bible as our Creator’s instructions for the people He made: how we are built, how we are meant to live, and how we are to worship Him. Because those instructions carry His authority, we take seriously His warnings not to add to His Word or take away from it (Deuteronomy 4:2; Revelation 22:18-19).
His name. In nearly seven thousand places, and in more than 450 English versions of the Bible, Yahweh’s personal name has been replaced with the titles “God” or “Lord.” A title describes a role that many have claimed; a name belongs to one. We call on Yahweh by name, as Scripture instructs (Zechariah 13:9).
Our own Bible. That is why we publish the Natural Faithful Remnant Version (NFRV): the Old and New Covenants with Yahweh’s name restored, and free of copyright, because we hold that no one may own His Word.
How we are organized
We have no clergy and use no religious titles: no Rabbi, Priest, Pastor, Father, Reverend or Bishop. “You have one Teacher, the Messiah, and you are all brethren” (Matthew 23:8). The site and everything it receives are looked after by unpaid volunteer correspondents. After hosting costs, every dollar received goes to helping people in need.
Getting to Know Who and What We Are
Part One – Who and What We Are
We are The Faithful Remnant — a congregation of the true Israelite Faith, the Worldwide Congregation of Israelites, gathered around the faith as it was first revealed by our Creator, Yahweh. In the vocabulary most familiar to the wider world, that faith could loosely be described as a Judaeo-Christian tradition, since it holds Yahweh as Creator and Yah'shua as Messiah. We use that comparison only as a starting point for readers unfamiliar with us, however, because we do not consider ourselves one denomination among the many that already carry those labels. We hold that the great majority of the organizations most people recognize today as Christian or Jewish have drifted from what their own Creator asked of them, however sincerely their members may practice what they have been taught.
Central to our identity is our understanding of the Bible itself. We do not read it primarily as a historical record or a moral guidebook, though it is both of those things. We read it as something closer to an owner's manual — a document our Creator wrote and inspired specifically to explain how we are built, encoded quietly into our own biology, and how we are meant to live, function, and worship in light of that design. Understood this way, the Bible is not merely a book we choose to follow; it is instructions from the One who made us, written for our benefit, and it carries the weight that any manufacturer's instructions carry for the product they were written for.
That understanding shapes how seriously we take a single, specific change that runs through nearly every widely used Bible translation in print today: the removal of Yahweh's own personal name from the text, and its replacement with generic titles — "God" or "Lord." The distinction matters more than it may first appear. Consider an ordinary analogy: if someone asked what company built a particular product, and the honest answer was simply "a technology company," that answer would be true, but nearly useless — there are thousands of technology companies, and only one of them actually built the product in question. Knowing the specific company's name is what lets you reach its actual support line and its actual warranty, rather than whichever technology company happens to answer the phone first. We hold that Yahweh's name works the same way. "God" and "Lord" are titles — descriptions of a role that many beings, real and imagined, have been said to hold throughout history. "Yahweh" is a name — the specific, personal name of the One who actually created us, and the name Scripture instructs us to call upon, and no other, when we pray: “They will call on My name, and I will answer them” (Zechariah 13:9; see also, Jeremiah 29:12; Psalm 91:14-15).
We do not take this position lightly, or without scriptural grounding. Yahweh's own words warn repeatedly against altering what He gave: "You shall not add to the word which I command you, nor take from it" (Deuteronomy 4:2); "till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from My law" (Matthew 5:18); "Do not add to His words, lest He rebuke you, and you be found a liar" (Proverbs 30:5-6); and the sober warning at the very end of Revelation against anyone who adds to or takes away from the words of that prophecy (Revelation 22:18-19). Despite those warnings — warnings that remain intact in nearly every modern Bible translation, including the very translations that no longer bear Yahweh's name — the historical record shows Yahweh's personal name removed and replaced with the title "God" or "Lord" in nearly seven thousand instances across more than four hundred and fifty English-language versions of the Christian Bible, and in a number of Jewish Tanakh translations as well. We regard this as the single most consequential alteration made to the text, because Yahweh's own promise to answer the prayers of the faithful is, in our reading of Scripture, tied to calling on Him specifically by that name, not by a title so generic it could belong to any of the "many other gods" the Bible itself says exist. A prayer addressed to "God" in the abstract has, in our understanding, no guarantee of reaching the one Creator who made that promise in the first place.
That same conviction — that a title is not a substitute for a name, and that generic honor paid to a role is not the same as loyalty to the one who actually holds it — also shapes how we understand religious leadership within our own congregation. We do not use, and do not seek, honorific religious titles such as Rabbi, Priest, Pastor, Father, Reverend, Your Holiness, or Bishop, in keeping with the instruction: "You are not to be called 'Rabbi' ... because you have one Teacher, and you are all brethren. Do not call anyone on earth your father, because you have one Father, who is in heaven. You are not to be called instructors or teachers ... because you have one Instructor, the Messiah." We understand this instruction as a caution against any human leader accumulating the kind of reverence that belongs to Yahweh and to Yah'shua alone, however well-intentioned that leader may be.
Part Two – Why We Are Called The Faithful Remnant
Our name is not a marketing choice; it is a description drawn directly from Scripture's own vocabulary, which uses the idea of a "remnant" — a faithful few preserved out of a much larger group — across three distinct periods of the Biblical narrative. Taken together, these three appearances of the remnant describe both where we come from and what we understand ourselves to be today.
A Remnant of Survivors
The first appearance is historical. In the Old Covenant, the remnant was, quite literally, whoever survived a catastrophe. When Assyria and then Babylon invaded ancient Israel, prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah used the term for the small faction of Israelites who survived the invasions and the exile that followed (Isaiah 10:20-22; Jeremiah 40:11), and the Hebrew word itself, She'ar, carries that same sense of those who escaped a slaughter — Isaiah even named one of his own sons Shear-jashub, "a remnant shall return," as a living statement of the idea. When a portion of that surviving population eventually returned from exile to rebuild the Temple, the books of Ezra and Nehemiah call them, again, the remnant (Ezra 9:8). Even at this earliest and most literal stage, the prophets were clear that survival alone was never the point — Yahweh preserved this group not merely to keep a bloodline intact, but to maintain a purified, faithful core that genuinely relied on Him, in contrast to the larger nation around them that had not.
A Remnant of Grace
The second appearance shifts from physical survival to spiritual survival, and it is here that the Apostle Paul, writing to the earliest Israelite Congregation, re-applies the same Old Covenant idea to a new problem. In Romans 9 through 11, Paul confronts a hard question: if Yah'shua is the Israelite Messiah, why did most of the Israelite people of his own generation not accept Him? Paul's answer draws directly on the remnant doctrine. Quoting Isaiah, he writes that "though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, a remnant shall be saved" (Romans 9:27) — establishing that a faithful minority, rather than the whole nation, has always been how Yahweh's redemptive plan actually works. He then reaches back further still, to Elijah, who believed in his own despair that he was the last faithful person left in Israel, only to be corrected by Yahweh: seven thousand others had also refused to bow to Baal (1 Kings 19; Romans 11:2-4). Paul's conclusion applies that same pattern to his own era, and by extension to ours: "even so then at this present time also there is a remnant according to the election of grace" (Romans 11:5). The Greek word he chooses, leimma, means simply "that which is left behind" — the same idea as a remnant of cloth, cut from the original bolt but no less genuinely part of it. Paul is careful to add that this remnant exists purely by Yahweh's grace, not by human merit or ritual observance (Romans 11:6) — a distinction we hold to closely, since it means the remnant's identity was never a matter of achievement, but of Yahweh's own faithfulness to preserve a people for Himself even when the larger body around them had gone astray.
A Remnant of the Last Days
The third and final appearance carries the same idea into the future — into the Book of Revelation's description of the last days. Having failed to destroy "the woman," representing Yahweh's covenant people, the dragon — identified earlier in the same chapter as Satan — turns to make war instead on "the remnant of her seed" (Revelation 12:17). In the Greek, this remnant is loipos, "the rest" or "those who remain" — the final generation of genuine believers, standing at the very end of the age. Revelation does not identify this end-times remnant by ancestry or nationality, but by two specific, observable marks: they are those "which keep the commandments of Yahweh," holding to His law without compromise even while the wider world bows to other authority, and those who "have the testimony of Yah'shua the Messiah," which Revelation itself defines a few chapters later as "the spirit of prophecy" (Revelation 19:10) — an unyielding, prophetically-guided witness to the Messiah rather than a silent or private faith.
One Name, Three Appearances
We take our name from all three of these appearances together, not from any one of them alone. Like the remnant of the Assyrian and Babylonian era, we understand ourselves as a faithful minority that has survived — in our case, the steady erosion and alteration of Yahweh's original word described in Part One above — rather than one that has simply inherited a tradition unexamined. Like the remnant Paul describes, we hold that our standing before Yahweh rests on His grace and our faithfulness to Him, not on our numbers, our history, or any claim to legalistic merit. And like the remnant described in Revelation, we understand the marks of genuine faith to be observable and specific — obedience to Yahweh's commandments and a clear, prophetically-grounded testimony of Yah'shua the Messiah — rather than a matter of which label the largest number of people happen to be using. This last point matters enough to state plainly: nothing about being a numerical minority troubles us, and nothing about another tradition's much larger following makes that tradition more likely to be correct. A following of a few and a following of billions stand on exactly the same footing when the question is truth rather than popularity. We are content to be a remnant, and a faithful one, because Scripture's own pattern, in every age it describes, has never been the crowd.
Footnote
Humans everywhere know that our DNA coding exists, and that we function within the designed limits written into it. We also know that we are meant to conduct ourselves according to what is written in our Creator’s Bible, and that we cannot change either one. But that points to a fundamental gift our Creator bestowed on each and every one of us: free will. We can choose whether to obey His Bible, or to disobey it in favour of making up our own day-to-day operating rules as we see fit.
Ancient and modern Biblical scribes, loyal to the self-accredited leaders of many denominations of the Christian faith, have made thousands of deliberate changes while transcribing Yahweh’s original Bible manuscripts. In doing so, they have confirmed their belief that they know better, and that they know more about themselves and the universe around them, than does their own Creator. Fortunately, these same scribes have kept detailed, meticulous records of virtually all of the changes they have made to Yahweh’s Bible over the centuries, in their private church library vaults. Gaining access to any of these records is extremely difficult – we know, because one of our correspondents has done it. This difficulty is explained to interested parties as being related to our inability to understand the ancient language of the manuscripts, suggesting that the curious should simply trust the church leaders’ expertise and knowledge in these matters, and instead enjoy the more modern and much easier to read (copyrighted) traditional version(s) of the “Bible” that they have so generously rewritten and provided for us all. (With respect to making these altered copies of an original work, they rely on Yahweh not challenging them under the “substantial similarity” and/or “infringement standard” of copyright law.)