Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 09050 The office of deacon is one of the most familiar features of church life and one of the least well understood. In many churches, deacons have become the governing board, the decision-making body, or the gatekeepers of congregational power. In others, the role has been reduced to practical tasks with no real spiritual…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 09052 Church membership is unfashionable in an age that prizes individual autonomy and resists anything that feels like institutional commitment. Many believers attend a church regularly without ever formally committing to it, treating the congregation as a service provider rather than a covenant community. But the New Testament does not describe the Christian life…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 09048 How a church organises its leadership and decision-making is not a matter of indifference. The New Testament does not leave us to improvise. While it does not prescribe a single rigid organisational chart, it does establish clear principles about who leads, how authority is exercised, and where accountability lies. The question of church…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 09049 The role of elders is one of the most important and most misunderstood subjects in church life. Some churches have elders in name but give them no real authority. Others vest so much power in a single leader that the plurality the New Testament assumes has vanished entirely. Understanding what Scripture actually says…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09043 The question of when the church began is not a matter of historical curiosity but a question with significant theological consequences. The answer determines how we understand the church’s relationship to Israel, the nature of the church itself, and the way we read large sections of both the Old and New Testaments. The…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09046 The church exists for a reason. It was not an accident, an afterthought, or a social convenience. Christ brought it into being at a specific moment in redemptive history for specific purposes, and understanding those purposes is essential for any local church that wants to be faithful to its calling rather than simply…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09038 The church and the kingdom of God are closely related, and in popular Christian language they are often treated as interchangeable. They are not. Understanding the distinction between them is essential for reading the New Testament accurately, and the failure to distinguish them produces real confusion about what the church is called to…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09039 The principle of the local church’s autonomy is one of the most distinctive features of Baptist ecclesiology, and it is not a quirk of tradition but a conviction drawn from the New Testament itself. Understanding what local church autonomy means, what it protects, and where its limits lie is essential for any believer…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09036 A church covenant is a voluntary agreement among the members of a local church that expresses their shared commitments to one another and to the life of the congregation. It is not a contract in the legal sense, nor is it a creedal statement defining what the church believes. It is a relational…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09034 The relationship between the church and the state is one of the most consequential questions in Christian ethics and ecclesiology. It touches on everything from whether Christians should pay taxes to whether the church should challenge unjust laws, from the extent of government authority to the limits of Christian obedience. The New Testament…