Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11099 Should we expect persecution, or is that something that happens to Christians in other countries and other centuries? It is a fair question for a believer in Britain, where nobody is arresting us and the worst most of us face is an awkward silence in the staff room. Yet the New Testament speaks…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11098 Christian suffering is the question that empties pews and fills prayer meetings, and anyone who answers it briskly has probably not sat long enough with somebody in the middle of it. If God loves his people and has the power to help, why is the believer in the next street burying a child…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11097 The phrase alternative medicine covers such an enormous range of things that treating it as one subject is the first mistake most of us make. It stretches from a cup of peppermint tea for indigestion all the way to practices that involve summoning spirit guides, and lumping those together produces either needless panic…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11096 Should Christians use doctors, or does going to the surgery show a shortage of faith? I have been asked this more often than you might expect, usually in a low voice by someone who has been told by a well-meaning friend that real believers trust God rather than the NHS. The question deserves…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11095 Whether we should use instruments in worship is one of those questions that sounds trivial until you meet someone for whom it is anything but. There are sincere, Bible-loving congregations across these islands who sing unaccompanied on principle, and there are others where the drum kit arrived decades ago and nobody has thought…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11094 Ask ten Christians what music in worship is for and you will get ten answers, several of them contradictory and at least two delivered with some heat. Some treat the singing as a warm-up act before the sermon. Others treat it as the point of the whole service and everything else as an…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11093 Christian giving is one of those subjects that makes a congregation shuffle in its seats, and I understand why. Money is private, budgets are tight, and most of us have sat under at least one sermon that felt like a sales pitch. So let me say at the outset that I am not…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 62. Theological triage borrows its name from emergency medicine, where a nurse quickly sorts arriving patients by the genuine severity of their condition rather than treating every case with identical urgency. A broken finger and a heart attack both need attention, but not the same attention, and not on the same timescale. Theological triage…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11092 Saturday or Sunday is a question that arrives in two very different tones. Sometimes it comes from a believer who has been challenged by a Seventh-day Adventist or a Hebrew Roots teacher and is genuinely unsettled. Sometimes it comes from someone who simply wonders why the church meets when it does. Either way…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11091 Dancing in church divides congregations more sharply than the biblical evidence really warrants, and it does so because the argument is almost never about the texts. It is about culture, temperament, memory of previous churches, and a set of instincts that people find difficult to articulate. So let me try to separate what…