Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9107. The complementarian and egalitarian positions are the two main answers evangelicals give to the question of how men and women relate in the home and in the church, and the labels get thrown about with far more confidence than accuracy. Before anyone can decide between them, they need to know what each actually…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11005. Nothing brings people to my study door more often than the problem of knowing God’s will. Should I take the job, marry this person, move to that city, train for ministry, stay or go? Underneath the particular decision there is usually the same anxiety: that God has a single hidden plan, that I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9105. What does 1 Timothy 2:12 mean in context? Few verses in the New Testament are quoted more often with less attention to what surrounds them, and few are dismissed more quickly by people who have decided in advance what Paul is allowed to say. I want to walk through the passage carefully, because…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11004. Christian giving is one of the few subjects where almost everyone agrees in principle and disagrees in practice. We all know we should be generous. Most of us give rather less than we imagine we do, and almost nobody wants the sermon. So let me try to make the case honestly, without guilt-driven…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 9104. The instruction in 1 Corinthians 14 that women should keep silent in the churches is among the hardest sentences in Paul for a modern congregation to hear, and the debate about whether it is a cultural instruction or a timeless one has been running for a very long time. I want to take…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11003. Ask about Christian tithing in most evangelical churches and you will get a confident answer: ten per cent, off the top, and the Bible says so. Ask for the New Testament chapter and verse that requires it of the Church, and the room usually goes quiet. I want to handle this carefully, because…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 9103. Few subjects can empty a church faster than a badly handled disagreement about women in ministry. I have seen congregations where the question was never raised until a crisis forced it, and by then positions had hardened, personalities had become involved, and what should have been a careful study of Scripture had turned…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11002. Biblical fasting is the deliberate setting aside of food, for a set time, in order to give undivided attention to God. That is the whole of it, and everything else people attach to the practice is either application or invention. It is one of the least discussed and most misunderstood habits in Christian…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 9102. The relationship between prophecy and teaching is one of those questions that looks like a technicality until it lands in the middle of a church meeting. Someone stands up in a service and says the Lord has laid something on their heart, and immediately the congregation is asking whether that was a word…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11001. Ask me how Christians should read the Bible and my first instinct is to ask what you expect to happen when you open it. Some people read the Bible the way they read an instruction manual, hunting for the paragraph that solves today’s problem. Others read the Bible the way they read poetry,…