Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9100. Are pastor, elder and bishop three different offices or three words for the same one? The New Testament answer is clearer than most church structures would suggest, and getting it right has consequences for how a congregation is led. My position is that elder and bishop describe a single office viewed from two…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 09092 Whether a congregation should be led by one pastor or by a plural eldership is a question with more practical consequence than most people expect. It shapes how decisions are made, how a minister is protected from himself, and what happens to a church when its leading figure is ill, or wrong, or…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9099. What distinguishes a parachurch organisation from a church? The question sounds academic until a congregation is asked to fund one, staff one, or send its young people away for a week with one, and then it becomes very practical indeed. My short answer is that a parachurch organisation is a voluntary society formed…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9098. A church covenant is a written statement of mutual promises that members make to God and to one another when they join a congregation. It usually speaks of walking together in love, of watching over one another, of attending faithfully, of contributing to the work, and of submitting to discipline where necessary. Some…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09091 The decision to leave a church is one that most believers face at some point, and it is usually made badly. Some go too soon, at the first friction, and repeat the pattern in every congregation they join. Others stay far too long under teaching that is starving them, out of loyalty to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9097. How often should a church observe communion? Weekly, monthly, quarterly, or whenever the diary allows? I have been asked this by members moving between congregations and startled to find the practice completely different from what they were used to, and by leaders wondering whether their own habit has any basis beyond inheritance. The…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09090 The objection to church membership is easily stated and deserves a straight answer. Nowhere in the New Testament does anybody sign a form, and no verse says that a believer must join a local congregation. Given that, is the whole apparatus of rolls, interviews and membership classes a human invention that we have…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9096. Ask ten churches to describe the role of deacons and you will get ten different answers, most of them shaped by whatever that particular congregation has always done rather than by anything in the New Testament. Some treat deacons as a board of trustees. Some treat them as junior elders. Some treat them…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 09089 To modern ears church discipline sounds like the opposite of love, which is why so few congregations practise it and so many members would leave if theirs began. The word carries associations of Puritan severity, public humiliation and religious control, and I understand the reaction even while I think it is mistaken. The…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9095. Whenever church size comes up in conversation, somebody always wants a number. Is a congregation of forty too small to be viable? Is a congregation of two thousand too large to be a church in any meaningful sense? I understand the instinct behind the question, but Scripture does not answer it the way…