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…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9094. The phrase breaking bread appears often enough in the New Testament that people assume it always means the same thing, and that assumption causes a good deal of confusion about whether the Lord’s Supper was originally a full meal. It is a fair question, and the answer is more interesting than a simple…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09087 Whether a congregation can stop being a true church is not a theoretical question in Britain, where a good many buildings still open on Sunday for gatherings in which the gospel has not been preached for two generations. The question is uncomfortable because it requires a judgement about other Christians, and we are…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 09086 The relationship between the universal church and the local congregation is one of those doctrines that quietly determines how people live. Get it wrong in one direction and you end up with a Christian who belongs to everything in general and nothing in particular. Get it wrong in the other and you end…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9093. Questions about church and state partnership land on my desk more often than people might expect. A council officer offers a grant for the toddler group, a school asks whether the church hall can host a breakfast club, a housing charity funded by the local authority wants to run a debt advice service…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09085 Flag waving in church covers two quite different practices that often get muddled in the same conversation. One is the use of coloured banners and flags in worship, common in charismatic settings and increasingly seen elsewhere. The other is the display of a national flag inside the building, which raises questions about patriotism,…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 09066. Consubstantiation is the term commonly used for the Lutheran understanding of the Lord’s Supper, in which the body and blood of Jesus are truly present in, with and under the bread and wine, while the bread and wine remain fully bread and wine. Both are there together, which is what the prefix is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09083 Church tax exemption comes up more often now than it did twenty years ago, and the question is usually asked with an edge. Why should religious organisations receive relief that a small business does not? Is a church that accepts favourable treatment from the state compromised by it? Both are fair questions and…
Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 09065. Transubstantiation is the Roman Catholic teaching that in the Mass the bread and wine are changed in their substance into the actual body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus, while the appearances of bread and wine, what the medieval theologians called the accidents, remain unchanged. It is not a metaphor about spiritual benefit….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09081 Whether pastors and teachers in Ephesians 4:11 describe one office or two is one of those questions that looks like a footnote and turns out to shape a great deal. It affects who we appoint, what we expect of them, and how we read the qualification lists in the Pastoral Epistles. The verse…