Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09079 Church decline in Britain and across much of the West is not a matter of opinion. The buildings that once held four hundred now hold forty, chapels have become carpet showrooms and flats, and every denomination publishes figures it would rather not. The question is not whether it is happening but why, and…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 09064. The memorial view of the Lord’s Supper holds that the bread and cup represent the body and blood of Jesus rather than becoming or containing them, and that the table is chiefly an act of remembrance and proclamation. It is the position of most Baptists and independent evangelicals, and it is regularly dismissed…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09078 Ask ten church members what pastoral ministry involves and you will get ten answers, most of them shaped by the last minister they had rather than by the New Testament. Some picture a chief executive. Some picture a chaplain who visits and comforts. Some, increasingly, picture a communicator with a platform. The text…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09063. The meaning of communion is not one thing but several, and I suspect that is why so many believers take the bread and cup each month without being able to say what they are doing. We know it matters. We know it has to do with the cross. Beyond that most of us…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09057. The two ordinances given to the church are baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Jesus instituted both, commanded both, and gave the church no others. Everything else that congregations do, however valuable, is either an application of Scripture’s general instructions or a matter of Christian liberty. That claim needs defending, since Rome counts seven…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09077 Whether online church is biblical has moved in a few short years from a curiosity to a live pastoral question in almost every congregation I know. The technology arrived gradually, the pandemic made it universal, and a good many believers have never fully returned to the building. Their question is a fair one:…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 09056. Biblical excommunication is the final step of church discipline, in which a congregation formally removes an unrepentant member from its fellowship and no longer treats that person as a believer in good standing. The word itself means to put out of communion, from the Latin behind our word koinonia, fellowship, and it carries…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09076 People ask me what makes a biblical church far more often than they used to, and I take that as a healthy sign. It usually means somebody has been let down, or has moved to a new town, or has begun reading the New Testament and noticed that the churches described there do…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09038. Ask most Christians how the church relates to the kingdom of God and you will get a puzzled pause. The two terms are used almost interchangeably in ordinary conversation. People speak of kingdom work when they mean church work, and of building the kingdom when they mean growing a congregation. The New Testament…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09073 The Alpha course is probably the most widely used evangelistic tool in the English speaking church, and asking whether it is biblical tends to make people defensive on both sides. Some treat any criticism of it as an attack on evangelism itself. Others dismiss it wholesale because of its origins or its associations,…