Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09030. Recognising an unhealthy church is harder than it sounds, because the warning signs rarely arrive labelled. They arrive as enthusiasm, as loyalty, as a strong sense of mission. By the time people realise something has gone wrong, they have usually invested years and friendships in the place, and leaving feels like a betrayal….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09046. The church exists for reasons that Scripture states plainly, and yet ask a dozen churchgoers what those reasons are and you will get a dozen answers, most of them about what the church does for them. That is not a cynical observation. It is what happens when a congregation stops asking the question…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09029. Deciding whether to leave a church is one of the loneliest decisions a Christian makes, and it is usually made badly. People stay far too long in places that are damaging them, or they walk out over something that would have been settled by one honest conversation. Both mistakes hurt, and both are…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 09045. Messianic Jews are Jewish people who have come to believe that Jesus is the promised Messiah and who continue to live as Jews, often worshipping in congregations that keep the Sabbath, mark the biblical feasts and use Hebrew in their services. Some evangelicals regard the movement with suspicion, as though a believer who…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09028. Expository preaching is preaching in which the point of the passage is the point of the sermon. The preacher works through a text, explains what it means in its own context, and then presses that meaning on the congregation. The shape of the sermon comes from the shape of the text rather than…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09044. Replacement theology, sometimes called supersessionism, teaches that the church has taken Israel’s place in the purposes of God, so that the promises made to Abraham and David now belong to believers in Jesus and there is no distinct future for the Jewish people as a nation. It has been the majority Christian position…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09027. The regulative principle of worship is the rule that a church may include in its public worship only what Scripture positively commands or clearly implies. Anything not warranted by the Bible is excluded, not because it is wicked but because God has not asked for it. It came out of the Reformation, it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09043. The church began on a particular day, in a particular city, at a particular hour, and I think you can put your finger on it. That claim sounds oddly confident to anyone who has been taught that the church is simply the people of God in every age, stretching back to Adam. But…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09042. Eastern Orthodoxy is the Christian tradition most Western believers know least about, and that ignorance runs both ways. Ask an average British evangelical what Eastern Orthodoxy teaches and you will usually get something about icons and beards. Ask an Orthodox believer what Baptists believe and you may get something equally thin. Since a…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09024. Few subjects make a congregation more uncomfortable than church discipline. The phrase conjures images of Puritan stocks, cold hearted committees and people driven out of fellowship over trivia, and the abuses have been real enough to justify the flinch. So most churches quietly do nothing, and serious sin goes unaddressed until it does…