Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 09039. Ask a Baptist what makes his church Baptist and sooner or later he will say something about local church autonomy. It is one of those phrases that gets used far more often than it gets explained, and I have sat in enough meetings to know that people mean rather different things by it….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09022. We tend to treat guidance as a private transaction, which is why the role of the gathered church in discerning the Spirit’s leading strikes many believers as an odd idea. The modern pattern is that I pray, I sense a leading, I act, and the church finds out afterwards. The New Testament pattern…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09021. Presbyterian government is rule by elders. Authority in the local congregation belongs to a body of elders called a session or kirk session rather than to a bishop above or to the membership below, and those local bodies are linked together in a series of graded courts: presbytery, synod and general assembly. The…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09020. Episcopal government is the system in which authority in the church rests with bishops, who oversee groups of congregations and stand in a distinct order above the local minister. The word comes from the Greek episkopos, meaning overseer. Anglicans, Roman Catholics, the Orthodox churches, Methodists in many places and several Pentecostal bodies all…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09019. Congregational government is the conviction that, under Jesus, final authority in a local church rests with the gathered membership rather than with a bishop, a synod or a self perpetuating board. Baptists, most independent evangelical churches, the older Congregational tradition and many newer fellowships work this way. Decisions of substance come to a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09018. The doctrine of apostolic succession holds that the authority Jesus gave His apostles has been handed down in an unbroken chain of ordinations, bishop to bishop, from the first century to the present day. Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and some Anglican bodies rest a good deal of weight on it. On this account,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09017. Ask most people what divides the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches and you will hear about statues, the Pope and whether priests can marry. Those are real differences, but they sit on the surface. The things that actually separate the two are older and deeper, and they come down to two questions that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09016. The sheer number of Christian denominations is one of the first things an outsider notices about the church, and it rarely lands well. Somebody comes to faith, starts looking for a church, and finds that one small town holds a Baptist chapel, an Anglican parish, a Methodist circuit, a Pentecostal fellowship and two…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09014. Baptismal regeneration is the teaching that the new birth is conveyed through the water of baptism, so that a person is regenerated in and by the act itself rather than by faith in Jesus prior to it. It is held in various forms by Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, many Lutherans and Anglicans, and…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09013. Whether there are prophets today is a question I answer yes to, with a great many qualifications attached, and the qualifications are not small print. They are the difference between a healthy church and a wrecked one. I am a continuationist. I do not believe the gifts were withdrawn when the last apostle…