Identifying and responding to cults and false teachings.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60098. Peter’s gospel and Paul’s gospel are treated by some teachers as two different messages, with the consequence that only Paul’s letters, and in the more extreme versions only his prison epistles, apply to the church today. The position is usually called ultra-dispensationalism or hyper-dispensationalism, and it needs answering carefully because it grows out…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60075. The cover-up culture that has come to light across parts of the charismatic and independent church world over the last decade is one of the saddest things I have had to think about as a minister. Case after case has followed the same shape, and the shape is what interests me here. I…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60074. The New Apostolic Reformation is the most influential movement in global charismatic Christianity that most churchgoers have never heard named. Its songs are sung in congregations that would be alarmed by its doctrine, and its assumptions have travelled far further than its label. I write as a continuationist who believes the gifts of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60073. The Turning revival began in Reading in 2016 and for a while it was the most talked about thing in British evangelicalism. Reports of hundreds and then thousands of people praying to receive Jesus on the streets travelled quickly, and churches across the country wanted to know how to get it. I want…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60072. The Latter Rain movement began in a small Canadian town in 1948 and has shaped far more of modern charismatic Christianity than most of its heirs realise. Its ideas are still with us, usually without the label attached. I write as a continuationist. I believe the gifts of the Spirit remain, and I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60067. Filipino Israelism is the claim that the Filipino people are the descendants of ancient Israel, that the Philippines is the land promised in Scripture, and that the prophecies of restoration point to the islands rather than to the Middle East. It is less familiar in Britain than its Victorian cousin, but it is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60066. British Israelism is the claim that the Anglo-Saxon and related peoples of north-western Europe are the physical descendants of the ten northern tribes of Israel, lost after the Assyrian deportation and rediscovered, as it happens, in ourselves. It sounds harmless enough at first, a piece of Victorian eccentricity. It is not harmless, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60104. The Nicolaitans are one of the small mysteries of the New Testament. They appear twice, both times in the letters to the seven churches in Revelation, and nowhere else in Scripture or in any document we can date with confidence to the first century. That has not stopped people writing confidently about them,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60082. Word of Faith teaching reaches more people worldwide today than most historic denominations do, which is one reason I think it deserves a careful answer rather than a dismissive one. Its distinctive claims are familiar even to people who have never set foot in one of its churches: that faith is a force,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60048. The prosperity gospel is the teaching that God wills every believer to be materially wealthy and physically well, and that faith is the mechanism by which those benefits are released. It goes by several names. Word of Faith. Health and wealth. Name it and claim it. Positive confession. The labels differ and the…