What the Bible teaches about the Church—its origin, nature, mission, leadership, ordinances, and practices.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09008. How often should we take communion? It is a question I am asked surprisingly often, usually by someone who has moved from a church that observed the Lord’s Supper every week to one that observes it monthly, or the other way round. Some Catholic and Orthodox congregations celebrate the Eucharist daily. Some Protestant…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9009. Churches answer the question of who is welcome at the Lord’s table in three broadly different ways, and open communion is the practice I hold and teach. The alternatives are held by serious people for serious reasons, and I want to give them a fair hearing before saying why I am not persuaded….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9007. When the bread and cup come round, somebody in the room is always wondering whether they may take communion, and that wondering is usually a good sign rather than a bad one. The people who worry about it are rarely the people who should be worried. My short answer is that believers may…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9006. The Lord’s Supper goes by a number of names, and each carries some freight: communion, the breaking of bread, the Lord’s table, the Eucharist, and in some traditions the Mass. What we call it matters less than what we think is happening, and on that Christians have divided more sharply than on almost…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9005. Christians disagree about the mode of baptism, with some pouring, some sprinkling and some immersing, and the disagreement is older than any of us. I hold that immersion is the normal and proper mode, and I want to give you the reasons rather than the tradition. I also want to say early that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9004. Infant baptism is practised by the majority of professing Christians worldwide, and any Baptist writing about it should begin by admitting that he is in a minority and that the people he disagrees with include many he expects to meet in glory. This is not a question about who is a Christian. It…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9003. The question of who should be baptised has divided sincere Christians for centuries, and it is not settled by asserting a tradition loudly. It is settled, if it can be settled at all, by looking at what the New Testament actually does and why it says baptism means what it means. My answer…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9002. Ask ten people what the church is and you will get ten answers, most of them about buildings, denominations or a vague sense of religious community, and the New Testament church is none of those things. The word in your Bible means something considerably more specific, and getting it wrong has consequences that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11091 Dancing in church divides congregations more sharply than the biblical evidence really warrants, and it does so because the argument is almost never about the texts. It is about culture, temperament, memory of previous churches, and a set of instincts that people find difficult to articulate. So let me try to separate what…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11031. The question of church liturgy divides evangelicals almost as neatly as music does, and usually for the same reason: we mistake our own habits for the biblical position. Baptists in particular tend to say we have no liturgy, which is never true. We have an order of service, a set of expected elements,…