What the Bible teaches about the Church—its origin, nature, mission, leadership, ordinances, and practices.
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 09014 Baptismal regeneration is the teaching that the act of water baptism itself conveys saving grace and is necessary for the forgiveness of sins and the new birth. It is held in various forms by the Roman Catholic Church, some Lutheran traditions, the Churches of Christ, and significant strands of Anglican theology. It touches…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09022 Western Christianity has a persistent individualism problem. The dominant assumption in many evangelical and charismatic contexts is that the believer’s relationship with God is a private transaction, and that discerning the Spirit’s voice is primarily a personal skill to be developed in isolation. Scripture tells a different story. The gathered church is not…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 09114 “Touch not my anointed” is quoted with surprising frequency in certain church circles as a warning against criticising or questioning Christian leaders, pastors, or prominent figures. The appeal is almost invariably a misuse of the text, and understanding what the passage actually says is important both for good biblical interpretation and for healthy…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 9109 The church has always struggled to hold two things together: genuine openness to the Spirit’s ongoing work in equipping believers with gifts, and the biblical insistence on order, intelligibility, and discernment in corporate worship. The history of charismatic Christianity is littered with the wreckage of communities that lost the second whilst pursuing the…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 01165 KJV-Onlyism is the conviction that the King James Version of the Bible, published in 1611, is the uniquely preserved and authoritative Word of God in English, and that all modern translations represent corrupt departures from it. It is held with genuine sincerity and a real concern for biblical authority. It is also, on…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 0027 This question touches on one of the great tensions within the Church today. On one side are those who say doctrine divides and love unites, so we should minimise doctrine for the sake of unity. On the other side are those who insist that any doctrinal compromise is a betrayal of truth, so…
Reading Time: 8 minutesQuestion 0028 This is one of the most important questions any believer can ask, and it requires careful thought. Get this wrong in one direction, and you will divide over things that should not divide. Get it wrong in the other direction, and you will maintain fellowship with those who deny the gospel itself. The…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 0025 The book of Acts gives us a snapshot of the earliest Christian community in Jerusalem, immediately after the Day of Pentecost. Three thousand people had just been baptised. The church had suddenly grown from a small band of disciples to a substantial movement. And Luke tells us how they lived: “And they devoted…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10013 This question lies at the heart of understanding the Bible’s storyline. How we answer it affects how we read prophecy, how we understand God’s purposes, and how we see ourselves as believers today. The distinction between Israel and the Church is one of the fundamental insights of dispensational theology, and Scripture makes this…
Reading Time: 8 minutesQuestion 9000 See also YouTube video at the end explaining why we should be baptised. Believer’s baptism is the baptism by immersion in water of those who have personally trusted in the Lord Jesus for salvation. It’s not infant baptism, not sprinkling, not pouring, but the full immersion of someone who has already been saved…