Guidance for serving Christ and His Church—evangelism, discipleship, missions, and pastoral care.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11025. The difference between preaching and teaching is one of those questions that sounds academic until you sit through a service where somebody got it wrong. I have heard lectures delivered from pulpits and I have heard rousing appeals delivered in Bible studies, and in both cases the congregation went home slightly hungry without…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1089. Scripture in counselling is where I keep returning whenever I sit with someone in pain, because the Bible speaks to the whole person, not only to their beliefs about God. I am not a trained clinical psychologist, and I refer people to good professional help when a situation calls for it. But as…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1088. Scripture in evangelism is not a set of proof texts we reach for after we have already made our own case. It is the message itself, and the power that makes the message land. I have shared the gospel in enough settings, from the pulpit to a hospital bedside, to know how tempting…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04121. Laying on hands for the sick is one of those practices that can provoke suspicion in one congregation and warm expectation in another, and I think both reactions usually owe more to cultural memory than to careful exegesis. Before we let televangelist excess on one side, or stiff cessationist caution on the other,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4087. Distinguishing spirit prompting from your own reasoning is one of the most practically pressing skills a Christian needs to develop, because the stakes of getting it wrong run in both directions. Claim the Spirit’s leading for what is really just personal preference dressed up in spiritual language, and you end up living by…