Ecclesiology (Church)

Question 10203. Let me tell you plainly why dispensationalism matters so much to me, because it is not a dry label that I wear but a way of reading the ...

Question 09002 The word "church" is one of the most familiar in the Christian vocabulary, yet it is also one of the most misunderstood. In popular usage it refers to ...

Question 09045. Messianic Jews are Jewish people who have come to believe that Jesus is the promised Messiah and who continue to live as Jews, often worshipping in congregations that ...

Question 09087 Whether a congregation can stop being a true church is not a theoretical question in Britain, where a good many buildings still open on Sunday for gatherings in ...

Question 09090 The objection to church membership is easily stated and deserves a straight answer. Nowhere in the New Testament does anybody sign a form, and no verse says that ...

Question 09072 A March for Jesus, or something like it, comes round in most towns sooner or later, and the invitation usually arrives with an assumption that any serious Christian ...

Question 09086 The relationship between the universal church and the local congregation is one of those doctrines that quietly determines how people live. Get it wrong in one direction and ...

Question 09070 Should we seek gifts from God, or is that presumption dressed up as devotion? I have heard the question put both ways, sometimes by the same person in ...

Question 09071 The word ecumenism, and the ecumenical movement that carries it, has become one of those terms that generates more heat than light. To some it means everything good ...

Question 09069 Anyone who has spent time in church life knows that misused gifts are not a theoretical problem. They are a pastoral one. A gift is a good thing ...

Question 09066. Consubstantiation is the term commonly used for the Lutheran understanding of the Lord's Supper, in which the body and blood of Jesus are truly present in, with and ...

Question 09068 Few questions reach me more often than this one: how do I work out what my spiritual gifts actually are? It usually arrives with a little anxiety attached, ...

Question 09064. The memorial view of the Lord's Supper holds that the bread and cup represent the body and blood of Jesus rather than becoming or containing them, and that ...

Question 09065. Transubstantiation is the Roman Catholic teaching that in the Mass the bread and wine are changed in their substance into the actual body, blood, soul and divinity of ...

Question 09057. The two ordinances given to the church are baptism and the Lord's Supper. Jesus instituted both, commanded both, and gave the church no others. Everything else that congregations ...

Question 09063. The meaning of communion is not one thing but several, and I suspect that is why so many believers take the bread and cup each month without being ...

Question 09055. Church discipline is the process by which a congregation lovingly confronts a member living in serious, unrepentant sin, with the aim of bringing that person to repentance and ...

Question 09056. Biblical excommunication is the final step of church discipline, in which a congregation formally removes an unrepentant member from its fellowship and no longer treats that person as ...

Question 09053. Should Christians attend church? I am aware that a minister answering this question is like a barber telling you that you need a haircut, so let me say ...

Question 09054. The house church movement covers a wide range of groups who meet in homes rather than in dedicated buildings, usually with informal leadership, participatory meetings and a conviction ...

Question 09050. The role of deacons is one of the most misunderstood things in church life, and the misunderstanding runs in two opposite directions. In some congregations deacons have become ...

Question 09052. Church membership is a formal, covenanted commitment between a believer and a local congregation, in which the believer commits to the life, worship, discipline and support of that ...

Question 09048. Church government is the least glamorous subject in theology and one of the most consequential. It decides who chooses your minister, who holds the money, who can discipline ...

Question 09049. The role of elders is set out in the New Testament with more care than almost any other practical matter, and yet many believers could not name what ...

Question 09043. The church began on a particular day, in a particular city, at a particular hour, and I think you can put your finger on it. That claim sounds ...

Question 09046. The church exists for reasons that Scripture states plainly, and yet ask a dozen churchgoers what those reasons are and you will get a dozen answers, most of ...

Question 09038. Ask most Christians how the church relates to the kingdom of God and you will get a puzzled pause. The two terms are used almost interchangeably in ordinary ...

Question 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 ...

Question 09036. A church covenant is a written statement of the promises members of a congregation make to God and to one another about how they will live together. It ...

Question 09034. The relationship between church and state has produced more confusion, and more blood, than almost any other question in Christian history. Scripture gives us the principles rather than ...

Question 09035. Say the words church and politics in most congregations and you can feel the temperature change. Some believers are convinced that any political comment from a pulpit is ...

Question 09032. A parachurch ministry is a Christian organisation that works alongside the local church without being one. The prefix comes from the Greek para, meaning beside. Student unions, mission ...

Question 09033. Whether online church can replace physical attendance is a question almost nobody asked before 2020 and almost every minister has been asked since. Services went to a screen ...

Question 09029. Deciding whether to leave a church is one of the loneliest decisions a Christian makes, and it is usually made badly. People stay far too long in places ...

Question 09031. Church planting is the work of starting new local congregations, usually where none exists or where the existing churches cannot reach the population around them. It is not ...

Question 9099. What distinguishes a parachurch organisation from a church? The question sounds academic until a congregation is asked to fund one, staff one, or send its young people away ...

Question 09028. Expository preaching is preaching in which the point of the passage is the point of the sermon. The preacher works through a text, explains what it means in ...

Question 9096. Ask ten churches to describe the role of deacons and you will get ten different answers, most of them shaped by whatever that particular congregation has always done ...

Question 9097. How often should a church observe communion? Weekly, monthly, quarterly, or whenever the diary allows? I have been asked this by members moving between congregations and startled to ...

Question 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 ...

Question 9095. Whenever church size comes up in conversation, somebody always wants a number. Is a congregation of forty too small to be viable? Is a congregation of two thousand ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 09012. Asking whether there are apostles today gets a sharper answer than most questions about gifts, and the reason is that the New Testament uses the word in two ...

Question 09010. Ordination to ministry is the recognition by a local church that God has called and gifted a man for the work of an elder or pastor, and its ...

Question 09011. Good pastoral training begins in a local church, continues in a local church, and is tested by a local church, and any model that treats the congregation as ...

Question 09009 The distinction between open and closed communion is one that many churchgoers encounter without fully understanding. It determines who is welcome at the Lord's Table when a church ...

Question 9094. The phrase breaking bread appears often enough in the New Testament that people assume it always means the same thing, and that assumption causes a good deal of ...

Question 09092 Whether a congregation should be led by one pastor or by a plural eldership is a question with more practical consequence than most people expect. It shapes how ...

Question 9093. Questions about church and state partnership land on my desk more often than people might expect. A council officer offers a grant for the toddler group, a school ...

Question 09089 To modern ears church discipline sounds like the opposite of love, which is why so few congregations practise it and so many members would leave if theirs began ...

Question 09091 The decision to leave a church is one that most believers face at some point, and it is usually made badly. Some go too soon, at the first ...

Question 09008 The New Testament commands the church to observe the Lord's Supper but does not specify how frequently. This has led to considerable variation across Christian traditions, from daily ...

Question 09088 Few situations test a congregation like a fallen pastor, and few are handled worse. The instinct is either to cover it, in order to protect the church's reputation, ...

Question 09047. What makes a true church true? It is not a theoretical question. People move house and need to find somewhere to worship. Believers watch a congregation drift and ...

Question 09073 The Alpha course is probably the most widely used evangelistic tool in the English speaking church, and asking whether it is biblical tends to make people defensive on ...

Question 09006 The Lord's Supper is the second of the two ordinances Jesus gave to His church. It is practised in virtually every Christian tradition, yet the meaning attached to ...

Question 09044. Replacement theology, sometimes called supersessionism, teaches that the church has taken Israel's place in the purposes of God, so that the promises made to Abraham and David now ...

Question 09037. Talk of genuine revival stirs something in most believers, and it also makes many of us wary, because the word has been attached to so much that turned ...

Question 09005 Christians who agree that believers should be baptised sometimes disagree about how it should be done. Should the person be fully immersed in water, or is pouring or ...

Question 09030. Recognising an unhealthy church is harder than it sounds, because the warning signs rarely arrive labelled. They arrive as enthusiasm, as loyalty, as a strong sense of mission ...

Question 09003 Baptism is one of the most visible acts of the Christian life, and it is also one of the most debated. Who is it for? Is it reserved ...

Question 09027. The regulative principle of worship is the rule that a church may include in its public worship only what Scripture positively commands or clearly implies. Anything not warranted ...

Question 09083 Church tax exemption comes up more often now than it did twenty years ago, and the question is usually asked with an edge. Why should religious organisations receive ...

Question 9104. The instruction in 1 Corinthians 14 that women should keep silent in the churches is among the hardest sentences in Paul for a modern congregation to hear, and ...

Question 09079 Church decline in Britain and across much of the West is not a matter of opinion. The buildings that once held four hundred now hold forty, chapels have ...

Question 09081 Whether pastors and teachers in Ephesians 4:11 describe one office or two is one of those questions that looks like a footnote and turns out to shape a ...

Question 09077 Whether online church is biblical has moved in a few short years from a curiosity to a live pastoral question in almost every congregation I know. The technology ...

Question 09078 Ask ten church members what pastoral ministry involves and you will get ten answers, most of them shaped by the last minister they had rather than by the ...

Question 9103. Few subjects can empty a church faster than a badly handled disagreement about women in ministry. I have seen congregations where the question was never raised until a ...

Question 9100. Are pastor, elder and bishop three different offices or three words for the same one? The New Testament answer is clearer than most church structures would suggest, and ...

Question 9102. The relationship between prophecy and teaching is one of those questions that looks like a technicality until it lands in the middle of a church meeting. Someone stands ...

Question 9107. The complementarian and egalitarian positions are the two main answers evangelicals give to the question of how men and women relate in the home and in the church, ...

Question 9098. A church covenant is a written statement of mutual promises that members make to God and to one another when they join a congregation. It usually speaks of ...

Question 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 ...

Question 9105. What does 1 Timothy 2:12 mean in context? Few verses in the New Testament are quoted more often with less attention to what surrounds them, and few are ...

Question 09007 The question of who may take communion touches directly on how we understand the nature of the Lord's Supper and the community for which it was given. Different ...

Question 09076 People ask me what makes a biblical church far more often than they used to, and I take that as a healthy sign. It usually means somebody has ...

Question 09042. Eastern Orthodoxy is the Christian tradition most Western believers know least about, and that ignorance runs both ways. Ask an average British evangelical what Eastern Orthodoxy teaches and ...

Question 09085 Flag waving in church covers two quite different practices that often get muddled in the same conversation. One is the use of coloured banners and flags in worship, ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 09004 Infant baptism, or paedobaptism, is practised by the majority of the world's Christians, including Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and many Methodists. Given its prevalence, it ...

Question 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, ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 9110. The Evangelical Baptist Network is a relatively recent body, and it exists because of a specific crisis inside Baptists Together, the Baptist Union of Great Britain. It grew ...

Question 09024. Few subjects make a congregation more uncomfortable than church discipline. The phrase conjures images of Puritan stocks, cold hearted committees and people driven out of fellowship over trivia, ...

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Question 9009 When a church gathers for the Lord's Supper, who is welcome at the table? This question has led to different practices among churches, often described as "open communion," ...

Question 9006 Alongside baptism, the Lord's Supper is the other ordinance that Jesus gave to His Church. It has been called by various names: the Lord's Supper, Communion, the Eucharist, ...

Question 9007 When the bread and cup are passed at the Lord's Supper, a question naturally arises: who may participate? Is it for everyone present? Only church members? What about ...

Question 9004 Few questions have divided Christians more than the question of infant baptism. Some denominations practise it; others reject it entirely. Some see it as essential for salvation; others ...

Question 9005 Christians baptise in different ways. Some pour water over the head, some sprinkle water, and some immerse the whole body under water. Does it matter which method we ...

Question 9002 The word "church" is thrown around quite loosely today. People talk about "going to church" as if it were simply a building or a Sunday morning activity. But ...

Question 9003 Baptism is one of the two ordinances that Jesus gave to the Church, and yet it has been a source of disagreement among Christians for centuries. One of ...

Question 1135. Women teaching and preaching generates more heat in contemporary Christianity than almost any other practical question I am asked, and I understand why. Positions range from full egalitarianism, ...

Question 09200. The mystery of Christ is Paul's own name for a truth he regarded as the hidden centrepiece of his ministry: that Jew and Gentile would be joined in ...

Question 60076 Yinka Oyekan is one of the more visible and genuinely complex figures in contemporary British Baptist life. He is a man of obvious energy, real commitment to evangelism, ...

Question 9111. Religious consumerism is the habit of approaching church the way we approach every other service we buy, and it has crept into congregations so quietly that most of ...

Question 9112. The mystery of the church is one of those phrases that sounds forbidding until you discover what Paul meant by it, at which point it becomes one of ...

Question 9113. What role does the gathered church play in helping believers interpret Scripture? For many evangelicals the honest answer is none at all. We read our Bibles alone, we ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 9114. Touch not my anointed is one of the most misused sentences in the English Bible, and I have heard it deployed to shut down every kind of legitimate ...

Question 9109. How does a church honour spiritual gifts without sliding into charismatic excess? That question has followed me through my whole ministry, because I am persuaded that both errors ...

Question 01165. KJV-Only members turn up in most Bible-believing churches sooner or later, and how a pastor responds to them says a great deal about the health of the congregation ...

Question 0027. Few questions expose the fault lines in the modern church as quickly as whether unity can exist without doctrinal agreement. On one side stand those who say doctrine ...

Question 0028. Knowing which doctrines to divide over is one of the most important and most difficult judgements a believer ever has to make. Get it wrong in one direction ...

Question 0025. Acts gives us a photograph of the very first Christian community in Jerusalem, taken just after the Day of Pentecost, and the early church devoted itself first of ...

Question 10013. The Church and Israel are the two peoples at the centre of God's dealings with humanity, and whether you distinguish them or merge them will quietly determine your ...

Question 09000. Believer's baptism is the immersion in water of a person who has already trusted Jesus, as their public identification with His death, burial and resurrection. That sentence contains ...

Question 9. Doctrinal disagreement is not the end of fellowship, and I want to say that clearly at the outset because so many believers fear that it is. They imagine ...

Question 09001. Biblical ecclesiology is simply the doctrine of the church, and the word itself tells you where to start. It comes from ekklesia, the New Testament word usually translated ...

Question 2. Does doctrine divide the church? You have probably heard it stated as though it were settled fact: doctrine divides, but love unites. The idea is that if we ...