Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09036 A church covenant is a voluntary agreement among the members of a local church that expresses their shared commitments to one another and to the life of the congregation. It is not a contract in the legal sense, nor is it a creedal statement defining what the church believes. It is a relational…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09034 The relationship between the church and the state is one of the most consequential questions in Christian ethics and ecclesiology. It touches on everything from whether Christians should pay taxes to whether the church should challenge unjust laws, from the extent of government authority to the limits of Christian obedience. The New Testament…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09035 The question of whether churches should be involved in politics provokes strong reactions on every side. Some argue that the church should stay out of politics entirely, focusing exclusively on spiritual matters. Others insist that the church has a moral obligation to engage with political issues as part of its prophetic calling. The…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09033 The question of whether online church can replace physical attendance gained urgency during the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of Christians worldwide were unable to gather in person. What began as an emergency measure has, for some, become a preference. The convenience of watching a service from home, the ability to access gifted preachers…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09031 Church planting is the intentional establishment of new local congregations where none existed before, or where existing churches are insufficient to reach the people in a given area. It is one of the primary strategies by which the gospel has advanced throughout history, and it has clear precedent in the New Testament itself,…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09096 The office of deacon is one of the most familiar roles in church life, yet what churches actually do with their deacons varies enormously. In some traditions, deacons function as a governing board. In others, they serve in a purely ceremonial capacity. The question is what the New Testament itself says about the…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 09097 Christians have practised communion weekly, monthly, quarterly, and at virtually every other interval imaginable. Some traditions insist on daily observance; others celebrate it only a handful of times per year. The strength of feeling on this question is often inversely proportional to the amount of New Testament evidence available, which is surprisingly thin…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09021 Presbyterian church government takes its name from the Greek word presbuteros, meaning elder, and it places the authority of the church in the hands of elected elders who govern both at the local and the regional level. It is the polity most closely associated with the Reformed tradition, practised by churches in the…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 09095 The question of how large or small a church should be generates strong opinions on every side. Megachurch advocates point to growth as evidence of God’s blessing. House-church advocates insist that anything beyond a living room has lost the New Testament pattern. Both claims deserve to be tested against what Scripture actually says,…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 09019 How a church governs itself is not a matter of indifference. The way authority is structured, decisions are made, and leaders are held accountable shapes every aspect of congregational life, from how doctrine is protected to how conflict is resolved. Congregational church government is one of the historic models of church polity, and…