Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 12000 Christian ethics is the study of how followers of Jesus ought to live, and that sounds dull until you notice that almost every difficult decision you will make this year falls under it. What you do with your money, how you speak about an absent colleague, what you accept at work, how you…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11107 Biblical parenting is a phrase that has sold a great many books, most of which contain considerably more method than the Bible does. Scripture is not a manual on sleep training, screen time or how to handle a fifteen-year-old who has stopped speaking to you. What it gives instead is a small number…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11106 Christian singleness is a subject most churches handle badly, and I include myself in that criticism. We build our programmes around families, we preach on marriage several times a year and on singleness roughly never, and then we wonder why unmarried believers in their thirties quietly drift away from congregations where they have…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 11105 Few phrases in Christian teaching have done as much good and as much harm as headship and submission. Used as Scripture uses them, they describe a marriage of extraordinary tenderness. Used as some men have used them, they have kept women in frightening situations and given the whole idea a stench it did…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11104 What Scripture asks of a husband and wife has become one of the hardest subjects to discuss calmly, partly because the words have been abused and partly because most people arrive at the conversation with a picture already in their heads. Some imagine a 1950s household with a silent woman and a man…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 11103 Gender dysphoria is a subject on which the church has managed to be both too loud and too silent, and the people caught in the middle of it are suffering. There are Christians who talk about it only as a culture war headline, and there are others who are so anxious about causing…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11102 Therapy and counselling make some Christians uneasy, and I understand why. The suspicion is that a secular discipline will quietly relocate the problem from sin to circumstance, tell you that you are fine as you are, and hand you a vocabulary of self-actualisation instead of repentance. That does happen. It is not the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11101 Should Christians take medication, particularly the sort that works on the mind? I get asked this quietly, often after a service, usually by someone who has already been taking it for months and has never told anyone at church. The secrecy tells you everything about how badly we have handled this subject. My…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11100 Mental illness is one of the areas where the church has too often made things worse, and I say that as a pastor who has watched it happen. A believer with depression or an anxiety disorder is told to pray harder, to confess the hidden sin, or to stop being so introspective, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11099 Should we expect persecution, or is that something that happens to Christians in other countries and other centuries? It is a fair question for a believer in Britain, where nobody is arresting us and the worst most of us face is an awkward silence in the staff room. Yet the New Testament speaks…