Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11182. Welcoming visitors well is one of those quiet ministries that never makes it onto a church’s strategic plan yet shapes, more than almost anything else, whether a nervous first time guest ever comes back for a second Sunday. I have watched a genuinely biblical, gospel centred sermon get undone by a cold, cliquey…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11145. Disagreement with leadership is one of the more delicate situations a church member can face, because Scripture asks for genuine respect toward those who lead while never asking for silence in the face of real concern. I have been on the receiving end of this as a pastor, and I have also been…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11144. Disagreement and division sound like near neighbours, and in a tense church meeting they can feel indistinguishable, but the Bible treats them as genuinely different things, and confusing them causes real damage in both directions. I have watched churches wound themselves by treating every disagreement as an act of rebellion that must be…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11141. Leaving a church is one of the most painful decisions a Christian can face, and I never want to make it sound simple, because in my experience it rarely is. I have sat on both sides of this conversation, as the pastor a family was leaving and as a friend counselling someone through…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 about culture, temperament, memory of previous churches, and a set of instincts that people find difficult to articulate. So let me try to separate what…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11046. Saying Amen at the end of a prayer is so automatic for most of us that we have stopped hearing it, which is a shame, because it is one of the few words that has travelled unchanged from Hebrew through Greek into English. Children ask about it and adults rarely have an answer…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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. Baptists in particular tend to say we have no liturgy, which is never true. We have an order of service, a set of expected elements,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11030. Whether Christians should be raising hands in worship is a question I have been asked more often by people who feel awkward about it than by people who want permission, and that itself tells you something about how tangled the issue has become. In some churches raising hands is so normal that not…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11029. Arguments about worship styles have split more congregations in my lifetime than arguments about doctrine, which is a sobering thing for a Baptist minister to admit and an important thing to face honestly. Organ or band, hymnal or screen, choir or worship team, robes or jeans. These questions are not nothing, but they…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11028. Asking how we should worship God is a more dangerous question than it looks, because Scripture contains several accounts of people who worshipped God enthusiastically and wrongly, and it did not go well for them. Nadab and Abihu offered unauthorised fire. Uzzah steadied the ark with the best of intentions. Cain brought an…