Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11027. Biblical worship is far larger than the hour we spend singing on a Sunday morning, and that single misunderstanding has probably done more damage to the church’s worship than any argument over music ever has. When Scripture speaks about worship it reaches for words about bowing, serving, and giving God his due weight….
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 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 for a week with one, and then it becomes very practical indeed. My short answer is that a parachurch organisation is a voluntary society formed…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 friction, and repeat the pattern in every congregation they join. Others stay far too long under teaching that is starving them, out of loyalty to…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 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 a believer must join a local congregation. Given that, is the whole apparatus of rolls, interviews and membership classes a human invention that we have…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 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. The word carries associations of Puritan severity, public humiliation and religious control, and I understand the reaction even while I think it is mistaken. The…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 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 you end up with a Christian who belongs to everything in general and nothing in particular. Get it wrong in the other and you end…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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, common in charismatic settings and increasingly seen elsewhere. The other is the display of a national flag inside the building, which raises questions about patriotism,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 become carpet showrooms and flats, and every denomination publishes figures it would rather not. The question is not whether it is happening but why, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 New Testament. Some picture a chief executive. Some picture a chaplain who visits and comforts. Some, increasingly, picture a communicator with a platform. The text…