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…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 arrived gradually, the pandemic made it universal, and a good many believers have never fully returned to the building. Their question is a fair one:…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 been let down, or has moved to a new town, or has begun reading the New Testament and noticed that the churches described there do…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 both sides. Some treat any criticism of it as an attack on evangelism itself. Others dismiss it wholesale because of its origins or its associations,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 the same conversation. On one side there is a fear of manufacturing something the Spirit has not given. On the other there is a fear…