Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09069 Anyone who has spent time in church life knows that misused gifts are not a theoretical problem. They are a pastoral one. A gift is a good thing given by a good God, and yet it passes through hands that are still being sanctified, which means it can be handled carelessly, proudly, or…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09068 Few questions reach me more often than this one: how do I work out what my spiritual gifts actually are? It usually arrives with a little anxiety attached, as though the Christian life were a treasure hunt and somebody had mislaid the map. I want to take that anxiety out of the question…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8028. The question of angels in worship sounds either startling or sentimental, depending on what you already assume about Sunday mornings. I want to argue that it is neither, and that Scripture treats the presence of the unseen host at our gatherings as a settled fact rather than a special occasion. It is not…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6067. Confession of sin to God is always sufficient for forgiveness. There is no human intermediary, no priest, no queue and no waiting period. That needs saying first and plainly, because a great deal of religious machinery has been built on denying it. And yet Scripture also tells believers to confess to one another….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6041. A respectable sin is one that a Christian community has quietly stopped treating as sin. It is not a biblical category, and that is precisely the problem, because Scripture knows nothing of a tier of offences that need not trouble anybody. Every congregation has its list, and the list is usually invisible to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5010. How the church treats people with disabilities reveals what it really believes about the image of God. Not what it prints in its statement of faith, but what it believes in practice, in the car park, the pew, and the membership roll. Scripture speaks to this with surprising directness, and its verdict is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 21. Doctrine and worship are not two separate compartments of church life, one for the mind and one for the heart, running along parallel tracks that occasionally intersect. Every act of corporate worship, every song, every prayer, every sermon, teaches something true or false about who God is, whether or not anyone in the…