Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9113. What role does the gathered church play in helping believers interpret Scripture? For many evangelicals the honest answer is none at all. We read our Bibles alone, we form our conclusions alone, and we treat the church as the place where those conclusions are occasionally aired. That instinct comes from something good, but…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9111. Religious consumerism is the habit of approaching church the way we approach every other service we buy, and it has crept into congregations so quietly that most of us do not notice we are doing it. We assess the music, the preaching, the children’s work, the coffee and the car park, and we…
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 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 09036. A church covenant is a written statement of the promises members of a congregation make to God and to one another about how they will live together. It is not a statement of faith, which sets out what a church believes. It is a statement of commitment, setting out what the members undertake…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 09053. Should Christians attend church? I am aware that a minister answering this question is like a barber telling you that you need a haircut, so let me say at the outset that I am not arguing for the survival of an institution. I am arguing for something the New Testament assumes so completely…
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 09046. The church exists for reasons that Scripture states plainly, and yet ask a dozen churchgoers what those reasons are and you will get a dozen answers, most of them about what the church does for them. That is not a cynical observation. It is what happens when a congregation stops asking the question…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09000. Believer’s baptism is the immersion in water of a person who has already trusted Jesus, as their public identification with His death, burial and resurrection. That sentence contains the whole argument, and every phrase in it is doing work. I want to open it up properly, because baptism is one of those subjects…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08072 Whether any Christian can cast out demons is a question that usually arrives with a good deal riding on it. Someone is frightened, or someone has been told they should be able to do this and nothing has happened, or someone has watched a ministry team at work and wondered whether they are…