Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11140. How do I find a good church? I get asked this constantly, whether from someone new to the faith, a family who has just relocated, or someone quietly limping away from a painful previous church experience and nervous about trying again. It is one of the most practically important questions a Christian ever…
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 9114. Touch not my anointed is one of the most misused sentences in the English Bible, and I have heard it deployed to shut down every kind of legitimate question. A leader is challenged about money, doctrine, or conduct, and someone stands up to warn the congregation that they are touching God’s anointed. The…
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 9112. The mystery of the church is one of those phrases that sounds forbidding until you discover what Paul meant by it, at which point it becomes one of the most liberating ideas in the New Testament. Paul uses the word repeatedly in Ephesians and Colossians, and he treats it as the thing that…
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: 9 minutesQuestion 9110. The Evangelical Baptist Network is a relatively recent body, and it exists because of a specific crisis inside Baptists Together, the Baptist Union of Great Britain. It grew out of what was initially called Baptist Ministers for Orthodox Marriage, formed as the Union worked through the question of whether accredited ministers could be…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9109. How does a church honour spiritual gifts without sliding into charismatic excess? That question has followed me through my whole ministry, because I am persuaded that both errors are real and that most congregations have only ever been warned about one of them. Some churches have quietly buried the gifts under a layer…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9107. The complementarian and egalitarian positions are the two main answers evangelicals give to the question of how men and women relate in the home and in the church, and the labels get thrown about with far more confidence than accuracy. Before anyone can decide between them, they need to know what each actually…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9105. What does 1 Timothy 2:12 mean in context? Few verses in the New Testament are quoted more often with less attention to what surrounds them, and few are dismissed more quickly by people who have decided in advance what Paul is allowed to say. I want to walk through the passage carefully, because…