Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09022 Western Christianity has a persistent individualism problem. The dominant assumption in many evangelical and charismatic contexts is that the believer’s relationship with God is a private transaction, and that discerning the Spirit’s voice is primarily a personal skill to be developed in isolation. Scripture tells a different story. The gathered church is not…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04047 When Paul writes that “to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:7), he is describing something that belongs to the entire church across all ages. Spiritual gifts are not occasional divine extras for particularly devout believers. They are the normal means by which the Spirit…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 9109 The church has always struggled to hold two things together: genuine openness to the Spirit’s ongoing work in equipping believers with gifts, and the biblical insistence on order, intelligibility, and discernment in corporate worship. The history of charismatic Christianity is littered with the wreckage of communities that lost the second whilst pursuing the…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 4065 Every believer in Christ has received at least one spiritual gift. This is not an aspiration or a target to aim for — it is a statement of fact grounded in the plain teaching of the New Testament. “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 01165 KJV-Onlyism is the conviction that the King James Version of the Bible, published in 1611, is the uniquely preserved and authoritative Word of God in English, and that all modern translations represent corrupt departures from it. It is held with genuine sincerity and a real concern for biblical authority. It is also, on…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 9001 Ecclesiology is the study of the Church. The word comes from the Greek ἐκκλησία (ekklesia), meaning “assembly” or “called-out ones,” combined with λόγος (logos), meaning “word” or “study.” It is the branch of theology that examines what Scripture teaches about the nature, purpose, structure, and ministry of the Church. What is the Church?…