Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9096. Ask ten churches to describe the role of deacons and you will get ten different answers, most of them shaped by whatever that particular congregation has always done rather than by anything in the New Testament. Some treat deacons as a board of trustees. Some treat them as junior elders. Some treat them…
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: 6 minutesQuestion 9095. Whenever church size comes up in conversation, somebody always wants a number. Is a congregation of forty too small to be viable? Is a congregation of two thousand too large to be a church in any meaningful sense? I understand the instinct behind the question, but Scripture does not answer it the way…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09088 Few situations test a congregation like a fallen pastor, and few are handled worse. The instinct is either to cover it, in order to protect the church’s reputation, or to destroy the man, in order to demonstrate that we do not tolerate such things. Scripture points somewhere different from both. I write this…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9094. The phrase breaking bread appears often enough in the New Testament that people assume it always means the same thing, and that assumption causes a good deal of confusion about whether the Lord’s Supper was originally a full meal. It is a fair question, and the answer is more interesting than a simple…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09087 Whether a congregation can stop being a true church is not a theoretical question in Britain, where a good many buildings still open on Sunday for gatherings in which the gospel has not been preached for two generations. The question is uncomfortable because it requires a judgement about other Christians, and we are…
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 9093. Questions about church and state partnership land on my desk more often than people might expect. A council officer offers a grant for the toddler group, a school asks whether the church hall can host a breakfast club, a housing charity funded by the local authority wants to run a debt advice service…
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 09083 Church tax exemption comes up more often now than it did twenty years ago, and the question is usually asked with an edge. Why should religious organisations receive relief that a small business does not? Is a church that accepts favourable treatment from the state compromised by it? Both are fair questions and…