Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 09056. Biblical excommunication is the final step of church discipline, in which a congregation formally removes an unrepentant member from its fellowship and no longer treats that person as a believer in good standing. The word itself means to put out of communion, from the Latin behind our word koinonia, fellowship, and it carries…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09038. Ask most Christians how the church relates to the kingdom of God and you will get a puzzled pause. The two terms are used almost interchangeably in ordinary conversation. People speak of kingdom work when they mean church work, and of building the kingdom when they mean growing a congregation. The New Testament…
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: 7 minutesQuestion 09055. Church discipline is the process by which a congregation lovingly confronts a member living in serious, unrepentant sin, with the aim of bringing that person to repentance and restoration. That last clause is the one everybody forgets, and forgetting it is why the practice has such a grim reputation. Most British congregations have…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09037. Talk of genuine revival stirs something in most believers, and it also makes many of us wary, because the word has been attached to so much that turned out to be froth. A conference gets called a revival. A well attended series of meetings gets called a revival. Something emotional happens and within…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09072 A March for Jesus, or something like it, comes round in most towns sooner or later, and the invitation usually arrives with an assumption that any serious Christian will want to be there. I have been asked about this many times, often with a second question attached in a lower voice: what about…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09054. The house church movement covers a wide range of groups who meet in homes rather than in dedicated buildings, usually with informal leadership, participatory meetings and a conviction that this recovers something the institutional church has lost. In China and other places where the state is hostile it is not a movement at…
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: 9 minutesQuestion 09071 The word ecumenism, and the ecumenical movement that carries it, has become one of those terms that generates more heat than light. To some it means everything good about Christians laying down their weapons. To others it means everything bad about churches abandoning the truth in order to be liked. Both reactions contain…
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…