Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09027. The regulative principle of worship is the rule that a church may include in its public worship only what Scripture positively commands or clearly implies. Anything not warranted by the Bible is excluded, not because it is wicked but because God has not asked for it. It came out of the Reformation, it…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09042. Eastern Orthodoxy is the Christian tradition most Western believers know least about, and that ignorance runs both ways. Ask an average British evangelical what Eastern Orthodoxy teaches and you will usually get something about icons and beards. Ask an Orthodox believer what Baptists believe and you may get something equally thin. Since a…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09024. Few subjects make a congregation more uncomfortable than church discipline. The phrase conjures images of Puritan stocks, cold hearted committees and people driven out of fellowship over trivia, and the abuses have been real enough to justify the flinch. So most churches quietly do nothing, and serious sin goes unaddressed until it does…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 09039. Ask a Baptist what makes his church Baptist and sooner or later he will say something about local church autonomy. It is one of those phrases that gets used far more often than it gets explained, and I have sat in enough meetings to know that people mean rather different things by it….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09022. We tend to treat guidance as a private transaction, which is why the role of the gathered church in discerning the Spirit’s leading strikes many believers as an odd idea. The modern pattern is that I pray, I sense a leading, I act, and the church finds out afterwards. The New Testament pattern…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09021. Presbyterian government is rule by elders. Authority in the local congregation belongs to a body of elders called a session or kirk session rather than to a bishop above or to the membership below, and those local bodies are linked together in a series of graded courts: presbytery, synod and general assembly. The…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09020. Episcopal government is the system in which authority in the church rests with bishops, who oversee groups of congregations and stand in a distinct order above the local minister. The word comes from the Greek episkopos, meaning overseer. Anglicans, Roman Catholics, the Orthodox churches, Methodists in many places and several Pentecostal bodies all…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09019. Congregational government is the conviction that, under Jesus, final authority in a local church rests with the gathered membership rather than with a bishop, a synod or a self perpetuating board. Baptists, most independent evangelical churches, the older Congregational tradition and many newer fellowships work this way. Decisions of substance come to a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09018. The doctrine of apostolic succession holds that the authority Jesus gave His apostles has been handed down in an unbroken chain of ordinations, bishop to bishop, from the first century to the present day. Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and some Anglican bodies rest a good deal of weight on it. On this account,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09017. Ask most people what divides the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches and you will hear about statues, the Pope and whether priests can marry. Those are real differences, but they sit on the surface. The things that actually separate the two are older and deeper, and they come down to two questions that…