Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09016. The sheer number of Christian denominations is one of the first things an outsider notices about the church, and it rarely lands well. Somebody comes to faith, starts looking for a church, and finds that one small town holds a Baptist chapel, an Anglican parish, a Methodist circuit, a Pentecostal fellowship and two…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09014. Baptismal regeneration is the teaching that the new birth is conveyed through the water of baptism, so that a person is regenerated in and by the act itself rather than by faith in Jesus prior to it. It is held in various forms by Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, many Lutherans and Anglicans, and…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09013. Whether there are prophets today is a question I answer yes to, with a great many qualifications attached, and the qualifications are not small print. They are the difference between a healthy church and a wrecked one. I am a continuationist. I do not believe the gifts were withdrawn when the last apostle…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09012. Asking whether there are apostles today gets a sharper answer than most questions about gifts, and the reason is that the New Testament uses the word in two distinct senses which get collapsed into one in the modern debate. I am a continuationist. I do not believe God switched the gifts off at…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09011. Good pastoral training begins in a local church, continues in a local church, and is tested by a local church, and any model that treats the congregation as the place you go once the training is finished has the order wrong. I say that as someone who values study a great deal. The…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09010. Ordination to ministry is the recognition by a local church that God has called and gifted a man for the work of an elder or pastor, and its public setting apart of him for that work. Notice what that definition does not say. It does not say that ordination confers powers, creates a…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09000. Believer’s baptism is the immersion in water of a person who has already trusted Jesus, as their public identification with His death, burial and resurrection. That sentence contains the whole argument, and every phrase in it is doing work. I want to open it up properly, because baptism is one of those subjects…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09001. Biblical ecclesiology is simply the doctrine of the church, and the word itself tells you where to start. It comes from ekklesia, the New Testament word usually translated church, which means an assembly, a gathering of those called out. That is a more useful starting point than most people expect, because it means…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10148. The seven churches of Revelation 2 and 3 are among the most searching pages in the New Testament, and also among the most misused. Some readers treat them as a coded map of church history. Others skip them entirely in their hurry to reach the trumpets and bowls. Both approaches miss what the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09200. The mystery of Christ is Paul’s own name for a truth he regarded as the hidden centrepiece of his ministry: that Jew and Gentile would be joined in one body, the Church, on completely equal terms. “When you read this,” he wrote, “you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ” (Ephesians…