Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 0029. Sooner or later every believer who takes both truth and relationships seriously has to ask whether a disagreement is worth breaking fellowship over. You find yourself genuinely at odds with another Christian over a matter of belief or practice. The difference feels significant. But is it significant enough to part ways? This is…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 0028. Knowing which doctrines to divide over is one of the most important and most difficult judgements a believer ever has to make. Get it wrong in one direction and you will fracture fellowship over matters that should never have separated you. Get it wrong in the other and you will keep company with…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 0027. Few questions expose the fault lines in the modern church as quickly as whether unity can exist without doctrinal agreement. On one side stand those who say doctrine divides while love unites, so we should keep doctrine to a minimum for the sake of getting along. On the other stand those who treat…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9. Doctrinal disagreement is not the end of fellowship, and I want to say that clearly at the outset because so many believers fear that it is. They imagine that to stay in true fellowship everyone must think identically about everything, and so they either paper over real differences or break off from anyone…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 09063 The word “communion” carries a weight that many Christians feel instinctively but struggle to articulate. It appears in our church life as the name for the Lord’s Supper, yet the biblical concept behind it reaches far deeper than a monthly or weekly observance. Understanding what communion actually means requires attention to the language…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 09053 The question of whether Christians should attend church would have baffled the first believers. To them, belonging to the gathered community was not an optional extra bolted onto personal faith; it was an inseparable expression of it. The modern framing of the question, “Can I be a Christian without going to church?”, reveals…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09036 A church covenant is a voluntary agreement among the members of a local church that expresses their shared commitments to one another and to the life of the congregation. It is not a contract in the legal sense, nor is it a creedal statement defining what the church believes. It is a relational…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 09032 The term “parachurch” refers to organisations that operate alongside the church, serving Christians and advancing the gospel through ministries that are distinct from the local congregation. The prefix para means “alongside,” and the concept is straightforward: these are ministries that support, supplement, and extend the work of the church without being churches themselves….
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09033 The question of whether online church can replace physical attendance gained urgency during the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of Christians worldwide were unable to gather in person. What began as an emergency measure has, for some, become a preference. The convenience of watching a service from home, the ability to access gifted preachers…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09029 Leaving a church is one of the most painful decisions a Christian can face. The New Testament places enormous weight on the gathered community of believers, and the decision to leave should never be taken lightly, impulsively, or without serious reflection and prayer. There are, however, circumstances in which leaving is not only…