Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09065 Transubstantiation is the Roman Catholic doctrine that the bread and wine of the Eucharist are literally transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ during the Mass. It is one of the defining doctrines of Roman Catholicism, formally articulated by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and reaffirmed at the Council of…
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: 3 minutesQuestion 09052 Church membership is unfashionable in an age that prizes individual autonomy and resists anything that feels like institutional commitment. Many believers attend a church regularly without ever formally committing to it, treating the congregation as a service provider rather than a covenant community. But the New Testament does not describe the Christian life…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 09048 How a church organises its leadership and decision-making is not a matter of indifference. The New Testament does not leave us to improvise. While it does not prescribe a single rigid organisational chart, it does establish clear principles about who leads, how authority is exercised, and where accountability lies. The question of church…
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: 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…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09028 The way a church handles its preaching ministry shapes the spiritual health of its congregation more than almost any other single factor. Expository preaching is the approach that takes the biblical text as the foundation, structure, and authority of the sermon, allowing the passage itself to determine the message rather than using Scripture…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09091 Leaving a church is one of the most difficult decisions a believer can face, and it is also one of the most frequently made for the wrong reasons. The consumer mentality that characterises much of Western Christianity treats church involvement as a service to be evaluated and discarded when it no longer meets…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09006 The Lord’s Supper is the second of the two ordinances Jesus gave to His church. It is practised in virtually every Christian tradition, yet the meaning attached to it varies enormously. Roman Catholics believe the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ. Lutherans hold that Christ is physically present…