Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 09092 Whether a congregation should be led by one pastor or by a plural eldership is a question with more practical consequence than most people expect. It shapes how decisions are made, how a minister is protected from himself, and what happens to a church when its leading figure is ill, or wrong, or…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09088 Few situations test a congregation like a fallen pastor, and few are handled worse. The instinct is either to cover it, in order to protect the church’s reputation, or to destroy the man, in order to demonstrate that we do not tolerate such things. Scripture points somewhere different from both. I write this…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09081 Whether pastors and teachers in Ephesians 4:11 describe one office or two is one of those questions that looks like a footnote and turns out to shape a great deal. It affects who we appoint, what we expect of them, and how we read the qualification lists in the Pastoral Epistles. The verse…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09078 Ask ten church members what pastoral ministry involves and you will get ten answers, most of them shaped by the last minister they had rather than by the New Testament. Some picture a chief executive. Some picture a chaplain who visits and comforts. Some, increasingly, picture a communicator with a platform. The text…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09076 People ask me what makes a biblical church far more often than they used to, and I take that as a healthy sign. It usually means somebody has been let down, or has moved to a new town, or has begun reading the New Testament and noticed that the churches described there do…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09030. Recognising an unhealthy church is harder than it sounds, because the warning signs rarely arrive labelled. They arrive as enthusiasm, as loyalty, as a strong sense of mission. By the time people realise something has gone wrong, they have usually invested years and friendships in the place, and leaving feels like a betrayal….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08100 The way the enemy attacks churches tells you a great deal about what he fears, and it is rarely what we expect. In my experience he is far less interested in dramatic assault than in the slow, respectable erosion that nobody notices until a congregation looks round and wonders where the life went….
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 8050. The phrase snare of the devil comes from Paul’s letters to Timothy, and it is worth noticing how ordinary the context is. He is not describing an exorcism or a supernatural encounter. He is talking about the appointment of church leaders and the handling of people who oppose the truth. A snare is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4090. People are sometimes genuinely surprised that the gift of administration appears in the Bible at all, as though spreadsheets and rotas and Spirit-given gifts belonged to two entirely different worlds. But there it plainly is in Paul’s list, and the gift of administration is a Spirit-given ability to steer, organise and steward the…