Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9007. When the bread and cup come round, somebody in the room is always wondering whether they may take communion, and that wondering is usually a good sign rather than a bad one. The people who worry about it are rarely the people who should be worried. My short answer is that believers may…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9006. The Lord’s Supper goes by a number of names, and each carries some freight: communion, the breaking of bread, the Lord’s table, the Eucharist, and in some traditions the Mass. What we call it matters less than what we think is happening, and on that Christians have divided more sharply than on almost…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9005. Christians disagree about the mode of baptism, with some pouring, some sprinkling and some immersing, and the disagreement is older than any of us. I hold that immersion is the normal and proper mode, and I want to give you the reasons rather than the tradition. I also want to say early that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9004. Infant baptism is practised by the majority of professing Christians worldwide, and any Baptist writing about it should begin by admitting that he is in a minority and that the people he disagrees with include many he expects to meet in glory. This is not a question about who is a Christian. It…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9003. The question of who should be baptised has divided sincere Christians for centuries, and it is not settled by asserting a tradition loudly. It is settled, if it can be settled at all, by looking at what the New Testament actually does and why it says baptism means what it means. My answer…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9097. How often should a church observe communion? Weekly, monthly, quarterly, or whenever the diary allows? I have been asked this by members moving between congregations and startled to find the practice completely different from what they were used to, and by leaders wondering whether their own habit has any basis beyond inheritance. The…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9094. The phrase breaking bread appears often enough in the New Testament that people assume it always means the same thing, and that assumption causes a good deal of confusion about whether the Lord’s Supper was originally a full meal. It is a fair question, and the answer is more interesting than a simple…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09057. The two ordinances given to the church are baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Jesus instituted both, commanded both, and gave the church no others. Everything else that congregations do, however valuable, is either an application of Scripture’s general instructions or a matter of Christian liberty. That claim needs defending, since Rome counts seven…
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 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…