Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 60038. Religious trauma is a phrase that would have baffled my grandfather and is now common enough to have its own shelf in the bookshop. It describes the lasting harm some people carry from their experience of church, and the first thing I want to say is that the harm is often real. I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12064. The phrase love the sinner and hate the sin has become one of those sayings that everybody quotes and nobody examines. It is not in the Bible, which surprises people. It comes closest to a line of Augustine’s about loving people and hating their faults, and it reached English through Gandhi of all…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 12059. Should Christians attend gay weddings? This is one of the hardest practical questions I am asked, and it is hard precisely because the people asking are not culture warriors. They are usually someone whose brother, colleague or oldest friend has sent an invitation, and who loves that person and does not want to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12058. Cohabiting before marriage is now the ordinary route into marriage in Britain, which means that when a couple starts attending church and someone eventually raises it, the conversation arrives with a great deal of embarrassment attached on both sides. I want to answer the doctrinal question honestly and then spend most of the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 12019 Transgender identity is not really a question about pronouns, bathrooms or sport, though those are where the arguments usually happen. It is a question about what a human being is, and whether the body has anything authoritative to say about that. Everything else follows from the answer. I want to handle this at…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 12017 Homosexual practice is the subject on which the church in the West is most frequently accused of cruelty, and it is the subject on which we most often deserve at least part of the accusation. Not because the biblical teaching is unclear, but because the manner of our teaching has too often been…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 11103 Gender dysphoria is a subject on which the church has managed to be both too loud and too silent, and the people caught in the middle of it are suffering. There are Christians who talk about it only as a culture war headline, and there are others who are so anxious about causing…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11102 Therapy and counselling make some Christians uneasy, and I understand why. The suspicion is that a secular discipline will quietly relocate the problem from sin to circumstance, tell you that you are fine as you are, and hand you a vocabulary of self-actualisation instead of repentance. That does happen. It is not the…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11100 Mental illness is one of the areas where the church has too often made things worse, and I say that as a pastor who has watched it happen. A believer with depression or an anxiety disorder is told to pray harder, to confess the hidden sin, or to stop being so introspective, and…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 11090 Habitual sin is the pastoral problem that will not go away. Almost every believer has something that keeps returning, and almost every pastor has sat with someone who has confessed the same thing for the fifth time and asked, with real desperation, why nothing changes. The question of whether habitual sin is primarily…