Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11023. The Great Commission is the standing order Jesus gave His followers between the resurrection and the ascension, recorded most fully at the end of Matthew’s Gospel. It is quoted constantly and examined rather less often. So let me take it apart slowly. What is actually commanded, to whom was it given, what authority…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11033. Saving for retirement troubles some Christians because it looks suspiciously like the rich fool in Luke 12, who built bigger barns and heard God call him a fool that same night. Others never think about it at all, and then arrive at seventy dependent on adult children who cannot afford it. Both responses…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11022. Ask about unreached peoples and you are really asking two questions at once. There is the practical one about the millions who live where no church exists, and there is the harder one underneath it: what happens to those who die without ever hearing of Jesus? I want to answer both, and to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11032. Asking how much is enough money is one of the few financial questions the Bible answers directly, and the answer is uncomfortable enough that most of us prefer to keep the question vague. We are far more willing to ask how to earn well, give wisely or invest sensibly. Those are good questions….
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11021. Christian missions is the deliberate sending of people across barriers of geography, language and culture so that Christ is made known where He is not yet named. That is the working definition I use, and each part of it is doing something. The word itself comes from the Latin for sending, which is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11031. The question of church liturgy divides evangelicals almost as neatly as music does, and usually for the same reason: we mistake our own habits for the biblical position. Baptists in particular tend to say we have no liturgy, which is never true. We have an order of service, a set of expected elements,…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11020. Jesus told His followers to make disciples, and the church has spent two thousand years discovering how easy it is to do something else instead. We gather crowds, run courses, fill diaries, and quietly hope that formation happens somewhere in the middle. So this is a practical answer to a practical question. What…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11030. Whether Christians should be raising hands in worship is a question I have been asked more often by people who feel awkward about it than by people who want permission, and that itself tells you something about how tangled the issue has become. In some churches raising hands is so normal that not…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11019. Christian discipleship has become a word we use for programmes: a course, a booklet, a six-week series for new believers. The New Testament uses it for something considerably larger, and considerably less optional. A disciple is a learner who follows a teacher in order to become like him. That is the whole idea,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11029. Arguments about worship styles have split more congregations in my lifetime than arguments about doctrine, which is a sobering thing for a Baptist minister to admit and an important thing to face honestly. Organ or band, hymnal or screen, choir or worship team, robes or jeans. These questions are not nothing, but they…