Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11014. People usually ask about worship outside church for one of two reasons. Either they have felt God on a hillside more powerfully than they ever have in a service and want to know whether that counts, or they have stopped attending and would like to know whether the walk on Sunday morning will…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11025. The difference between preaching and teaching is one of those questions that sounds academic until you sit through a service where somebody got it wrong. I have heard lectures delivered from pulpits and I have heard rousing appeals delivered in Bible studies, and in both cases the congregation went home slightly hungry without…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9112. The mystery of the church is one of those phrases that sounds forbidding until you discover what Paul meant by it, at which point it becomes one of the most liberating ideas in the New Testament. Paul uses the word repeatedly in Ephesians and Colossians, and he treats it as the thing that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11009. Most Christians spend the largest waking portion of their lives in daily work, and a good many of them suspect it does not really count. The hours at the desk or the wheel or the checkout feel like the necessary cost of the parts of life that matter, and the parts that matter…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9111. Religious consumerism is the habit of approaching church the way we approach every other service we buy, and it has crept into congregations so quietly that most of us do not notice we are doing it. We assess the music, the preaching, the children’s work, the coffee and the car park, and we…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9109. How does a church honour spiritual gifts without sliding into charismatic excess? That question has followed me through my whole ministry, because I am persuaded that both errors are real and that most congregations have only ever been warned about one of them. Some churches have quietly buried the gifts under a layer…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9107. The complementarian and egalitarian positions are the two main answers evangelicals give to the question of how men and women relate in the home and in the church, and the labels get thrown about with far more confidence than accuracy. Before anyone can decide between them, they need to know what each actually…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11006. Christian dating is a phrase the Bible never uses, and that alone should shape how confidently we answer this question. Courtship as we practise it is a modern arrangement, and anyone who claims chapter and verse for a particular method is stretching the text. What Scripture does give us is a settled understanding…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9105. What does 1 Timothy 2:12 mean in context? Few verses in the New Testament are quoted more often with less attention to what surrounds them, and few are dismissed more quickly by people who have decided in advance what Paul is allowed to say. I want to walk through the passage carefully, because…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11005. Nothing brings people to my study door more often than the problem of knowing God’s will. Should I take the job, marry this person, move to that city, train for ministry, stay or go? Underneath the particular decision there is usually the same anxiety: that God has a single hidden plan, that I…