Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09021. Presbyterian government is rule by elders. Authority in the local congregation belongs to a body of elders called a session or kirk session rather than to a bishop above or to the membership below, and those local bodies are linked together in a series of graded courts: presbytery, synod and general assembly. The…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09020. Episcopal government is the system in which authority in the church rests with bishops, who oversee groups of congregations and stand in a distinct order above the local minister. The word comes from the Greek episkopos, meaning overseer. Anglicans, Roman Catholics, the Orthodox churches, Methodists in many places and several Pentecostal bodies all…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09019. Congregational government is the conviction that, under Jesus, final authority in a local church rests with the gathered membership rather than with a bishop, a synod or a self perpetuating board. Baptists, most independent evangelical churches, the older Congregational tradition and many newer fellowships work this way. Decisions of substance come to a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09018. The doctrine of apostolic succession holds that the authority Jesus gave His apostles has been handed down in an unbroken chain of ordinations, bishop to bishop, from the first century to the present day. Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and some Anglican bodies rest a good deal of weight on it. On this account,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09017. Ask most people what divides the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches and you will hear about statues, the Pope and whether priests can marry. Those are real differences, but they sit on the surface. The things that actually separate the two are older and deeper, and they come down to two questions that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09016. The sheer number of Christian denominations is one of the first things an outsider notices about the church, and it rarely lands well. Somebody comes to faith, starts looking for a church, and finds that one small town holds a Baptist chapel, an Anglican parish, a Methodist circuit, a Pentecostal fellowship and two…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09011. Good pastoral training begins in a local church, continues in a local church, and is tested by a local church, and any model that treats the congregation as the place you go once the training is finished has the order wrong. I say that as someone who values study a great deal. The…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09010. Ordination to ministry is the recognition by a local church that God has called and gifted a man for the work of an elder or pastor, and its public setting apart of him for that work. Notice what that definition does not say. It does not say that ordination confers powers, creates a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08124. The future of Satan is one of the few subjects on which Scripture is entirely unambiguous. There is no mystery about the outcome, no suspense, and no possibility of a different result, which is more than can be said for many things people are curious about. What the Bible gives is a sequence,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08123. The present work of Satan is one of those subjects where Christians tend to know either too little or far too much, and I have met both. Some treat him as a figure confined to Eden and Revelation with nothing much happening in between, while others see his fingerprints on every flat tyre….