Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09029. Deciding whether to leave a church is one of the loneliest decisions a Christian makes, and it is usually made badly. People stay far too long in places that are damaging them, or they walk out over something that would have been settled by one honest conversation. Both mistakes hurt, and both are…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 09045. Messianic Jews are Jewish people who have come to believe that Jesus is the promised Messiah and who continue to live as Jews, often worshipping in congregations that keep the Sabbath, mark the biblical feasts and use Hebrew in their services. Some evangelicals regard the movement with suspicion, as though a believer who…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09028. Expository preaching is preaching in which the point of the passage is the point of the sermon. The preacher works through a text, explains what it means in its own context, and then presses that meaning on the congregation. The shape of the sermon comes from the shape of the text rather than…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09043. The church began on a particular day, in a particular city, at a particular hour, and I think you can put your finger on it. That claim sounds oddly confident to anyone who has been taught that the church is simply the people of God in every age, stretching back to Adam. But…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09027. The regulative principle of worship is the rule that a church may include in its public worship only what Scripture positively commands or clearly implies. Anything not warranted by the Bible is excluded, not because it is wicked but because God has not asked for it. It came out of the Reformation, it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09022. We tend to treat guidance as a private transaction, which is why the role of the gathered church in discerning the Spirit’s leading strikes many believers as an odd idea. The modern pattern is that I pray, I sense a leading, I act, and the church finds out afterwards. The New Testament pattern…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 09039. Ask a Baptist what makes his church Baptist and sooner or later he will say something about local church autonomy. It is one of those phrases that gets used far more often than it gets explained, and I have sat in enough meetings to know that people mean rather different things by it….
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…