Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 8019. Ezekiel opens his book with a vision so strange that readers have been arguing about it for two and a half thousand years, and at the centre of it are four living creatures. John sees something very like them around the throne in Revelation 4. Between them these two passages have generated more…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 11120. Raising hands in worship is one of those things that can make an otherwise unremarkable Sunday morning feel suddenly loaded, because the moment someone’s arms go up in a congregation that does not usually do that, half the room is thinking about God and the other half is thinking about the person with…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60026. Few questions divide thoughtful believers as quickly as this one, because modern worship music from Bethel, Elevation and Hillsong is everywhere. Their songs fill hymn projectors, playlists and youth events across the English speaking church, and a good many of them are genuinely singable, warm and biblically shaped in their language. I have…
Reading Time: 8 minutesQuestion 11119. Kneeling in prayer is the picture most of us reach for when we imagine someone truly serious about talking to God, and I get asked fairly often whether it is something we ought to be doing rather than just something pious people in old paintings did. It is a fair question, and an…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11095 Whether we should use instruments in worship is one of those questions that sounds trivial until you meet someone for whom it is anything but. There are sincere, Bible-loving congregations across these islands who sing unaccompanied on principle, and there are others where the drum kit arrived decades ago and nobody has thought…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11094 Ask ten Christians what music in worship is for and you will get ten answers, several of them contradictory and at least two delivered with some heat. Some treat the singing as a warm-up act before the sermon. Others treat it as the point of the whole service and everything else as an…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11092 Saturday or Sunday is a question that arrives in two very different tones. Sometimes it comes from a believer who has been challenged by a Seventh-day Adventist or a Hebrew Roots teacher and is genuinely unsettled. Sometimes it comes from someone who simply wonders why the church meets when it does. Either way…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11091 Dancing in church divides congregations more sharply than the biblical evidence really warrants, and it does so because the argument is almost never about the texts. It is about culture, temperament, memory of previous churches, and a set of instincts that people find difficult to articulate. So let me try to separate what…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11079 The Lord’s Prayer contains adoration, submission, petition, confession and a request for protection, and somebody always notices that it contains no thanksgiving. For a prayer given by Jesus as a model, in a Bible that commands gratitude on almost every page, that looks like a surprising gap. I have been asked about it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11048. Written prayers make many evangelicals uneasy, on the grounds that real prayer should be spontaneous and anything read from a page must be second-hand. I understand the instinct and I do not entirely share it. The Bible contains a very large book of written prayers, God’s people have sung them for three thousand…