Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09077 The rapid growth of online church services, particularly following the COVID-19 pandemic, has raised a question that would have been inconceivable for most of church history: can watching a church service on a screen constitute genuine church involvement in the biblical sense? The question is not whether online ministry has any value. It…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09085 The question of flag-waving in church touches on deeper issues than aesthetics or personal taste. It raises questions about what the gathered church is for, what symbols belong in corporate worship, and where the line falls between legitimate national gratitude and an unhealthy fusion of faith and patriotism. The answer requires careful thought…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60113 The phrase “spiritual but not religious” has become one of the defining self-descriptions of contemporary Western culture. Surveys consistently show growing numbers of people, particularly younger adults, who identify this way. They believe in something, they feel connected to something larger than themselves, they may pray or meditate, but they reject organised religion,…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 08139 Whether angels experience something analogous to human emotion is a question the Bible does not answer systematically, but it does offer a number of passages that present angelic beings as responding to events with what looks remarkably like genuine feeling. The question matters because it touches on what it means to be a…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11091 The question of whether dancing belongs in Christian worship stirs strong feelings in both directions. Some believers associate dance with worldliness and regard its introduction into worship as an unwelcome intrusion of secular culture. Others point to the dancing of David before the Ark and insist that physical, expressive worship is not merely…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11094 Music has been part of the worship of God’s people from the earliest pages of Scripture, and its role in the life of the church is so deeply embedded that most believers have never paused to ask why. What is music actually doing in corporate worship? Is it a warm-up before the sermon,…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11014 The short answer is yes, emphatically. Worship is not confined to a building, a service, or a Sunday morning time slot. The longer answer requires understanding what worship actually is in biblical terms, because the question itself often rests on a definition of worship that is too narrow. If worship means singing songs…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11015 Private worship is the believer’s personal, individual engagement with God, carried out apart from the gathered church. It is the devotional life that sustains a Christian between Sundays, the hidden practice that Jesus assumed His followers would maintain, and the foundation without which corporate worship becomes hollow performance. Jesus taught about it directly,…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60026 This is a question many believers wrestle with honestly. Bethel Church (Redding, California), Elevation Church (Charlotte, North Carolina), and Hillsong Church (originating in Sydney, Australia) produce some of the most widely sung worship music in the English-speaking church. Their songs appear in hymnals, on projection screens, and on streaming platforms across every denomination….
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11029 Few topics have caused more friction in local churches over the past fifty years than the question of worship styles. The so-called “worship wars” have divided congregations, exhausted pastors, and generated an enormous amount of heat with remarkably little light. The question deserves a careful, biblical answer rather than the tribal loyalties it…