Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11015. Private worship is what happens between a believer and God when nobody else is in the room and nobody is going to ask about it afterwards. It is the least visible part of Christian life and, I would argue, the part that shapes everything else. It also carries a good deal of guilt….
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: 5 minutesQuestion 11004. Christian giving is one of the few subjects where almost everyone agrees in principle and disagrees in practice. We all know we should be generous. Most of us give rather less than we imagine we do, and almost nobody wants the sermon. So let me try to make the case honestly, without guilt-driven…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09085 Flag waving in church covers two quite different practices that often get muddled in the same conversation. One is the use of coloured banners and flags in worship, common in charismatic settings and increasingly seen elsewhere. The other is the display of a national flag inside the building, which raises questions about patriotism,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09063. The meaning of communion is not one thing but several, and I suspect that is why so many believers take the bread and cup each month without being able to say what they are doing. We know it matters. We know it has to do with the cross. Beyond that most of us…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09046. The church exists for reasons that Scripture states plainly, and yet ask a dozen churchgoers what those reasons are and you will get a dozen answers, most of them about what the church does for them. That is not a cynical observation. It is what happens when a congregation stops asking the question…
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 08139. Whether angels experience emotions sounds like a question for a slow afternoon, until you notice how much of the Bible’s angelic material is emotional in tone. They shout, they rejoice, they worship, they cover their faces, and in one case they shudder. I think the answer is plainly yes, and working out what…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08114. Scripture never gives us the number of angels, and I think that silence is deliberate. What it gives instead is a vocabulary of vastness, used repeatedly and by different writers, which is designed to leave you with an impression rather than a figure. That impression is worth having. A believer who grasps the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8028. The question of angels in worship sounds either startling or sentimental, depending on what you already assume about Sunday mornings. I want to argue that it is neither, and that Scripture treats the presence of the unseen host at our gatherings as a settled fact rather than a special occasion. It is not…