Well, hello and welcome to another episode of Ask NT Write Anything, the program where we

answer your questions about Jesus, the Bible, and the life of faith.

I'm Mike Bird from Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia, and I'm joined, of course, by...

I'm Tom Wright from Oxford in England.

Tom, always a pleasure to see you, and always a pleasure, too, to connect with our listeners

who have such a good array of questions.

And today, we've got four questions, big ones.

We've got questions about denominational splits, about covenant theology, about the sacraments, which is a big deal if you're in the Salvation Army, because they don't really have sacraments, and then whether it's possible to lose your salvation.

Our first question comes from Jared Matthews in Anderson in the United States.

And this is what Jared asks. He says, in what circumstances should a church or denomination split?

And how should that be navigated? I am part of the Anglican Church of North America. And while I agree with the reason

for splitting from the Episcopal Church, I can't help but be heartbroken at the fact that the

Anglican Church is divided in America. Now, Tom, you've had a lot to do with discussions about the Anglican Church of North America and the Episcopal Church and how that relates to the wider Anglican Communion. You were doing a lot of work in this area during your time when you were a bishop and jet sitting around the world trying to heal some of these riffs. Tom, how do you answer

Jared's question? It's a great question, and it isn't, of course, only the Anglican or Church

of England or Episcopal Church in America, where my wife and I currently have our real home,

which is in the Western Islands of Scotland,

there are sadly several different varieties of Presbyterianism. There is the Church of

Scotland, but then there are various movements that broke away from the Church of Scotland

at various stages over the last two or three hundred years. And in some cases, there were

particular social forces that the Church of Scotland was seen as the landowner's church, and the ordinary working people felt that they really didn't belong and that they were being bullied by it.

So they set up on their own.

It's more complicated than that, but that was part of it.

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