Nine Marks of a Healthy Church

Nine Marks of a Healthy Church - Book Review

Earlier in the year our church covered the book What is a Healthy Church? The longer version of that material is found the the book called the Nine Marks of a Healthy Church by Mark Dever. To prepare for the Wednesday night teaching, I read through this book to help me prepare.

I was drawn to this book because I am the Pastor at a very small church. And when you are the pastor of a very small church, you find yourself constantly questioning your own abilities and measuring your effectiveness by the number of people in the room. I mean, surely if I was doing what God wanted me to do, then this church would grow... Right?

Wrong.

There are many cases in the Bible of Men doing exactly what God wanted them to do, and their lives weren't marked by popular success. Noah didn't have one convert believe in his message of judgment. Isaiah's message was that people weren't going to believe it. And Jesus was eventually abandoned by all of his followers and crucified.

So, I needed another way to evaluate our church. I had been reading the Nine Marks blog for a little while, so I decided to grab this book from Amazon and give it a read. I then grabbed the down-sized version and used it during our Wednesday night teaching time. Everyone seemed to enjoy it and we walked away with some changes that need to be made and some confidence that we are doing some things right.

The Nine Marks are:

Expositional Preaching
Biblical Theology
Biblical Understanding of the Good News
Biblical Understanding of Conversion
Biblical Understanding of Evangelism
Biblical Understanding of Church Membership
Biblical Understanding of Church Discipline
Biblical Understanding of Church Leadership
Concern for Promoting Christian Discipleship and Growth

Though there are several other ways to evaluate your church, I found this one to be extremely helpful and essentially Biblical in nature. Even asking about being "healthy" instead of "successful" is such an important aspect. I highly recommend this book, and encourage you to click the link above and start evaluating your church.

Comments

The Seed and The Soil of Education (New Learning Project Part 1)

(This is my entry for the first part of my project for my New Learning course that I am taking.) Introduction Corn Fields in Illinois I have lived the majority of my life in the Midwest: mid-state Illinois to be specific. Where I live, farming is everywhere. My grandparents and great-grandparents on both sides of my family were farmers. My dad grew up on a farm and owned farmland, well into my own adulthood. But, even if it wasn’t in the family, I still would have been surrounded by farming. You can’t go more than a mile outside of my city’s limits without encountering miles and miles of fields. Most of our highways, and even interstates, are located between acres of farmland.

This too shall pass...

Gam zeh ya'avor (Hebrew) "This Too Shall Pass" Welcome! According to Google Analytics, this is by far the most visited post that I have ever written. If someone comes here from a search engine, most of the time they are looking for " this too shall pass quote " or simply " this too shall pass " on Google or one of the other search engines. I am sure that most of the time visitors are looking for the originations of this quote, but I have to wonder, why is this quote on people's minds? Why are they pondering the passing of events? Here is my thought: It is probably because most of us have realized that the adult life is much harder than we ever imagined it to be. There is more pain and more sorrow than we had ever imagined as children, but we have learned that time keeps ticking. And as time continues to flow things pass. In fact, even the really big things and the really hard things will still pass. If you are here because you are thinking ...

The Minnesota Crime Commission wrote:

Every baby starts life as a little savage. He is completely selfish and self-centered. He wants what he wants when he wants it: his bottle, his mother's attention, his playmate's toys, his uncle's watch, or whatever. Deny him these and he seethes with rage and aggressiveness which would be murderous were he not so helpless. He's dirty, he has no morals, no knowledge, no developed skills. This means that all children, not just certain children but all children, are born delinquent. If permitted to continue in their self-centered world of infancy, given free reign to their impulsive actions to satisfy each want, every child would grow up a criminal, a thief, a killer, a rapist.

HARMLESS THOUGHTS

Search This Blog