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Here’s another book that Mark Dever was giving away at The Whiteboard Sessions. This is an expanded version of his original pamphlet, and a condensed version of his larger work, 9 Marks of a Healthy Church.
At 126 pages, What Is A Healthy Church? is quite accessible for those who don’t have a lot of time on their hands, but would still like to hear what Dever has to say about church health.
The book is divided into three main sections.
- What is a healthy church?
- Essential marks of a healthy church
- Important marks of a healthy church
In the introduction, Dever asks the reader what you are looking for in a church. Any time you are looking for a new church home you invariably come up with a set of criteria by which you judge those churches you visit. The author is asking us to evaluate those criteria to see if they are biblically based and God centered, or self centered.
What is a healthy church?
In this first section Dever defines the role of the church in the believer’s life, noting that the church is a family, a fellowship, and a body. He argues that if one claims to be a Christian, but shows no desire for community with other believers, you should question whether you are truly a Christian or not.
A true Christian builds his life into the lives of other believers through the concrete fellowship of a local church.
Since the church is a body of God’s people, if we are striving to live the Christian life and love God and others, as Jesus commanded us, then we should care about the health of the local church. Here is his final definition of a healthy church.
A healthy church is a congregation that increasingly reflects God’s character as his character has been revealed in his Word.
Essential marks of a healthy church
In the second section of the book, Dever lays out three marks of a healthy church that he identifies as essential to the church’s health. Without these things, you have a sick church in need of serious medical attention that can only be given by the great physician.
Expositional preaching is the first essential mark. This means taking a passage of Scripture, explaining what the text says and what it means, then applying that meaning to lives of the listeners. The real strength of this style of preaching is, as Dever notes, that
expositional preaching is not so much about how a preacher says what he says, but about how a preacher decides what to say.
The reason this is of essential importance to the health of the church is that God uses his Word to grow his people. Continue reading