Within the reading, Dever proclaims there are nine essential marks of a healthy
church. I believe, the idea of what makes a church healthy can be subjective, but
it appears that Dever did a good job explaining what a healthy church means from
a biblical standpoint. He believes expositional preaching, theology, The Good
News, conversion, evangelism, biblical understanding of membership, church
discipline, promotion of church discipleship and growth, and biblical understanding
of leadership all work together towards making a church healthy.
When looking at my own church, I believe it suffers from what many other
churches suffer from. There are plenty of members who do not have a firm
understanding of the importance of church discipleship and growth. It is not
irregular for people to go to church for personal reasons. They believe in
developing spiritually but perhaps they only focus on their own growth rather than
the growth of others. In doing so, they do not focus on things like church growth
and evangelism. Naturally, when the church is focused on the gospel, it will
naturally breed better Christians who emphasize growth[1]. These types of
Christians will do what they can to ensure that others know about the God they
serve and will work towards growing the church, sometimes unconsciously. I
believe it is important that we teach and preach holiness before we ever speak on
membership. The goal should be growing spiritually which leads to increased
numbers, not increasing the numbers first and then focusing on spirituality.
Another area of growth can be Biblical understanding of leadership. Like most
churches, we have a prolific leader while those under him need work (including
myself). Many of us are somewhat new to ministry and therefore we do not
command things in a boss like nature like Jesus[2]. Another aspect of ministry
many tend to forget is the charge to serve. Being a ministry leader should not be
a self-serving position but rather one of a servant.
Lastly, I believe the church should focus on conversion. It is not good enough to
just proclaim Christianity; one must have a better understanding of what their lives
used to be, where they were headed, and what they were saved from[3]. Believers
should not only acknowledge the change in their lives, they should also see a
difference in their mentality and attitude. It is my personal belief, far too many
people within the church behave the same way they did before they got baptized
and professed Jesus as their Lord and savior. This needs to be addressed and
changed by acknowledging, this type of behavior should not be accepted and is
contradictory to the Bible itself.
[1] Mark Dever, Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, third ed. (Wheaton, Illinois:
Crossway, 2013), 217.
[2] Ibid., 250
[3] Ibid., 108
