I am lucky to be in a church that is doing or working on many of these nine
marks. The three that I can see that my current home church could work on and
have started working on more the last year or more are those of understanding
evangelism, church discipline, and concern for discipleship and growth. These
very could well be very important for any church behind Biblical church leadership
and expositional preaching, which I feel may be the most important in that if those
are not in the church there is really not much way to grow if the leadership is not
in this growth area. d Our pastor has started time of teaching on Sunday evenings
and has been presenting ways to evangelize to those that we are in relationships
with in our everyday lives. He has been teaching on Repent, witness and disciple,
teaching the congregation how to share with others, one tool he has taught has
been the three circles. I think that this is a great beginning of teaching the church
how to evangelize, however the attendance on Sunday nights is not anywhere
near the attendance on Sunday mornings. d I am not sure how we can encourage
attendance to these, time for teaching more than we have been doing pre-Covid,
however maybe since it was cut short in a way maybe more people will be willing
to come and be a part of the teaching time. These time for teaching also will touch
on discipleship once they resume, however I think that there could be more
mentorship type relationships made like Paul and Timothy, with accountability and
mentorship, and then work on those Barnabas’ in our lives in sharing that
relationship and the good news with people. I have started a children discipleship
class that will be a beginning to this, and there has been in the past discipleship
explored which comes after Christianity explored classes but those have not
happened but a few times in the last 5 years, perhaps that may be something that
the church brings back and continues, however a leaders who is willing to facilitate
is needed and often times those are hard to find, even in a big church. The third
that, I think could be accomplished more at my church (unless I am not seeing it
already as it is a large church) is that of biblical church discipline. I will admit that
the first thought was that of things people are doing wrong that will affect the
congregation, however, Devers spoke about formative discipline where he referred
to the “things that shape people as they grow emotionally, physically, mentally and
spiritually.”[1] This is part of what I am hoping to accomplish with our children’s
discipleship class that giving the children the tools that they can then use to grow
more in their faith and be able to defend in the future as well.
[1] Mark Dever, Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, Crossway: Wheaton, Il., 2013,
183
