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. 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. 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.
