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.
5
[1]5Mark Dever,5Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, third ed. (Wheaton,
Illinois: Crossway, 2013), 217.
[2]5Ibid., 250
[3]5Ibid., 108
