After reading Dever's9 Marks of a Healthy Church, what 3 do you/your
church need to work on
the most? Why? What steps could you/your church take to implement
those areas?
After reading Mark Dever’s Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, there were
two that stuck out to me was the discipleship and growth and Church
membership. When Mark’s had mentioned, “to learn what we most need
in our lives, we need to turn to God himself, hear the word preached
expositionally, so that we don’t just hear selective themes”.[1]This really
touched my soul deeply because I am at a four way stop not knowing if I
want to stay at the church that I am at or do I want to find something else,
or do I just sit down and be still. There are times where I am sitting and
listening to the word being preached and I have no idea what the Pastor is
talking about. There is no time to even ask a question of understanding
unless you book a coaching session with the pastor. If you do not have the
fee that is sown into the ministry, then you are basically left out into the
wind. So, I take my notes and research on my own to have a better
understanding of what was spoken in a particular sermon. I feel that there
is growth in numbers at where I attend, but there seems to not be any
follow up with the new converts. It is almost like the new convert is there
and then they slowly leave, and you look up and wonder where a
particular person may have left and why. I understand that it is not the job
for the Pastor to do everything, but to delegate it to other leaders. Maybe
it is just me being used to the way my other church was tightly connected
where we can ask questions if we did not understand something. I think if
they have a person or a team that would follow up with new converts to
assist them along the way where they can grow and not feel by
themselves, and people would not leave.
With the church membership, they are promoting to share the streams on
social media platforms and the traditional ways of inviting people to
church to have church growth. This is again amazing, however it falls
short of connecting with new converts so that they won’t walk away. This
is my personal experience of being a member as well as when I was
serving on the dream team in the area of youth ministries.
[1]Dever, Mark. (2013).9 Marks of a Healthy Church. 3rd ed. Wheaton, IL:
Crossway.216.
