9 Marks of a healthy Church.

Author: Mark Dever

Published by Crossway. PP248 £10.99

Review by Jim Sayers

If you go into any Christian bookshop today you will find the shelves groaning with ‘Church growth’ books. They all say basically the same thing: organise your church this way and it is guaranteed to grow. Get a vision statement, run seeker services, reconfigure your auditorium, do your evangelism differently, target particular groups. Let me say that I think we try to do all these things in one way or another, but they are just tinkering with the system. That is why I get turned off by much of the latest church growth theory. It is obvious stuff, often boiling down to secular ‘management- speak’ baptised into the Church.

Nine Marks of a healthy church goes deeper, and is an altogether more radical call to the Church to rediscover biblical ministry to reach the world. Written in an easy-to-read, preachy style, by Mark Dever, Pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church, Washington DC, (and, inevitably, founder of 9 Marks Ministries!), this is a book that challenges many of the assumptions of American evangelicalism.

What are the true marks of a healthy, biblical, gospel-focussed church? Mark explains how expositional preaching, really getting into the text in its context and applying it to today, changes the church. So much preaching is topical proof-texting that fails to do the hard work in the text. (To use Dick Lucas’ phrase, topical preachers use the Bible as a drunk uses a lamppost: for support rather than illumination.) By contrast ‘Let a good expositional ministry be established and watch what happens. Forget what the experts say. Watch hungry people have their lives transformed as the living God speaks to them through the power of his Word.’ Mark shows how preaching the whole Bible expositionally brings us to a much greater doctrine of God. Much of evangelicalism worships an anaemic God they don’t want to talk about, whereas the Bible presents a God who is creative, holy, faithful, loving and sovereign. Preach a weak God and you also preach a weak gospel, offering people a nice friend and the answer to their personal needs. But the gospel is much more transforming than that, and conversion is a much more radical change than merely praying the sinner’s prayer. Mark unfolds the true meaning of repentance, and goes on to show how understanding the nature of the gospel changes the way we do evangelism, and increases our passion for the lost. In the final chapters he turns his attention to three very un-PC issues: church membership, church discipline and biblical church leadership. In the light of our present process of reforming our church constitution, these chapters are required reading. Mark doesn’t hold back from issues that other writers squeamishly ignore.

Reading this book gave me courage to work at building a healthy, gospel focussed church. Much of this material flowed into my series ‘6 marks of a gospel church’ (I didn’t leave any out, honest! I just recognised some overlaps!), a sermon series that has had more feedback than any other. (Go to our sermon downloads and listen for yourself.) I really think there is a great agenda here for evangelical churches in the twenty first century.

Jim Sayers