Nine Marks of a Healthy Church

I first heard Mark Dever for a week at an InterVarsity Summer Leadership Training. I remembered learning the most from his sermons, so when I heard about Nine Marks of a Healthy Church I was excited to read his views. Dever describes nine characteristics of churches that have grown rare: expositional preaching, Biblical theology, the Gospel, discipling, concern for growth, church leadership, and Biblical understandings of conversion, evangelism, membership. Each chapter describes one of these characteristics in detail.

The first characteristic, and in Dever’s opinion, the most important, is expositional preaching. This is in contrast to preaching where the pastor uses the sermon to establish the topic and then talks about the topic. In expositional preaching the topic comes from the passage(s) under discussion and the points are raised and argued by the passage itself. There are several reasons why this is the central characteristic. First, the preacher will have his mind shaped by the scripture, including topics he had not originally spent time on, rather than just the preacher’s favorite topics. Second, God has chosen to speak primarily through His Word; if we are hearing the preacher’s ideas rather than God’s Word explained, we will not be changed through the Word. In fact, since we cannot know God directly because of sin, He will not be known unless He speaks to us. It is essential to our relationship with Him.

The second characteristic is a correct understanding of theology. It does the church no good to have people who are committed to the church, but don’t really believe what the Bible says about God. Specifically what the Bible says is that God is creating, holy, faithful, loving, and sovereign. He created the Earth and all that is in it, and has continually created His people. He is holy, having a character unlike ours, being perfect and without flaw. He is faithful to His promises and His character. In particular, He has promised to both punish wickedness (of which we have plenty) and spare us. His faithfulness in this area was revealed along with His love, when Jesus came and died for our sin, and God punished Himself. Finally, God is sovereign: He will accomplish His purposes and bring us to Himself at the end of time. Importantly, God will accomplish His purposes, not us.

The third characteristic is an understanding of the Gospel. It is not that we are essentially ok but need to realize our limitations or some such thinking. It is that we are not ok, that we desperately need God, but that He died for us and has great plans for us. It is not that God is love—real love will punish, after all. Nor is the Gospel a call to right living: it is a call for repentance of our sin, a call to believe that we are completely depraved as the Bible said and to trust in God for everything.

Mark four, a Biblical understanding of conversion, was fairly opaque to my understanding. It seemed to basically repeat much of characteristic three, namely that we are depraved and spiritually dead. We are corpses in need of a new life, which only God can bring. Conversions that do not result in changed lives are not true conversions. This conversion comes from hearing or reading the Word of God, believing, and repenting.

Mark five is the understanding of evangelism. All people are called to evangelize, not just professionals. We need to tell people to repent and believe (which will prove costly to us). We need tell people that they will be saved if they repent and believe, but that they need to decide now. We need to tell them that it is worth it. We need to use the Bible in telling them, and we need to pray.

Dever also describes several things that are not evangelism. Evangelism is not imposing your beliefs, it is merely telling people. “According to the Bible, evangelism is simply telling the Good News; it does not include making sure that the other person responds to it correctly.” Personal testimony is not evangelism. It might be part of it, but telling people what Jesus has done for you is different than asserting that we are sinful, that Christ died to pay for our sins, and calling people to repentance. Likewise social action or political involvement is not evangelism. Apologetics (answering people’s questions and objections) is not repentance, nor is the results of evangelism actually evangelism. It is not how many people have believed, but how often we have proclaimed sin and God’s grace through Christ that is important.

The sixth mark of a healthy church is a Biblical understanding of church membership. A church is not a building or an organization, but it is a collection of local believers who profess faith in Christ, by His power, for His glory. Thus, merely attending a church is not being part of the church. It is participating in this fellowship of believers and becoming a member of the church is important in this. If there is no way for the church to expel you, then you probably have not given yourself fully to the community. Dever offers a number of reasons we should become members, from being able to help each other grow in faith to partnering in ministry and evangelism. He also lists the requirements of membership at his church: attend regularly, be at Communion, attend the members’ meetings, pray regularly, and give regularly.

The seventh mark relates to church membership as well: church discipline. Church discipline is clearly commanded in Scripture, yet few churches today practice it. Before the Civil War, the Southern Baptists excommunicated two percent of their members each year and grew at twice the population growth. Church discipline is essential because the Church is called to be different; if a member of the church is not living like a Christian should, for the sake of that person and for God’s glory (because people are watching the church to see what God is like) they need to be disciplined. Dever’s church has practiced church discipline for offenses such as violations of the moral law, disreputable conduct, habitual absence from worship, sowing discord, and not helping with church finances. Discipline is done for the good of the person disciplined, to show the danger of sin to other Christians, for church health, as a public witness, and to reflect the holiness of God. Discipline should be done with humility and love, not out of revenge or meanness. It should not be done as a judgment based on knowing they are not a Christian (since we don’t know that), but to express concern that they are not pleasing God in the way that they are living.

Mark eight is a concern for discipleship and growth. Growth is not optional; everywhere in the Bible God commands His people to grow. Some of this is simply numerical growth, but in the New Testament it is primarily spiritual growth—growing in faith and maturity. Ultimately this growth is done by God, but we have a responsibility to work at it ourselves. A church can cultivate growth by the other eight marks. For instance, expositional preaching will train members to be fed from the Bible, rather than by the preacher. Growth is essential, since things are not growing are dying: “it is only the things that are alive that swim upstream; the dead things all float along with the current.” (p. 201) However, we cannot easily measure growth. “The only certain observable sign of [true Christian] growth is a life of increasing holiness, rooted in Christian self-denial.” (p. 201) Dever gives several questions (quoted in the notes below) that can help discern this.

The last mark is biblical leadership. The Biblical churches were congregational, rather than hierarchical. Paul writes to the whole congregation in many of his letters, not just the leaders. When Paul wrote Galatians in response to a false gospel, he wrote to the congregation, not the bishop, seminary, pastor or elders. However God gives some people the gift of leadership to build up the body. Qualifications for leadership are spiritual (others-centered, irreproachable conduct, respected) rather than the more MBA sort of qualities (good manager, delegates effectively, manages conflict, has vision). Dever strongly recommends having elders assist the pastor (who functions as a sort of elder) since they have helped him tremendously. Finally, there are four aspects of leadership (BOSS): being the boss, being out in front, supplying others, and serving.

Dever does an excellent job of describing the Biblical views of these nine marks. I suspect that if you already happen to have the Biblical view of a particular mark that the chapter will be fairly uninformative, as that was the effect that the chapters on evangelism, conversion, and the gospel had on me. However, I found he had interesting support for exegetical preaching (which I have always preferred, but never had an argument for), and the marks of church membership and discipleship raised ideas that I had not considered but definitely seem to be Scriptural. I was also disappointed that the marks are simply marks that have grown rare; he does not offer any defense as to why these are healthy marks. This was particularly disappointing since he dismisses many other books on the topic as being unhelpful. However, this book is definitely worth reading, particularly for young leaders in the church.

Review: 8.5

Solid Biblical explanation of these principles. Content is probably 9.5, but the writing drags the rating down. It is somewhat dull (although not painfully so), and I would really like some defense as to why these are marks of a healthy church. Not that I disagree with him, but he offers no arguments in favor of his basic thesis.

[Update July 2015]

Having come around to a more Charismatic way of looking at things, I no longer agree that these are the nine marks of a healthy church. Good marks, yes, but not sufficient for health. Dever writes from a very evangelical view, and these are classic marks of what evangelicals consider a good church—a healthy community which is holding firm to the truth. My experience is that emphasis on right doctrine and right thinking results in a church that is living but does not feel alive. It sees a little transformation in its members and community around it, but frankly, feels like it is loosing the war with the larger culture.

My Charismatic experience suggests that he is missing three very important marks: the Holy Spirit and the Presence of God, loving worship, and love for people. After all, the point of being a Christian is loving God, and if He does not show up somehow, that is a disappointing love-relationship... If we really have the Almighty God, the guy who created this entire universe, living is us, but people show up at our church and cannot sense that somehow these people are different, that somehow God is here in some mysterious but tangible way, something might be wrong. And if we really love God, there ought to be some sort of expression of that in worship (which is not necessarily the same thing as singing songs about God). Finally, “if we have not love, we are a clanging cymbal.” If people do not sense God’s love when they interact with a church, something is definitely wrong. Right doctrine without love does not transform the world the way Jesus modeled.

▶ Notes

Chapter 1: Expositional Preaching

“...preachers are not commanded to simply go and preach. They are commanded specifically to go and preach the Word.” (p. 27)
“A preacher should have his mind increasingly shaped by Scripture. He shouldn’t just use Scripture as an excuse for what he already knows he wants to say.” (p. 27)
“We can create people around [care groups / a good choir / life-stage groups / men’s groups / personality]. And God can surely use all of these things. But in the final analysis the people of God, the church of God can only be created around the Word of God.” (p. 36)
“But the congregation’s commitment to the centrality of the Word coming from the front, from the preacher, the one specially gifted by God and called to that ministry, is the most important thing you can look for in a church.” (p. 38)
“It shouldn’t surprise you to hear that sound, expositional preaching is often the fountainhead of growth in a church.” (p. 40)

Chapter 2: Biblical Theology

“We can summarize the main story line of the Bible simply under five words; this is what the Bible teaches us about God: that He is creating; that He is holy; that He is faithful; that He is loving; and that He is sovereign.” (p. 46)
“God completes His purposes . He fulfills His promises. As Christians, we need to know that God will continue to care for us, and that His continuing care is based not on our faithfulness but on His. It may be more exciting for a little while to try to run around and pretend that the world is some great laser-tag contest, spiritually, between the forces of darkness and the forces of light. And certainly there are very real evil forces that we as Christians come up against in the world and in our own hearts. But the outcome does not hang in the balance.” (p. 58)

Chapter 3: The Gospel

“The Bible utterly rejects the idea that we are okay, that the human condition is just fine, that everyone is really in need of simply accepting their current condition, their finitude, their limitedness, their imperfections, or that we simply need to look on the bright side of things.” (p. 66)
“The Bible presents God not simply as our passive Creator but as our jealous Lover. He wants all of us. For us to think that we can disregard Him sometimes, set Him and His ways aside when it suits us, is to show that we have not understood at all the nature of our relationship with God. We cannot claim to be believers and yet knowingly, repeatedly, and happily break His law. But that is the state that we find ourselves in.” (p. 68)
“No, the news that we as Christians have to bring is not just that our depravity is so pervasive but also that God’s plans for us are so wonderful—because He knows what He made us for. When you begin to realize that, you become thankful for the fact that Christianity is not finally about anesthetizing you to life’s pain, or even about waking you up to it and teaching you to live with it. The message of Jesus Christ is about teaching us to live with a transforming longing, with a growing faith, with a sure and certain hope of what’s to come. The Gospel is not simply that we’re okay.” (p. 69-70)
“‘If you loved me, you would let me do it.’ As adults, of course, we know that love doesn’t always let. Indeed, sometimes love prevents and sometimes love even punishes. So if we say that ‘God is love,’ what are we thinking that such divine love must look like?” (p. 70)
“Repentance and faith are actually the two sides of the same coin. It is not as though you can have the basic model (belief) and then, if you really want to get holy at some later time, start adding some repentance. ... ‘Repent’ is what you do when you being thinking rightly about God and yourself—belief without this kind of change is counterfeit.” (p. 78)
“I fear for our nation. There’s a popular suspicion abroad that the Christian Gospel, as expressed by evangelicals, is a threat to our freedoms. Go and study the history of Germany and note what kind of Christianity reigned for a century before Nazism. It was not a Christianity of absolute truths from an absolute God. It was a compromising, moralizing, relativizing kind of Christianity offering a gospel that could be shaped by human hands and human thoughts. What we should really fear, as a nation but primarily as individuals, are the consequences of ignoring the Gospel.” (p. 80)

Chapter 5: Evangelism

Good books

Will Metzger: Tell the Truth
Mack Stiles: Speaking of Jesus
Iain Murray: Revival and Revivalism (how the practice of evangelism in American evolved)
J.I. Packer: Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God

“‘I don’t think that anything has been done in the name of Christ and under the banner of Christianity that has proven more destructive to human personality, and hence counter-productive to the evangelistic enterprise, than the unchristian, uncouth strategy of attempting to make people aware of their lost and sinful condition.’” (Robert Schuller, Milk and Honey, p. 4, Dec. 1997) [Needless to say, Dever rebuts this point of view!]
“According to the Bible, evangelism is simply telling the Good News; it does not include making sure that the other person responds to it correctly. I wish we could make people respond to the Gospel, but we cannot. According to the Bible, the fruit of evangelism comes from God, not from our clever techniques or our personal passion for what we are doing.” (p. 117)
“Testimony is, of course, very popular in our postmodern, ‘that’s-good-for-you’ age. Who would object to your thinking you’ve got something good from Christ? But wait and see what happens when you try to move the conversation from what Jesus has done for you to the facts of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ and how that all applies to your nonbelieving friend. That’s when you discover that testimony is not necessarily evangelism.” (p. 119)

Chapter 7: Church discipline

A publication on church growth from the Southern Baptist denomination suggested “open the front doors and close the back doors,” that is, help people understand what the church is doing (accessibility) and make it more difficult for people to be uncared-for and un-discipled. But Dever says, “if we really want to see our churches grow, we need to make it harder to join and we need to be better about excluding people. We need to be able to show that there is a distinction between the church and the world—that it means something to be a Christian.” (p. 156-7)
Some books:

John Armstrong: The Compromised Church (read the article by R. Albert Mohler, Jr. entitled “Church Discipline: The Missing Mark”)
Daniel Wray: Biblical Church Discipline
Greg Wills: Democratic Religion (historical background)
John L. Dagg: Manual of Church Polity
Jay Adams: Handbook of Church Discipline (more modern than Dagg)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Life Together (description of interaction between Christians)

“Jesus intends our lives to back up our words. If our lives don’t back up our words, the evangelistic task is injured, as we have seen so terribly this last century in America. Undisciplined churches have actually made it harder for people to hear the Good News of new life in Jesus Christ.” (p. 165)

Chapter 8: Discipleship and Growth

“In a funny way, when we hear expositional preaching we become less dependent on the preacher. We’re more concerned about the Word of God.” (p. 192)
“The preachers who talk only about God’s love talk about it less and less with every sermon they preach, because there is less and less in their own mind that God loves us in spite of. There’s less and less of a problem that has been dealt with.” (p. 194)
“Remember, it is only the things that are alive that swim upstream; the dead things all float along with the current.” (p. 201)
“Rather than thinking of growth as a linear graph, recording mounting or declining measurements—totals of services attended, dollars given, books read—perhaps it is better to think of Christian growth as a sort of video game where each day you are given a fresh challenge to live that day as a Christian.” (p. 201)
“According to [Jonathan Edwards in Treatise Concerning Religious Affections] ... the only certain observable sign of [true Christian] growth is a life of increasing holiness, rooted in Christian self-denial.” (p. 201)
Pastoral questions to ask during visitations: (quoted from p. 198)

In what particular way have you grown in your understanding of the Christian life since we last met?
In what particular way have you grown in your practice of the Christian life since we last met?
In what particular way do you feel that you need instruction?
In what particular way are you disappointed in your pursuit of holiness?
How, specifically, can I pray for you?

Chapter 9: Biblical church leadership

In response to the proverb “trust must be earned,” “the kind of trust that we are called to give to our fellow imperfect humans in this life ... can never finally be earned. It must be given as a gift—a gift in faith, in trust more of the God who gives than of the leaders He has given.” (p. 214)
“Being more subtle, secularization often deceives Christians before they are aware of it, including those in the church-growth movement. How else can one explain the comment of a Japanese businessman to a visiting Australian? ‘Whenever I meet a Buddhist leader, I meet a holy man. Whenever I meet a Christian leader, I meet a manager.’” (p. 217, from Dining with the Devil by Os Guiness)
“Imagine two congregations, one with a lot of people speaking in tongues, the other with scores of young people attending the funeral of an older man whom they had come to know as a fellow church member. That second church seems to me to be more ‘charismatic’ in the biblical sense of that word. That second church looks more like what I understand the New Testament to be calling a church to be—a community in which people have learned to love and to care for each other.” (p. 221)