Nine Marks of a Healthy Church (4th Edition) E-Book

Mark Dever

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

What Makes for a Healthy Church? You may have read books on this topic before but not like this one. Instead of an instruction manual for church growth, this classic text points to basic biblical principles for assessing and strengthening the health of your church. Whether you're a pastor, a leader, or an involved member of your congregation, studying the nine marks of a healthy church will help you cultivate new life and well-being within your own church for God's glory. This revised edition includes two new chapters; updated material on prayer, missions, evangelism, and the gospel; and a foreword by H. B. Charles Jr.

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“I cannot say enough about how Nine Marks of a Healthy Church was used to shape my personal understanding of the biblical church and the local church I was planting when I first read the second edition of the book. Amidst so many controversial ideas and methods presented to church planters by church-planting best sellers, Nine Marks of a Healthy Church simply brought me back to Scripture, centered my heart on what a biblical church must be and do, and also relieved me from the perspective that I had to shape the congregation before me Sunday after Sunday. Don’t misunderstand me; I knew all these marks before, but they were not appropriately connected and applied. In practice, the use of these nine marks were tainted with foreign ideas and a lack of intentionality that prevented them from bearing the right fruits. I am glad for Dever’s reshaping of the content to consider two other marks that are also neglected in the contemporary church: prayer and missions. The book still has nine marks. If you are wondering how, you will have to read it! Do not hesitate!”

Mauro Meister, President, Andrew Jumper Graduate Center, Brazil; Senior Pastor, Presbyterian Church Barra Funda; author, Law and Grace and The Origin of Idolatry

“From my early days as a football coach, my football mentor instilled in me a sense of urgency to be clear on what we were looking for as we set out to build championship teams. All championship teams own distinctive marks that we look to reproduce year after year. In my formative days as a pastor, Mark Dever has helped me gain biblical clarity on what a healthy local church looks like through Nine Marks of a Healthy Church. As leaders of our local churches, it is critical that we are clear on how Christ is building his church so that we can faithfully come alongside him in his work.”

Rocky Seto, Senior Pastor, Evergreen Baptist Church of San Gabriel Valley

“Here are the timeless biblical truths that inform what the church is, how God creates and nurtures it, and how its pastors and members participate in that work. Nine Marks of a Healthy Church has helped me as a young pastor see through the fog of church growth models to the essential architecture of ecclesiology. This book is far and away the clearest and most biblical account of what the church is that I’ve come across. Most importantly, the vision of the church displayed here is so God-centered that it places the magnificent responsibility of sustaining and leading it back on the right shoulders, namely, his.”

Samuel D. Ferguson, Rector, The Falls Church Anglican

“I was an ambitious Capitol Hill staffer when I was first handed this book twenty years ago. In retrospect, it was this moment that totally upended my estimation of the local church and changed the trajectory of my life toward ministry in it. The personal ambitions I had been aiming for began to seem insignificant compared to the growing desire for God’s glory to be displayed through the local church. After now a decade of cross-cultural ministry in the Arab world, my understanding of a healthy church is continually shaped and sharpened by the principles of this book. Reader beware: this book could totally transform the way you see the seemingly ordinary local church.”

Jenny Manley, pastor’s wife, United Arab Emirates; author, The Good Portion: Christ

“My first conversation with Mark Dever was a memorable one. I’d asked why I should consider doing the pastoral internship program at his church. Mark’s reply: ‘Because too many pastors simply don’t know about the church.’ The statement struck me then and has stuck with me since—pastors of churches not knowing enough about the churches they pastor. But far from only harping on the problem, Mark has given his life to helping with the solution. How? With books like this one, pointing pastors and church members alike back to the Bible to recover a right understanding and practice of some of the most basic yet life-giving marks of a church. Nine Marks of a Healthy Church is not merely a manual for how to do church but a methodology of how to think about the church. Throughout its pages, the Bible is actually used, showing its authority and sufficiency, not simply talked about. The gospel is clearly communicated and celebrated, not simply assumed. Diverse voices from the past are consulted—whether African-American pastor Francis Grimké on preaching or African-Jamaican pastor Moses Hall on prayer—to instruct our practices in the present. And a pastoral heart is put on display, showing a love for God and his glory, and a love for God’s people and their growth. Reading this book may not immediately change your church, but it might change you, causing you to more carefully, thoughtfully, and biblically consider how the Lord might use your faithfulness as a minister or a member to contribute to the greater health of your local church.”

Omar Johnson, Pastor, Temple Hills Baptist Church, Temple Hills, MD

“The nine marks are as relevant and important for today’s church as they’ve ever been. Whereas a combination of pragmatism, tradition, and cultural influences shape so much of modern Christianity, Dever refreshingly points us back to the foundational truths of the Bible that ought to drive all of our practices in the church. While the nine marks are so straightforwardly Scriptural that no faithful reader of the Bible could deny their significance, to actually implement them in our churches is to swim against the cultural current. To that end, this book is an invaluable resource for any pastor or congregant who desires to see God’s glory more clearly manifest through Christ-centered, gospel-preaching, biblically sound churches.”

Harry Fujiwara, Pastor, The First Baptist Church in the City of New York

“It is astonishing that the apostle Paul describes the local gathering of Christians as ‘the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood’ (Acts 20:28). That raises the stakes of church life and health and mission about as high as it can be. We are dealing with a blood-bought body of people. I do not want human ideas. I want God’s word about the church. I turn with hope and confidence to Mark Dever’s radically biblical commitment. Few people today have thought more or better about what makes a church biblical and healthy. I thank God for the book and for 9Marks ministries.”

John Piper, Founder and Teacher, desiringGod.org; Chancellor, Bethlehem College & Seminary; author, Desiring God

“The future of biblical Christianity in the Western world is inextricably bound to the future of the local church. Mark Dever knows this, and his Nine Marks of a Healthy Church is a biblical prescription for faithfulness.”

Ligon Duncan, Chancellor and CEO, Reformed Theological Seminary

Nine Marks of a Healthy Church

Crossway Books by Mark Dever

12 Challenges Churches Face

The Compelling Community: Where God’s Power Makes a Church Attractive (coauthor)

Discipling: How to Help Others Follow Jesus

The Gospel and Personal Evangelism

How Can Our Church Find a Faithful Pastor?

How to Build a Healthy Church: A Practical Guide for Deliberate Leadership (coauthor)

In My Place Condemned He Stood: Celebrating the Glory of the Atonement (coauthor)

It Is Well: Expositions on Substitutionary Atonement (coauthor)

The Message of the New Testament: Promises Kept

The Message of the Old Testament: Promises Made

Nine Marks of a Healthy Church (4th edition)

Proclaiming a Cross-Centered Theology (coauthor)

The Unadjusted Gospel (coauthor)

What Does God Want of Us Anyway? A Quick Overview of the Whole Bible

What Is a Healthy Church?

Why Should I Join a Church?

Nine Marks of a Healthy Church

Fourth Edition

Mark Dever

Foreword by H. B. Charles Jr.

Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, fourth edition

Copyright © 2000, 2004, 2013, 2021 by Mark Dever

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

The first edition, published in 2000, was an expansion of a much short work published in 1997 by Founders Press.

Cover design: Jordan Singer

First printing 2021

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations in chapters 3, 8, and 9 are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible. Public domain.

Scripture quotations in chapters 1–2, 4–7, front matter, and back matter are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-7811-3 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-7813-7 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-7812-0 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-7814-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Dever, Mark, author. | Charles, H. B., writer of foreword.

Title: Nine marks of a healthy church / Mark Dever ; foreword by H. B. Charles Jr.

Description: Fourth edition. | Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021008455 (print) | LCCN 2021008456 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433578113 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781433578120 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433578144 (mobi) | ISBN 9781433578137 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Church—Marks.

Classification: LCC BV601 .D48 2021 (print) | LCC BV601 (ebook) | DDC 250—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008455

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008456

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2022-10-14 05:29:06 PM

Contents

Foreword by H. B. Charles Jr.

Preface to the Fourth Edition (2021)

Preface to the Third Edition (2013)

Preface to the Second Edition (2004)

Introduction

Mark One: Expositional Preaching

Mark Two: Gospel Doctrine

Mark Three: A Biblical Understanding of Conversion and Evangelism

Mark Four: A Biblical Understanding of Church Membership

Mark Five: Biblical Church Discipline

Mark Six: A Biblical Concern for Discipleship and Growth

Mark Seven: Biblical Church Leadership

Mark Eight: A Biblical Understanding and Practice of Prayer

Mark Nine: A Biblical Understanding and Practice of Missions

Appendix 1: Tips for Leading the Church in a Healthy Direction

Appendix 2: “Don’t Do It!” Why You Shouldn’t Practice Church Discipline

Appendix 3: The Original 9 Marks Letter

General Index

Scripture Index

Foreword

H. B. Charles Jr.

I was on my monthly pilgrimage to my favorite Christian bookstore. It was a large store with multiple sections. Each visit, I would browse my way through each section, strategically getting to the pastoral helps/church life area last. It was one of the smallest sections in the store. But I would spend the most time there, hoping to find resources to help me lead the established congregation I was called to serve.

One day, as I browsed the section, a book jumped out at me: Nine Marks of a Healthy Church. While only a young man and a new pastor, I was already burned out on church growth tricks, theories, and techniques. Not only had I read the material; I had tried out the novel ideas on my patient—but quickly becoming cynical—congregation. As I diligently read book after book, I unsuccessfully tried idea after idea. Three steps to . . . five keys to . . . seven ways to. . . .

Now someone had come up with nine marks!

“Here we go again,” I thought, as I picked up the book virtually against my will. As I looked over the table of contents, I was more shocked than when I saw the title. The first mark of a healthy church was expositional preaching! The second mark was biblical theology! This was nothing like any church growth book I had ever read.

Nine Marks provided a biblical compass for the critical years of my pastoral ministry. It confronted me with the radical but obvious truth that the Lord Jesus Christ is the head of the church. The Word of God is to be the final authority in local church ministry—not pastoral vision, congregational tradition, statistical goals, ministry programs, or attendee preferences. The church is not a business, pastors are not executives, and ministry is not franchise-building.

Like many other pastors, I have benefited immensely from reading and rereading this biblical yet practical study of the church—and reading it again with fellow church leaders. The book became a ministry, which has served the church well by generously providing resources to help pastors, staff, and leaders think biblically about the local church.

I had devoured 9Marks resources for years, when the Lord blessed me with a personal friendship with Mark Dever. Getting to know him caused me to appreciate Nine Marks of a Healthy Church even more. These are not random ideas thrown together to sell a book. They are the Scripture-driven convictions of a pastor who loves Christ, the gospel, and the church. Dever has faithfully led Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, for decades. This local church, which embodies these nine marks, has influenced a generation of pastors and congregations to glorify the Lord by pursuing biblical church health.

I am excited that Mark Dever has labored to give us this updated and expanded version of Nine Marks. Some of the material in this edition has been rearranged. New chapters have been added on missions and prayer. But don’t worry: this book is still the trusted friend you’ve come to love over the years. If this is your first time working through this material, prepare to meet a new friend that will be a helpful resource in the years to come. Read it. Practice the principles that will take you back to the basics of Christian ministry. Share it with colleagues and coworkers. Pray the Lord will raise up churches during these critical times that are devoted to Jesus Christ, biblical convictions, gospel proclamation, true community, and church health.

Preface to the Fourth Edition (2021)

So much has changed since I first preached this series of messages in the 1990s, and yet so much has remained the same. Perhaps it’s just my personal predisposition, but that which remains the same strikes me as greatly more important even than the most important changes we’ve seen. What doesn’t change is what the Bible presents about a healthy church.

I go all over the country—and sometimes even outside of it—speaking to pastors and other Christians about what characterizes a sound, healthy local church. And yet, I realized some time ago that while I may often have an application or two about this topic in my normal Bible expositions, I hadn’t addressed this issue in my preaching at Capitol Hill Baptist Church (CHBC) in any focused fashion since the 1990s!

As I talked about preaching on some of these same topics again, friends pressed me particularly on the topics of prayer and missions. It’s not that they thought I had any novel theological breakthroughs to share, but they thought that some of the practices in our own church’s life would be helpful and encouraging to other churches.

With that in mind, I decided to combine some messages. Decades of workshops on Nine Marks of a Healthy Church had led me to think some could be better handled that way. So I combined the messages on biblical theology and the gospel. That combined message is now “Gospel Doctrine” (chap. 2) in this edition. And because questions I received about conversion and evangelism were always interrelated, I combined those two messages. They are now a single chapter, “A Biblical Understanding of Conversion and Evangelism” (chap. 3). That left me free to take the two additional messages from the series of sermons given in November of 2015 and make them two new chapters: “A Biblical Understanding and Practice of Prayer” (chap. 8) and “A Biblical Understanding and Practice of Missions” (chap. 9).

Of course, I’ve never claimed that these are the only marks of health that a church should have; they are simply marks of health that need attention in many churches today. Over the years, you, dear reader, may see other marks that need to be investigated and championed. Perhaps our theology needs to be made more biblical. Or maybe our practice needs to be updated. I look forward to reading your further contributions on this vital, God-honoring topic. But, here in this fourth edition, I give you mine. I’ve scrubbed every chapter, omitting some things here and adding some things there. Some sections have been shortened, others expanded. And, of course, there are the larger changes mentioned above.

But the basic picture remains the same. In the years since this book first appeared, many other books on related themes have become available. Three may be of particular interest to you: the book I wrote called The Church; the book I wrote with Paul Alexander called How to Build a Healthy Church; and the book I wrote with Jamie Dunlop called Compelling Community. If you’ve liked this book, those other three titles would fit nicely in your reading and reflection.

Caleb Morell has been an outstanding assistant in preparing for these revisions. He’s made my work much lighter. H. B. Charles Jr. was kind to agree to write a new foreword for this edition. And the friends at Crossway are always just that—friends—and colaborers in this regard. Their ability to produce and distribute books allows my private efforts to be of some public good. And yet, for all the help others have been in reading and writing and suggesting revisions and amendments to this book, as always, any errors you may find are mine alone.

Again, to God be the glory in all that lies within.

Mark Dever

Pastor, Capitol Hill Baptist Church, Washington, DC

President, 9Marks.org

July 2020

Preface to the Third Edition (2013)

Few authors get a third chance to try to get a message across to their readers. As I finish this revision, I’m now closing in on twenty years of pastoring the same congregation. When I first preached this series of sermons to our church, I hadn’t been pastoring them even five years. My family was young. Our church was small and older. Now the church is larger and younger and my family is smaller and older. It is from this changing perspective that I take up the topic of church health yet again.

For this opportunity I am profoundly grateful to our friends at Crossway. Lane Dennis, Al Fisher, and many others have been allies in ministry since before they first approached me about doing this book some fifteen years ago.

The nine marks that I’ve chosen to cover seem every bit as relevant now as they did then. Many other aspects of the church can be fruitfully discussed, but I would like to continue pressing on these topics. Conversations with pastors and other church leaders in the intervening years have done nothing to cause me to think otherwise.

In this revised third edition, some arguments have been added (on, for example, expositional preaching, the nature of the gospel, and complementarianism), illustrations updated, and appendices changed and added. But the basic structure of the book remains the same.

Extensive help has been given to me in these revisions by friends too numerous to mention. Three that I cannot omit, however, because of the amount of attention they gave to this project and the help they were to me, are Mike McKinley, Bobby Jamieson, and Jaime Owens. Beyond that, my dear wife Connie reread the entire book, making thoughtful comments for the improvement of it throughout.

As with every edition, all errors of expression and judgment are my own. For any good done through it, all the glory goes to God.

Mark Dever

Senior Pastor, Capitol Hill Baptist Church

Washington, DC, September 2012

Preface to the Second Edition (2004)

Ten Years of Nine Marks

As I’m writing this preface to the new expanded edition of Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, I’m also about to celebrate ten years pastoring the same congregation. To some reading this sentence, that sounds like an eternity; to others, it may seem as if I’ve just begun. To be honest, to me it feels a bit like both.

I confess that pastoring a church sometimes feels like difficult work. There have been times when my tears have not been tears of joy, but of frustration, or sadness, or even worse. The people who are least happy and who leave have often been those who have required the most time, and who have talked the most to others as they have gone. And sometimes their talk has been neither edifying nor encouraging. They have little thought of how their actions affect others—the pastor, the pastor’s family, those who have loved them and worked with them, young Christians who are confused, others to whom they talk wrongly. There are things I work for that don’t work out, and things I care about that nobody else does. Some hopes go unfulfilled, and occasionally even tragedies intrude. It is in the nature of sheep to stray and of wolves to eat. I guess if I can’t deal with that, I should just get out of undershepherding.

But most of my work is, to be honest, exhilarating! I thank God for those many times when I have known tears of joy. In God’s grace, the number of people leaving the congregation unhappy has been dwarfed by the number of people leaving with tears of gratitude, and by those coming in. We have known growth in our congregation that hasn’t been dramatic when considered in any one year, but which staggers me when I pause and look back. I’ve seen young men become converted and then eventually go into the ministry. While I’m writing this, two of the men now on our pastoral staff were first friends of mine when they were non-Christians. I studied the Gospel of Mark with them. By God’s grace, I saw both of them come to know the Lord, and I now sit and listen to them preach the everlasting gospel to others. My eyes moisten even while I write these words.

The church as a whole has prospered. It seems clearly healthy. Strains in relationships are dealt with in godly ways. A culture of discipleship seems to have taken root. People go from here to seminary, or to their work as teachers, architects, or businessmen with more resolve in both their work and their evangelism. We’ve seen many marriages and young families begun. We’ve seen political types instructed in their worldviews; Christians in all walks of life helped in their understanding of the gospel; and discipline exercised to try to disabuse those who may be self-deceived. Pain has been exceeded by joy. God’s grace toward us seems only to increase with every life encountered.

As God’s Word has been taught, the congregation’s appetite for good teaching has increased. A palpable sense of expectation has developed in the congregation. There is excitement as the congregation gathers. Older saints are cared for through their difficult days. One dear man’s ninety-sixth birthday was celebrated by a bunch of the younger people in the church taking him to McDonald’s (his favorite restaurant)! Wounded marriages have been helped; wounded people have found God’s healing. Young people have come to appreciate hymns, and older people the vigorous singing of choruses. Countless hours have been given in quiet service to the building up of others. Courageous choices have been prayed for, made, and celebrated. New friendships are being made every day. Young men who have spent time with us here are now pastoring congregations in Kentucky and Michigan and Georgia and Connecticut and Illinois. They are preaching in Hawaii and Iowa. Missions giving has gone from a few thousand dollars a year to a few hundred thousand dollars a year. Our compassion for the lost has grown. I could go on. God has obviously been good to us. We have known health.

My Surprising Change

I didn’t intend all of this when I came. I didn’t come with a plan or program to bring all this about. I came with a commitment to God’s Word, to give myself to knowing, believing, and teaching it. I had seen the blight of the unconverted church member, and was particularly concerned about that, but I didn’t have a carefully worked out strategy to deal with the problem.

In God’s providence, I had done a doctorate focusing on a Puritan (Richard Sibbes) whose writings about the individual Christian I loved, but whose concessions on the church came to seem increasingly unwise to me. Unhealthy churches cause few problems for the healthiest Christians; but they are cruel taxes on the growth of the youngest and weakest Christians. They prey on those who don’t understand Scripture well. They mislead spiritual children. They even take the curious hopes of non-Christians that there might be another way to live, and seem to deny it. Bad churches are terribly effective antimissionary forces. I deeply lament sin in my own life, and sin’s corporate magnification in the life of so many churches. They seem to make Jesus out to be a liar when he promised life to the full (John 10:10).

This all became more central to my life when, in 1994, I became the senior pastor of the congregation I now serve. The responsibility weighed on my mind. Texts such as James 3:1 (“judged more strictly”) and Hebrews 13:17 (“must give an account”) loomed larger in my mind. Circumstances conspired to emphasize to me the importance with which God regards the local church. I thought of a statement by nineteenth-century Scottish pastor and trainer of pastors, John Brown, who, in a letter of paternal counsel to one of his pupils newly ordained over a small congregation, wrote,

I know the vanity of your heart, and that you will feel mortified that your congregation is very small, in comparison with those of your brethren around you; but assure yourself on the word of an old man, that when you come to give an account of them to the Lord Christ, at his judgment-seat, you will think you have had enough.1

As I looked out over the congregation I had charge of, I felt the weightiness of such an accounting to God.

But it was ultimately through preaching expositional sermons, serially going through book after book, that all of the Bible’s teachings on the church became more central to me. It began to seem obviously a farce that we claimed to be Christians but didn’t love each other. Sermons on John and 1 John, Wednesday night Bible studies going through James for three years, and conversations about membership and church covenants all came together.

The “each other” and “one another” passages began to come alive and enflesh the theological truths that I had known about God caring for his church. As I’ve preached through Ephesians 2–3, it has become clear to me that the church is the center of God’s plan to display his wisdom to the heavenly beings. When Paul spoke to the Ephesian elders, he referred to the church as something that God “bought with his own blood” (Acts 20:28). And, of course, on the road to Damascus earlier, when Saul was interrupted on his course of persecuting Christians, the risen Christ did not ask Saul why he persecuted these Christians, or even the church; rather, Christ so identified with his church that the accusing question he put to Saul was, “Why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:4). The church was clearly central in God’s eternal plan, in his sacrifice, and in his continuing concern.

I’ve come to see that love is largely local. And the local congregation is the place which claims to display this love for all the world to see. So Jesus taught his disciples in John 13:34–35, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” I have seen friends and family alienated from Christ because they perceive this or that local church to have been such a terrible place. And, on the other hand, I have seen friends and family come to Christ because they have seen exactly this love that Jesus taught and lived—love for one another, the kind of selfless love that he showed—and they’ve felt the natural human attraction to it. So the congregation—the gathered people of God as the sounding board of the Word—has become more central to my understanding of evangelism, and of how we should pray and plan to evangelize. The local church is God’s evangelism plan. The local church is God’s evangelism program.

Over these last ten years, the congregation has also become more central to my understanding of how we are to discern true conversion in others, and how we are to have assurance of it ourselves. I remember being struck by 1 John 4:20–21 when preparing to preach on it: “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. . . . Whoever loves God must also love his brother.” James 1 and 2 carries the same message. This love doesn’t seem to be optional.

More recently, this consideration of the centrality of the congregation has brought about in my thinking a new respect for the local congregation’s discipline—both formative and corrective. We’ve had some painful cases here, and some wonderful recoveries; and all of us are clearly still works in progress. But it has become crystal clear that if we are to depend upon each other in our congregations, discipline must be part of discipleship. And if there is to be the kind of discipline that we see in the New Testament, we must know and be known by others, and we must be committed to one another. We must also have some trust of authority. All the practicalities of trusting authority in marriage, home, and church are hammered out on the local level. Misunderstanding these matters and coming to dislike and resent authority seems very near to what the fall was all about. Conversely, understanding these matters seems very near to the heart of God’s gracious work of reestablishing his relationship with us—a relationship of authority and love together. I’ve come to see that relationship with a local congregation is central to individual discipleship. The church isn’t an optional extra; it’s the shape of your following Jesus. I’ve come to understand that now in a way I never did before I came to this church. And I think that I’m seeing something of the health that God intends us to experience in a congregation.

What This Book Is Not

I should just say another word about what this book is not. Let me front-load your disappointment. This book leaves out a lot. Many of our favorite topics may not be covered. Rereading this book now, after a few years of others reading it too, I am even more aware of much I have not said. Friends have said to me, “What about prayer?” or “Where’s worship?” John Piper asked, “Mark, why isn’t missions in this?” I don’t really like to disappoint friends who’ve taken the time to read the book; and I certainly don’t like disappointing John Piper! But this book is not an exhaustive ecclesiology. We’ve been given good ideas for “more marks” that we could add. And a second edition might seem just the time to do this.

But we’ve decided not to. I continue to think that common errors in these particular nine matters are responsible for so much that goes wrong in our churches. It seems to me economical, strategic, faithful, and simply correct to continue to try to focus the attention of Christians on these particular matters. More missions, persevering prayer, wonderful worship—all will be best encouraged, I think, by tending better to these basic matters. Nobody is going to believe in the need that missions presupposes if they’re not taught about that need from the Word. No one is going to go if they don’t have an understanding of God’s great plan to redeem a people for himself. And they won’t do missions well if they don’t understand the gospel.

If people do begin to think more carefully about conversion, it will affect their prayers. If we are more biblical in our practice of evangelism, we will find ourselves giving more of our prayer time to praying for non-Christians, and we will realize more of why we must pray for people to be converted. If we come to understand more about biblical church membership, we will find our corporate prayer times more central, better attended, more invigorating to our faith, and more challenging and reordering to our priorities.

If we begin to appreciate again the significance of church discipline, our times of corporate worship will be infused with more of a sense of awe at God’s grace. If we find ourselves in churches that are increasingly marked by discipleship and spiritually flourishing members, the excitement and anticipation for singing praises and confessing sins together will grow. If we work to be led by those who meet the Bible’s qualifications, we will find joy and confidence in our times together growing, we will be more free and enlivened in our times together, and our obedience will be more consistent.

This book isn’t a complete inventory of every sign of health. It is intended to be a list of crucial marks that will lead to such a full experience.

An Outward-Looking Church

If I had to add one more mark to what you’re about to read, it wouldn’t be missions or prayer or worship; but it would touch on all of those things. I think that I would add that we want our congregations to be outward looking. We are to be upwardly focused—God centered. But we are also, I think, supposed to reflect God’s own love as we look out on other people and on other congregations.

This can show itself in many ways. I long for our congregation to integrate better our vision for global missions and our efforts in local evangelism. If we have a commitment to help evangelize an unreached people group abroad, why haven’t we done a better job in trying to find members of this people group in our metropolitan area? Why aren’t our missions and evangelism better integrated?

We do pray in the pastoral prayer each Sunday morning for the prosperity of the gospel in other lands and through other local congregations. We’re just now bringing someone on staff to help us plant another church. We as a church help to sponsor 9Marks, and through it work with many other churches for their benefit. We have “Weekenders” at which we welcome guest pastors and elders, seminarians, and other church leaders to be with us for a weekend. They sit in on a real elders meeting, in real membership classes. We put on special lectures and have attendees in our homes to eat and talk. We have internships for those preparing for the pastorate. We have curriculum we write and talks we give. All of this is for the building up of other congregations. As a pastor, I am certain that I need to realize that, under God, the local church is responsible for raising up the next generation of leaders. No Bible college, course, or seminary can do this. And such raising up of new leaders—for here and abroad—should be one of the goals of our church.

Looking back, I’m encouraged by how I’ve seen God’s work here and in so many other congregations. In this congregation’s life together I’ve seen evident, increasing, joyful, God-glorifying health.

Some people don’t think this image of “health” is a good one. They may think that it’s too man-centered, or too therapeutic. But as I’ve considered this, it seems to me more and more that health is actually a very good image for soundness, wholeness, correctness, and rightness.

Jesus talked of the health of our bodies as an image of our spiritual state (see Matt. 6:22–23 [Luke 11:33–34]; cf. Matt. 7:17–18). He said that, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick” (Matt. 9:12 [Mark 2:17; Luke 5:31]). Jesus brought soundness to people’s bodies to point to the soundness he offered for their souls (see Matt. 12:13; 14:35–36; 15:31; Mark 5:34; Luke 7:9–10; 15:27; John 7:23). The disciples in Acts continued the same health-giving Christ-exalting ministry (Acts 3:16; 4:10).

Paul used the image of the church as Christ’s own body, and he described its prosperity in organic images of growth and health. For example, Paul wrote that “speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work” (Eph. 4:15–16). Paul described correct doctrine in Titus 2:1 as “sound” or “healthy” doctrine. John greeted fellow Christians by telling them that, “I pray that you may enjoy good health and that all may go well with you, even as your soul is getting along well” (3 John 2).

None of this is to say that we can know it’s God’s will for his children to experience good physical health in this life, but simply to say that health is a natural image that God himself has sanctioned for that which is right and correct. As I said above, some Christians, out of concern over a wrongly therapeutic culture, shy away from using such images. But the abuse of the language shouldn’t detract from its appropriate use. And with such understanding of health—its connection to life and prosperity; the objective norms of what is good and right that are presumed in it; the joy involved in it; the care to be taken over it—we can easily see the wisdom in our desiring to pursue the spiritual health of our own souls, and to work for healthy churches. It is to that end that this book was first written. And it is to that end that I pray that God will now use it in your life, and in the life of your church.

Mark Dever

Washington, DC, June 2004

1  John Brown, cited by Alexander Grossart in The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Grossart (1862–1864; reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1979), 294.

Introduction

Some time ago, author and theologian David Wells reported some interesting findings of a survey taken in seven seminaries. One in particular struck me: “These students are dissatisfied with the current status of the church. They believe it has lost its vision, and they want more from it than it is giving them.” Wells himself agreed: “Neither their desire nor their judgment in this regard is amiss. Indeed, it is not until we experience a holy dissatisfaction with things as they are that we can plant the seeds of reform. Of course, dissatisfaction alone is not enough.”1

Dissatisfaction, indeed, is not enough. We find dissatisfaction with the church on every hand. Shelves groan under the weight of books with prescriptions for what ails her. Conference speakers live off the congregational diseases that always seem to survive their remedies. Pastors wrongly exult and tragically burn out. Confused and uncertain Christians are left to wander like sheep without a shepherd. But dissatisfaction is not enough. We need something more. We need positively to recover what the church is to be. What is the church in her nature and essence? What is to distinguish and mark the church?

For Historians

Christians often talk about “marks of the church.” In his first published book, Men with a Message, John Stott summed up the teaching of Christ to the churches in the book of Revelation this way: “These then are the marks of the ideal Church—love, suffering, holiness, sound doctrine, genuineness, evangelism and humility. They are what Christ desires to find in his churches as He walks among them.”2

But this language has a more formal history as well, which must be acknowledged before engaging in the task of a book-length consideration of “nine marks of a healthy church.”

Christians have long talked of the “marks of the church.” Here, as in so much of the church’s thinking, the question of how to distinguish true from false has led to a clearer definition of the true. The topic of the church did not become a center of widespread formal theological debate until the Reformation. Before the sixteenth century, the church was more assumed than discussed. It was considered to be the means of grace upon which the rest of theology rested. Roman Catholic theology uses the phrase “the mystery of the church” to refer to the depth of the reality of the church, which can never be fully explored. Practically, the church of Rome links its claim to being the true, visible church to the succession of Peter as the bishop of Rome.

With the advent of the radical criticisms of Martin Luther and others in the sixteenth century, however, discussion of the nature of the church itself became inevitable. As one scholar explains, “The Reformation made the gospel, not ecclesiastical organization, the test of the true church.”3 Calvin questioned Rome’s claims to be the true church on the basis of apostolic succession: “Especially in the organization of the church nothing is more absurd than to lodge the succession in persons alone to the exclusion of teaching.”4 Since that time, therefore, the notae, signa, symbola, criteria, or marks of the church have been a necessary focus of discussion.

In 1530, Melanchthon drew up the Augsburg Confession, which in article 7 stated that “this Church is the congregation of the saints in which the gospel is rightly taught and the sacraments are rightly administered. And for that true unity of the Church it is enough to have unity of belief concerning the teaching of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments.”5 In his Loci Communes (1543), Melanchthon repeated the idea: “The marks which point out the church are the pure gospel and the proper use of the sacraments.”6 Since the Reformation, Protestants have typically viewed these two marks—the preaching of the gospel and the proper administering of the sacraments—as delineating the true church over against imposters.

In 1553 Thomas Cranmer produced the Forty-Two Articles of the Church of England. While not officially promulgated until later in the century as part of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, they show the thinking of the great English Reformer concerning the church. Article 20 read (as Article 19 of the Thirty-Nine Articles still reads): “The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men in which the pure word of God is preached and the sacraments be duly administered, according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.”7

John Calvin addressed the issue of distinguishing the false from the true church in his Institutes: “Wherever we see the Word of God purely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to Christ’s institution, there, it is not to be doubted, a church of God exists.”8

A third mark of the church, right discipline, has often been added since then, though it is widely acknowledged that this is implied in the second mark—the sacraments being rightly administered.9 The Belgic Confession (1561), Article 29, said,

The marks by which the true Church is known are these: If the pure doctrine of the gospel is preached therein; if she maintains the pure administration of the sacraments as instituted by Christ; if church discipline is exercised in punishing of sin; in short, if all things are managed according to the pure Word of God, all things contrary thereto rejected, and Jesus Christ acknowledged as the only Head of the Church.10

Edmund Clowney has summarized these marks as “true preaching of the Word; proper observance of the sacraments; and faithful exercise of church discipline.”11

We can see in these two marks—gospel proclamation and observance of the sacraments—both the creation and the preservation of the church, the fountain of God’s truth and the lovely vessel to contain and display it. The church is generated by the right preaching of God’s Word; the church is contained and distinguished by the right administration of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. (Presumed in this latter mark is that church discipline is being practiced.)

The Church Today Reflects the World

This book is a lesser thing than a consideration of these marks of the church. I accept the traditional Protestant understanding of the true church being distinguished or marked off from the false by the right preaching of the Word and the right administration of the sacraments. But inside the set of all true local churches, some are more healthy and others less so. This book describes some marks that distinguish the more healthy churches from the true but more sickly ones. Therefore this book does not attempt to say everything that should be said about the church. To use theological language, it is not a full ecclesiology. To use an image, it is more a prescription than a course in general anatomy of the body of Christ.

Certainly no church is perfect. But, thank God, many imperfect churches are healthy. Nevertheless, I fear that many more are not—even among those that affirm the full deity of Christ and the full authority of Scripture. Why is this the case?

Some say the ill health of many churches today is related to various cultural conditions that have infested the church.

Some of the most common scapegoats have been the institutions that prepare people for the ministry. Richard Muller has described something of what he has seen of the seminaries’ defaulting on their stewardship:

Seminaries have been guilty of creating several generations of clergy and teachers who are fundamentally ignorant of the materials of the theological task and prepared to argue (in their own defense) the irrelevance of classical study to the practical operation of ministry. The sad result has been the loss, in many places, of the central, cultural function of the church in the West and the replacement of a culturally and intellectually rich clergy with a group of practitioners and operations-directors who can do almost anything except make sense of the church’s theological message in the contemporary context.12

This book, then, is a plan for recovering biblical preaching and church leadership at a time when too many congregations are languishing in a notional and nominal Christianity, with all the resulting pragmatism and pettiness. The purpose of too many evangelical churches has fallen from glorifying God to growing larger, assuming that numerical growth, however achieved, must glorify God.

One problem, theologically and even practically, with lowering our vision is the self-defeating pragmatism that results. Neopaganism, secularization, pragmatism, and ignorance are all serious problems facing churches today. But I am convinced that the problem most fundamentally lies in the way Christians conceive of their churches. Too many churches misunderstand the priority that they are to give to God’s revelation and to the nature of the regeneration he offers therein. Reevaluating these must be a part of any solution to the problems of today’s churches.

Popular Models of the Church

Four models of the church are found today in my own association of churches (Southern Baptist Convention) and in many others as well. We might summarize these models as liberal, prosperity gospel, seeker-sensitive, and traditional.

Drawing with bold lines for a minute, we might conceive of the liberal model as having F. D. E. Schleiermacher as its patron saint. In an attempt to be successful in evangelism, Schleiermacher tried to rethink the gospel in contemporary terms.

The well-known preacher Benny Hinn might be an example of a second model, the prosperity gospel church. In an attempt to make the promises of physical healing equal to the promises of spiritual forgiveness, and to make the future fulfillment present, preachers like Hinn have built churches around what they claim are immediate displays of God’s power. According to this model, all should be able to see and benefit from promised health and prosperity now.

We might find something of the same goal in the seeker-sensitive model, seen in the writing and ministry of Bill Hybels and his associates at Willow Creek and the many churches associated with them. They have tried to rethink the church, like the liberals, with the goal of evangelism always in mind—from the outside in, again, in an attempt to make the gospel’s relevance obvious to all.

The patron saint of traditional evangelical churches could be said to be the late Billy Graham (or perhaps one of several other great evangelists of the present or preceding generation). Again, the motive is to be successful in evangelism, with the local church treated as a stationary evangelistic rally. Actually, the “traditional” evangelical church in America is much like the seeker-sensitive model, only to an older culture—the culture of fifty or a hundred years ago. So instead of Willow Creek skits, the First Baptist Women’s Trio is regarded as the thing that will draw nonbelievers in.

While there are important doctrinal distinctions between these various kinds of churches, all four have important commonalities. All assume that evident relevance and response is the key indicator of success. The social ministries of the liberal church, the miracles of the prosperity gospel church, the music of the seeker-sensitive church, and the programs of the traditional evangelical church all must work well and work now to be considered relevant and successful. Depending on the type of church, success may mean so many fed, so many involved, or so many saved, but the assumption that all these kinds of churches share is that the fruit of a successful church is readily apparent.

From both a biblical and a historical standpoint, this assumption seems incalculably dangerous. Biblically, we find that God’s Word is replete with images of delayed blessing. God, for his own inscrutable purposes, tests and tries his Jobs and his Josephs, his Jeremiahs, and even Jesus himself. The trials of Job, the beating and selling of Joseph, the imprisonment and mocking of Jeremiah, and the rejection and crucifixion of Jesus all remind us that God moves in mysterious ways. He calls us more fundamentally to a relationship of trust with him than to a full understanding of him and his ways. The parables of Jesus are full of stories of the kingdom of God beginning in surprisingly small ways but growing finally to a glorious prominence. Biblically, we must realize that the size of what our eyes see is rarely a good way to estimate the greatness of something in the eyes of God.

From a historical standpoint, we would do well to remember that looks can be deceiving. When a culture is saturated with Christianity and biblical knowledge, when God’s general benevolence and even his special grace are spread widely, one might perceive obvious blessings. Biblical morality may be affirmed by all. The church may be widely esteemed. The Bible may be taught even in secular schools. In such a time, it may be hard to distinguish between the apparent and the real.

But in a time when Christianity is being widely and rapidly disowned, where evangelism is considered intolerant or even classified as a hate crime, we find the stakes are changed. On the one hand, the culture to which we would conform in order to be relevant becomes so inextricably entwined with antagonism to the gospel that to conform to it must result in a loss of the gospel itself. On the other hand, it is more difficult for nominal Christianity to thrive. In such a day, we must rehear the Bible and reimagine the concept of successful ministry not as necessarily immediately fruitful but as demonstrably faithful to God’s Word.

Great missionaries who have gone to non-Christian cultures must have known this. When they went to places where there were no obvious “fields white unto harvest” but only years and even decades of rejection, they must have had some other motivation to keep them going. William Carey was faithful in India and Adoniram Judson in Burma not because their immediate success showed them that that they were being obviously relevant. They were faithful because the Spirit of God in them encouraged them to obedience and trust. We in the secular West must recover a sense of satisfaction in such biblical faithfulness. And we must recover it particularly in our lives together as Christians, in our churches.

Needed: A Different Model

We need a new model for the church. Actually, the model we need is an old one. Even though I’m writing a book about it, I’m not quite sure what to call it. Mere? Historic? Biblical?

Simply put, we need churches that are self-consciously distinct from the culture. We need churches in which the key indicator of success is not evident results but persevering biblical faithfulness.13 We need churches that help us to recover those aspects of Christianity that are distinct from the world, and that unite us.

What follows is not intended to be a full portrait of this new (old) model of the church but a timely prescription. It focuses on two basic needs in our churches: preaching the message and leading disciples.

Preaching the Message

The first five marks of a healthy church that we will consider reflect the concern to preach rightly the Word of God. Mark One is about preaching itself. It is a defense of the primacy of expositional preaching as a reflection of the centrality of God’s Word.

Why is his Word central? Why is it the instrument of creating faith? The Word is so central and so instrumental because the Word of the Lord holds out the object of our faith to us. It presents God’s promise to us—from all kinds of individual promises (throughout the Bible) all the way to the great promise, the great hope, the great object of our faith, Christ himself. The Word presents that which we are to believe.

Then, in Mark Two, we consider the framework of this message: gospel doctrine. We must understand God’s truth as a coherent whole, coming to us first and foremost as a revelation of himself. Questions of who God is and of what he is like can never be considered irrelevant to the practical matters of church life. How discerning are we in how we understand the gospel ourselves, how we teach it, and how we train others to know it? Is our message, though larded with Christian pieties, basically a message of self-salvation, or is there something more in it? Does our gospel consist only of universal ethical truths for our daily lives, or are there once-for-all, historical, special saving actions of God in Christ at the root of it?

That brings us to the reception of the message, Mark Three: a biblical understanding of conversion and evangelism. One of the most painful tasks pastors face is trying to undo the damage of false converts who have been too quickly and thoughtlessly assured by an evangelist that they are indeed Christians. Such apparently charitable activity may lead to short bursts of excitement, involvement, and interest, but if an apparent conversion does not result in a changed life, then one begins to wonder at the unwitting cruelty of convincing such people that because they once prayed a prayer or were baptized spontaneously, they have fully investigated all the hope that God has for them in life. “If that failed,” we may leave them to think, “then Christianity has nothing more to offer me. No more hope. No more life. I tried, and it didn’t work.” We need churches to understand and teach what the Bible teaches about conversion.

And this means that we must consider our evangelism. If, in our evangelism, we imply that becoming a Christian is something that we do ourselves, then we disastrously pass on our misunderstanding of the gospel and of conversion. In our evangelism we must be partners with the Holy Spirit, presenting the gospel but relying on the Holy Spirit of God to do the true convicting and convincing and converting. Are your church’s or your own evangelistic practices in line with this great truth?

Leading the Disciples

The other nexus of problems in today’s churches has to do with the right administration of the borders and markers of Christian identity. More generally put, we have problems in leading disciples.

First, in Mark Four, we address the question of the whole framework for discipleship: a biblical understanding of church membership. In this past century, Christians have all but ignored biblical teaching on the corporate nature of following Christ. Our churches are awash in self-centered narcissism, hyperindividualism thinly veiled in everything from “gift inventories” to “targeted churches” that “aren’t for everybody.” When we read 1 John or the Gospel of John, we see that Jesus never intended us to be lone Christians, and that our love for others who aren’t just like us shows whether we truly love God.

Many churches today have problems with the basic definition of what it means to be a disciple. So in Mark Five we explore a biblical understanding of church discipline. Is there any behavior that churches should not tolerate? Are any teachings in our churches “beyond the pale”? Do our churches indicate a concern for anything beyond their own institutional survival and expansion? Do we evidence an understanding that we bear the name of God and live either to his honor or to his shame? We need churches to recover the loving, regular, and wise practice of church discipline.

In Mark Six we examine Christian discipleship and growth. Evangelism that does not result in discipleship is not only incomplete evangelism but is entirely misconceived. The solution is not that we need to do more evangelism but that we need to do it differently. We don’t simply need to remember to tell people to come to church after we have prayed the prayer with them; we need to tell them to count the cost before they pray that prayer!

Mark Seven focuses on the need to recover a biblical understanding of church leadership. Leadership in the church should not be granted as a response to secular gifts or position, to family relationships, or in recognition of length of service in the church. Leadership in the church should be invested in those who seem to evidence in their own lives, and who are able to promote in the life of the congregation as a whole, the edifying and sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit.

Mark Eight