What Is a Healthy Church?


Book Description

Key Traits of a Healthy Church to Develop within the Local Body What is an ideal church, and how can you tell? How does it look different from other churches? More importantly, how does it act differently, especially in society? Many of us aren't sure how to answer those questions, even though we probably have some preconceived ideas. This book answers those questions and many more. Author Mark Dever seeks to help believers recognize the key characteristics of a healthy church: expositional preaching, biblical theology, and a right understanding of the gospel. Dever then calls us to develop those characteristics in our own churches. By following the example of New Testament authors and addressing all members of the church, pastors and laity alike, Dever challenges all believers to do their part in maintaining the local church. Part of the 9Marks Building Healthy Churches series, What Is a Healthy Church? offers timeless truths and practical principles to help each of us fulfill our God-given roles in the body of Christ. Offers an Ideal Church Model: Encourages pastors and members to implement healthy church qualities within their local body Written by Mark Dever: Pastor, bestselling author, and president of 9Marks From 9Marks: Other titles in the Building Healthy Churches series include Church Discipline; Deacons; and Church Membership Replaces ISBN 978-1-58134-937-5




Nine Marks of a Healthy Church (3rd Edition)


Book Description

Now in its third edition and featuring a new foreword by New York Times best-selling author David Platt, pastor Mark Dever’s classic book is not an instruction manual for church growth. Rather, it is a wise pastor’s recommendation for how to assess the health of a church using nine crucial qualities often neglected by many of today’s congregations. Church leaders and church members alike will resonate with the principles outlined here, breathing new life and health into the church at large. In this newly revised edition, fresh arguments have been added (for example on expositional preaching, about the nature of the gospel, on complementarianism), illustrations have been updated, appendices have been changed, and cover has been improved.




Nine Marks of a Healthy Church (4th Edition)


Book Description

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.




Finding a Vision for Your Church


Book Description

The church is more than a building - it is an assembly of people joined together across distances and even through time to fulfill God’s purposes in the world. Each local gathering of that assembly needs a vision to help its members accomplish the work God has called them to do. But how do you inspire your church to create and follow through on a vision? Mike Milton provides tested, biblical ideas to get everyone in the church involved in a plan to help the congregation grow. Each chapter develops an awareness of what needs to be done, provides questions for review, and includes prayers by elders and ministers of churches that have put these ideas to use.




How to Build a Healthy Church (Second Edition)


Book Description

A Newly Updated and Rebranded Edition of The Deliberate Church If churches are the dwelling place of God's Spirit, why are so many built around the strategies of man? Eager for church growth, leaders can be lured by entertaining new schemes, forgetting to keep doctrinal truth as their driving force. Churches must find a way out of the maze of programs and methods and humbly lean on the sufficiency of God's Word. How to Build a Healthy Church, a revised and expanded edition of The Deliberate Church, challenges leaders to evaluate their motivations for ministry and provides practical examples of healthy, deliberate leadership. Written as a companion handbook for Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, it covers important topics including membership, worship, responsible evangelism, and church roles. This is more than a step-by-step plan to mimic; it's a biblical blueprint for pastors, elders, and anyone committed to the church's vitality.




Budgeting for a Healthy Church


Book Description

Many pastors conceive of the church budget as primarily a financial tool, but in fact it is primarily a pastoral tool. A church's philosophy of ministry is locked into its budget, and so the budget will either stifle or accelerate any attempts to move a congregation toward a biblical model of church health. As such, the church budget is a far more potent pastoral tool than many church leaders realize. Budgeting for a Healthy Church examines each section of the budget in light of Biblical principles to show how a church budget can lock in healthy approaches to ministry. Whereas most books on church budgeting are "how" books, explaining how the budgeting process should work, this is a "what" book, helping church leaders determine the pastoral implications of what they choose to fund in their budgets.




What Is a Healthy Church Member?


Book Description

Biblically and practically instructs church members in ways they can labor for the health of their church. What Is a Healthy Church Member? takes its cue from Mark Dever's book What Is a Healthy Church?, which offered one definition of what a healthy church looks like biblically and historically. In this new work, pastor Thabiti Anyabwile attempts to answer the natural next question: "What does a healthy church member look like in the light of Scripture?" God intends for us to play an active and vital part in the body of Christ, the local church. He wants us to experience the local church as a home more profoundly wonderful and meaningful than any other place on earth. He intends for his churches to be healthy places and for the members of those churches to be healthy as well. This book explains how membership in the local church can produce spiritual growth in its members and how each member can contribute to the growth and health of the whole.




Nine Marks of a Healthy Church


Book Description

Did you know that . . .FROGS drink through their skin? Instead of swallowing water with their mouths, frogs absorb moisture through their skin. Frogs can also take in oxygen through their skin, which helps them breathe better in the water.FROGS eat with their eyes closed? The eyes help the frog swallow by lowering into its head and pushing the food down its throat.FROGS can jump 20 times their own length? That’s like a human jumping past four school buses in one leap!FROGS have sticky tongues? Frogs don’t use their hands to catch food . . . they just stick out their tongues! Flies, mosquitoes, and other yummy bugs stick to the tip and get pulled into the frog’s mouth for dinner.SOME FROGS wear camouflage? Stripes and spots help frogs blend into their natural surroundings. Some frogs can even change color depending on their location or the weather.FROGS recycle? Frogs shed their skin about once a week. Then they eat the old skin to reuse the nutrients stored inside.FROGS can live to be 40 years old? Most frogs live from 4 to 15 years.A FROG wasn’t always a frog? Every frog starts as a tiny egg that hatches into a tadpole. A tadpole has a round head and a tail and lives in the water like a fish. The tadpole eats a lot as its body changes and grows new parts. After three to four months, the tadpole has four legs and no tail and can live on land—it has become a frog!AWESOME!Did you know that you can become a new creature, too? You may not have a tail and live in the water, but God can give you a new life. Do you sometimes do things that make you feel bad inside? Maybe you were mean to someone at school or told a lie to your parents. God calls those bad things sin. Everyone is born knowing how to sin, and everyone who sins must be punished. But God, who loves us, doesn’t want us to sin. He wants us to be like Him—loving, kind, and good. Just as a tadpole changes into a frog, God can help you become more like Him. God sent His only Son, Jesus, to earth to be a human, just like us, except Jesus never sinned. Even so, He chose to die so that He could pay the death penalty for our sins. Three days after He died, God raised Him back to life again!Do you want to have a clean, new life? Then just believe in what Jesus did for you. Tell God that you are sorry for your sins and thank Him for sending Jesus to save you. The Bible says, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17). God will change you on the inside to make you a totally new creature—just like a tadpole changes into a frog. To do this, you can pray something like this:Dear God, I am sorry for the bad things I do. Thank You for sending Jesus to pay the penalty for my sins. Please change me on the inside and help keep me from sin so I can live a clean, new life for You. Amen.If you have just prayed to ask God to change you, write your name and address on the lines below and send it to us. We will send you a free booklet to help you grow in your new life with Christ.




Church Elders


Book Description

Effective leadership is important. Nowhere is this more true than in the church. Jeramie Rinne offers readers a concise overview of the Bible's teaching on spiritual leadership, setting forth an easy-to-understand "job description" for elders that is focused on enabling pastors and church leaders to effectively shepherd their congregations. Giving practical guidance to new elders and helping church members better understand and support their spiritual leaders, this conversational book emphasizes purposeful ministry rather than project management. It will also bolster leaders' confidence by encouraging them to embrace their pastoral calling with grace, wisdom, and a clarity of vision.




Church Membership


Book Description

Jonathan Leeman addresses the commonly asked (and often unanswered) question of, "Why should I join a church?" in a time when many are shunning the practice of organized religion. By offering a brief, straightforward explanation of what church membership is and why it's important, Leeman gives the local church its proper due and builds a case for committing to the local body. Church Membership is a useful tool for churches to distribute en masse to new and potential members of their congregation. This volume is part of the 9Marks: Building Healthy Churches series. Look for upcoming, quick-read formats of the following marks of a healthy church: expositional preaching, biblical theology, the gospel, conversion, evangelism, church discipline, discipleship and growth, and church leadership.