calvins-urbanreform

When I recently heard, through Matthias Media, of a conference soon to take place with Mark Dever, Philip Jensen and Tony Payne my ears pricked up. I was soon disappointed to hear that it was only in America and would not be in Australia anytime soon. The conference is called 'Gospel Growth vs Church Growth'. With the 'conversations' (emerging lingo) of church health, growth, leadership, and structure going on in my neck of the woods I was beginning to get fustrated. Much of the conferences/discussions centered on human vision and techniques to grow your church or converse with post-moderns. After hearing about the conference and seeing the 9marks website I decided to pick up 9 Marks of a Healthy Church by Mark Dever. It is refreshing to read a book that clearly believes church health must be informed by the whole Bible. Yet Dever's book "is not a complete ecclesiology," he writes, "It is merely trying to focus on certain crucial aspects of healthy church life that have grown rare among churches today" (2004:338-9). So what are the 9 Marks? I shall list one for now.

Mark #1: Expository Preaching "...This will help you understand what pastors are to give themselves to, and what congregations are to demand of them. My main role, and the main role of any pastor, is expositional preaching. ...if you get priority of the Word established, then you have in place the single most important aspect of the church's life, and growing health is virtually assured, because God has decided to act by His Spirit through His Word" (2004:39).

"A healthy church is a church that hears the Word of God and continues to hear the Word of God. And such a church is composed of individual Christians who hear the Word of God and continue to hear the Word of God, always being refashioned and reshaped by it, constantly being washed in the Word and sanctified by God's truth" (2004:51).