Dever / Alexander How to Build a Healthy Church (Second Edition)

A Practical Guide for Deliberate Leadership
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4335-7580-8
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

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.

Mark Dever (PhD, Cambridge University) is the senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, and president of 9Marks (9Marks.org). Dever has authored over a dozen books and speaks at conferences nationwide. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Connie, and they have two adult children.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dever, Mark

Alexander, Paul

Leseproben

A Note to the Reader

Why did you take this book off the shelf? What caught your attention? Come on, be honest. Were you intrigued by the cover design? Did you read the endorsements on the back? Maybe you just picked it up because you like to stay current with the latest stuff out there on church growth and ministry models.

Or maybe the reason was deeper. Maybe you’re a pastor who’s been at it for a long time and you’re discouraged by the lack of growth in your church. “What am I missing? Why am I not being as effective as the pastor down the road?” Maybe you picked it up because you’re tired of not being “successful” in ministry—the fish aren’t biting, so why not change the bait?

On the other hand, you might be a young-buck church planter who’s looking to make an impact for the kingdom. Maybe you’re tired of looking at a new world through old glasses and want to push the envelope—innovate, get creative, experiment with some new methods, try some crazy ideas, find out what really makes people tick in a post-everything generation.

Then again, maybe you’ve invested the last five years of your life trying to implement the latest church growth model and it didn’t work. Maybe you’re reading because you’re disillusioned with the failure of a model that seemed promising and produced amazing results elsewhere. So now you’re on to the next thing—what we call the deliberate church.

Maybe your interest was piqued by the possibility of a new way of doing church that might breathe fresh life into your congregation. Maybe you’re reading it because it might be the next big wave in church ministry that could spark explosive growth in your church and light a fire in your community. Or perhaps you’ve just found yourself feeling a little outdated—a light blue leisure suit in a Bloomingdale’s world—so you’ve come into the Christian bookstore to update the ministry wardrobe. Search your heart—why did you open this book? What are you looking for?

Before you start reading in earnest, let us clarify what this book is not, just for truth in advertising. First, it’s not new. It’s old—really old. We’re not claiming that any of this stuff is original with us; it’s not a “fresh take” or a “unique approach”—it’s not innovative. In fact, we don’t even want to be innovative (there, we said it!). Second, it’s not a program. It’s not something you can just plug into your church and press “Play.” It’s not dependent on technique; we don’t have a set plan for spiritual maturity, or systematic steps for building a church; there’s no flashy lingo or professional diagrams or cool metaphors. Third, it’s not a quick fix. In other words, don’t expect to read this book, implement its suggestions, and see immediate, observable results. Healthy growth takes time, prayer, hard work, patience, and perseverance.

“Well, if it’s not a new program, then what is it?” Simply put, it’s the Word building the church.

It’s easy to agree with our culture that newer is invariably better. New clothes are better than old hand-me-downs; a new car is better than Dad’s old beater. There is just something about new things that is almost irresistibly fascinating to us. They have this gravity that pulls us in with their glimmering shine, their new-car smell, their modern look, their promise of increased efficiency and effectiveness. We know it’s dumb, but somehow they make us feel new with them—almost like we’re renewed in their image.

When it comes to ideas on how to build the church, it’s tempting to allow our fascination with the new to drive our thinking and determine our methods. This temptation is all the more seductive in the context of an emerging evangelical culture that increasingly distances itself from the clear proclamation of doctrinal certainties grounded in scriptural truth and handed down to us by the historic Christian creeds and confessions. As we are uprooted from our rich doctrinal and historical heritage, the innovative and creative begin to appear more plausible than the tried and true, in part because we are immersed in a culture that stridently embraces its own superiority to whatever is past. Pragmatism then naturally prevails. Without even realizing or reflecting on it, we quickly become excited about the most recent creative model that promises the most immediately observable results, usually measured by sanctified statistics.

At the root of all this, often unwittingly, is the rapid erosion of our faith in the sufficiency of Scripture for our effectiveness in ministry. Paul instructs Timothy to devote himself to preaching the Word (2 Tim. 4:2) precisely because that Word makes the man of God “adequate, equipped for every good work” (3:17). Timothy didn’t need the latest rhetorical techniques, business practices, or creative ministry models based on captivating metaphors. He simply needed to be guided, governed, and geared by the Word of God.

Deliberate, of course, means well thought through or careful. What we are trying to be careful about as church leaders, then, is building the church on and around the gospel of Christ. More specifically, we are trying to be careful about building our church according to the pattern that God has given us in Scripture. At its best, the deliberate church is careful to trust the Word of God, wielded by Jesus Christ, to do the work of building the local church. It is an attempt to put our money where our mouth is when we say that we believe in the sufficiency of Scripture for the life, health, and growth of the local church. Our goal isn’t to see how innovative we can be. Our goal is to see how faithful we can be.

What follows, then, could be called a model of ministry. But it’s really just an attempt to be deliberate about treating the biblical gospel as that which feeds the church’s growth, drives its progress, and governs every aspect of the church’s corporate life and leadership. In whatever we do, we want to be careful about allowing God’s Word to set our trajectory, power our progress, and govern our methods. From our preaching and evangelism, to the way we take in new members; from our discipleship and discipline practices, to our leadership models; from the structure of our Sunday morning services, all the way down to the agenda at the elders’ meeting, we want our procedures to reflect reliance on the biblical gospel, submission to its claims, and awareness of its implications for our corporate life together.

The words of God in Scripture are the building blocks of the church. As pastors and church leaders, then, our first priority is to make sure that the gospel enjoys functional centrality in the church. That is, we must make sure that the gospel governs the way the church functions. When the gospel enjoys functional centrality, the church gains traction in the culture, because the gospel is the power of God for salvation (Rom. 1:16; 1 Cor. 1:17–18). The gospel is what gives people new spiritual birth (James 1:18; 1 Pet. 1:23). The gospel fights the church’s enemies, such as doctrinal error and moral wickedness (Acts 6:7; 12:24; 19:20). In short, God’s Word, encapsulated in the gospel, builds the church.1

Preserving this functional centrality of the gospel is the reason we don’t want to promote programs, steps, and innovative metaphors in this book. To preserve functional centrality for the gospel, human method has to remain plain, or else it will naturally supplant the gospel’s rightful role. In this way, our method in building the church will function in much the same way as a preacher’s style of communication. A preacher can be so flamboyant and animated that his own personality becomes more noticeable and affecting than the message he’s trying to preach. Similarly, the methods of pastors and church leaders in building the local church can become so prominent that they begin to siphon for themselves the glory for the church’s growth that rightly belongs to the gospel alone. Our goal as preachers and leaders is to keep our methods basic and plain so that the gospel is cast in bold relief against the backdrop of our own admitted weakness.

Think Tank

1.  Does the gospel enjoy functional centrality in your church? Why or why not? Are there ways in which your current model of ministry might siphon off the glory of the gospel for itself? How so?

We called the first edition of this book The Deliberate Church because we wanted a title that might serve to throw us into the fray of the church methodology debates. American evangelicalism is now dripping with various kinds of churches: the Emerging Church, the Purpose-Driven Church, the Connecting Church, the Disciple-Making Church, a critical assessment called the Market-Driven Church, and almost any other kind of church you could possibly want. We thought keeping the format of “the ____ Church” for a title might get our foot in the door of the debate. Deliberate was the best word we could find to succinctly describe what we’re talking about. But it’s mainly a term that (hopefully) will get us in on the conversation so that we can hold up a way of doing things that actually has been recovered from centuries past—a church driven and governed by the gospel. Capitol...