Healthy Church, part 1

In Mark Dever’s little book, What is a healthy church?, he begins by defining church and then defining a healthy church.

Church is people. It is not an organization, though it is organized. It is not a club, though there are “members”. It is not a building, though church meets in buildings, usually. Jesus didn’t die for brick and mortar.  Church is people; it is a specific group of people. “It’s a people--the new covenant, blood-bought people of God” (p. 34, Healthy Church). Church is the people of God--gathered and scattered--under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the head of “the church”, not organization, but people.

I like this: “a group of pardoned rebels whom God wants to use to display his glory before all the heavenly host because they tell the truth about him and look increasingly like him [Jesus]---holy, loving, united.”

So then, what is a healthy congregation (church)? I’m going to use the word “congregation” to refer to what we usually label a “local church”. Dever would answer, “A healthy church [congregation] is a congregation that increasingly reflects God’s character as his character has been revealed in his Word.”

The word healthy “communicates the idea of a body that’s living and growing as it should” (p. 39). There are different ways to measure healthy growth, so please don’t automatically assume that “growth” means “budgets, buildings, and bodies”. That may or may not be the case. For more study on that, read Revelation 2 and 3 where Jesus writes letters to the seven churches. We might be surprised. In the language of the conversation a friend of mine and I were having today, it’s probably not a good idea to use the world’s scorecard (or our version of the world’s scorecard) to measure the health of our congregations.

It just hit me----how does healthiness relate to faithfulness?

Next week, mark 1 of a healthy church according to Dever - “expositional preaching”.