Healthy Church: Introduction
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What makes a church healthy? And who gets to decide? Christians can have strong opinions about what a church should look like, how it should be led, what should happen when it gathers, and what programs or practices it should prioritize. But our preferences, traditions, and favorite ministry resources do not get the final word. God does. If we want healthy churches, we need to ask what Scripture says a healthy church should be.
In this episode of Salty Believer Unscripted, Josiah Walker and I begin what we expect will be a series of conversations about healthy churches. We use Mark Dever’s Nine Marks of a Healthy Church as a framework, but the point is not to defend the Nine Marks or pretend there is a perfect church model we can copy. The goal is to think biblically about preaching, the gospel, conversion, membership, discipline, discipleship, leadership, prayer, missions, and other aspects of life together in the local church. We also talk about an important danger in conversations like these. Learning what a healthy church should look like can make us impatient with the church we actually have. Healthy churches are not built with a wrecking ball. We should love our churches, serve them, pray for them, and patiently help them grow toward greater faithfulness to God’s Word.
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