Download or read book What Is a Healthy Church written by Mark Dever and published by Crossway. This book was released on 2024-09-26 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book Who Runs the Church written by Zondervan, and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Churches have split and denominations have formed over the issue of church government. While many Christians can explain their church's form of rule or defend it because of its "tried and true" traditions, few people understand their church's administrative customs from a biblical perspective. Who Runs the Church? explores questions such as: What model for governing the church does the Bible provide, and is such a model given for practical or spiritual reasons? Is there room for different methods within Christianity? Or is there a right way of "doing church"? And, finally, how (and by whom) should the church be governed? Four predominant approaches to church government are presented by respected proponents: Episcopalianism - represented by Peter Toon Presbyterianism - represented by L. Roy Taylor Single-Elder Congregationalism - represented by Paige Patterson Plural-Elder Congregationalism - represented by Samuel E. Waldron As in other Counterpoints books, each view is followed by critiques from the other contributors, and its advocate then responds.
Download or read book Perspectives on Church Government written by Chad Brand and published by B&H Publishing Group. This book was released on 2004-07-01 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perspectives on Church Government presents in counterpoint form the basic models of church government which have developed over the course of church history with a view toward determining which is most faithful to Scripture. Each chapter will be written by a prominent person from within each tradition—with specific guidelines dealing with the biblical, historical, and theological issues within each governance tradition. In addition, each writer will have the opportunity to give a brief response to the other traditions.
Download or read book The Politics of Jesus written by Obery M. Hendricks Jr and published by Three Leaves. This book was released on 2007-08-21 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who was Jesus? And how was this first-century political revolutionary, whose teachings are meant to lead the way to freedom, turned into a meek and mild servant of the status quo? How is it possible to profess a belief in Jesus, yet ignore the suffering of the poor and the needy? Just how truly faithful to the vision of Jesus are the many politicians who claim to be Christian? These are the kinds of questions Obery Hendricks, a biblical scholar, activist, and minister, asks in this provocative new book. In this day and age of heated political debate, Hendricks’s The Politics of Jesus stands out as much for its brilliant re-creation of the life and mind of Jesus of Nazareth as for its scathing critique of modern politicians “of faith.”
Download or read book Conversations on Church Polity By a Lady Miss Harriet Gunn written by and published by . This book was released on 1833 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Baptist Foundations written by Mark Dever and published by B&H Publishing Group. This book was released on 2015-06-15 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, representatives of several North American Baptist seminaries and a Baptist university make the exegetical and theological case for a Baptist polity. Right polity, they argue, is congregationalism, elder leadership, diaconal service, regenerate church membership, church discipline, and a Baptist approach to the ordinances.
Download or read book Budgeting for a Healthy Church written by Jamie Dunlop and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Nine Marks of a Healthy Church 3rd Edition written by Mark Dever and published by Crossway. This book was released on 2013-08-31 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Church Order in the New Testament written by Eduard Schweizer and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2006-07-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Schweizer listens carefully to the testimony of the various New Testament writers in order to understand the theological problem of how the New Testament church understood itself, and how it expressed that understanding in its order. The purely historical question about the form of the church at different times is seen by Schweizer as necessary, but need only be asked insofar as the actual shaping of the church is always evidence of the concept of its own nature to which it testifies. Thus, Schweizer arranges the New Testament writings primarily by the theological kinship of their idea of the church, providing a comprehensive examination of the church in the New Testament and Apostolic Fathers. He treats both the diversity of views and the unity found in these writings. He also discusses issues relating to church office, ministry, and ordination.
Download or read book Political Church written by Jonathan Leeman and published by SPCK. This book was released on 2016-03-17 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The church is political. Theologians have been debating this claim for years. Liberationists, Anabaptists, Augustinians, neo-Calvinists, Radical Orthodox and others continue to discuss the matter. What do we mean by politics and the political? What are the limits of the church’s political reach? What is the nature of the church as an institution? How do we establish these claims theologically? Jonathan Leeman sets out to address these questions in this significant work. Drawing on covenantal theology and the ‘new institutionalism’ in political science, Leeman critiques political liberalism and explores how the biblical canon informs an account of the local church as an embassy of Christ’s kingdom. Political Church heralds a new era in political theology.
Download or read book Don t Fire Your Church Members written by Jonathan Leeman and published by B&H Publishing Group. This book was released on 2016-01-15 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Church membership is not just a status, it’s an office. Leaders shouldn’t fire members from the responsibilities given to them by Jesus—they should train them! When members are trained, the church grows in holiness and love, discipleship and mission. Complacency and nominalism are diminished. Jesus gives every church member an office in the church’s government: to assume final responsibility for guarding the what and the who of the gospel in the church and its ministry. Similarly, Jesus gives leaders to the church for equipping the members to do this church-building and mission-accomplishing work. In our day, the tasks of reinvigorating congregational authority and elder authority must work together. The vision of congregationalism pictured in this book offers an integrated view of the Christian life. Congregationalism is biblical, but biblical congregationalism just might look a little different than you expect. It is nothing less than Jesus’ authorization for living out his kingdom rule among a people on mission.
Download or read book To Change the Church written by Ross Douthat and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times columnist and one of America’s leading conservative thinkers considers Pope Francis’s efforts to change the church he governs in a book that is “must reading for every Christian who cares about the fate of the West and the future of global Christianity” (Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option). Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 1936, today Pope Francis is the 266th pope of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Francis’s stewardship of the Church, while perceived as a revelation by many, has provoked division throughout the world. “If a conclave were to be held today,” one Roman source told The New Yorker, “Francis would be lucky to get ten votes.” In his “concise, rhetorically agile…adroit, perceptive, gripping account (The New York Times Book Review), Ross Douthat explains why the particular debate Francis has opened—over communion for the divorced and the remarried—is so dangerous: How it cuts to the heart of the larger argument over how Christianity should respond to the sexual revolution and modernity itself, how it promises or threatens to separate the church from its own deep past, and how it divides Catholicism along geographical and cultural lines. Douthat argues that the Francis era is a crucial experiment for all of Western civilization, which is facing resurgent external enemies (from ISIS to Putin) even as it struggles with its own internal divisions, its decadence, and self-doubt. Whether Francis or his critics are right won’t just determine whether he ends up as a hero or a tragic figure for Catholics. It will determine whether he’s a hero, or a gambler who’s betraying both his church and his civilization into the hands of its enemies. “A balanced look at the struggle for the future of Catholicism…To Change the Church is a fascinating look at the church under Pope Francis” (Kirkus Reviews). Engaging and provocative, this is “a pot-boiler of a history that examines a growing ecclesial crisis” (Washington Independent Review of Books).
Download or read book The Unstuck Church written by Tony Morgan and published by Thomas Nelson. This book was released on 2017-05-16 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed church leader, blogger, founder and chief strategic officer of The Unstuck Group, Tony Morgan unpacks the lifecycle of a typical church, identifies characteristics of each phase, and provides practical next steps a church can take to move towards sustained health. Think about your church for a moment. Is it growing? Is it diminishing? Is it somewhere in between? Acclaimed church leader, blogger, and founder and chief strategic officer of The Unstuck Group, Tony Morgan has identified the seven stages of a church's lifecycle that range from the hopeful and optimistic days of launch, to the stagnating last stages of life support. Regardless of the stage in which you find your church, it carries with it the world's greatest mission—to "go and make disciples of all the nations . . ." With eternity at stake the Church should be doing most everything within its power to see lives changed forever. The Church should strive for the pinnacle of the lifecycle, where they are continually making new disciples and experiencing what Morgan refers to as "sustained health." In The Unstuck Church, Morgan unpacks each phase of the church lifecycle, and offers specific and strategic next steps the church leader can take to find it's way to sustained health . . . and finally become unstuck. The Unstuck Church is a call for honest an assessment of where your church sits on the lifecycle, and a challenge to move beyond it.
Download or read book Jesus Death and Heavenly Offering in Hebrews written by R. B. Jamieson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines Hebrews' exposition of Jesus' death, his self-offering in heaven at his ascension, and the link between them.
Download or read book Five Views on the Church and Politics written by J. Brian Benestad and published by Zondervan Academic. This book was released on 2015-12-15 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn to think deeply about the relationship between church and state in a way that goes beyond mere policy debates and current campaigns. Few topics can grab headlines and stir passions quite like politics, especially when the church is involved. Considering the attention that many Christian parachurch groups, churches, and individual believers give to politics--and of the varying and sometimes divergent political ideals and aims among them--Five Views on the Church and Politics provides a helpful breakdown of the possible Christian approaches to political involvement. General Editor Amy Black brings together five top-notch political theologians in the book, each representing one of the five key political traditions within Christianity: Anabaptist (Separationist: the most limited possible Christian involvement in politics) - represented by Thomas Heilke Lutheran (Paradoxical: strong separation of church and state) – represented by Robert Benne Black Church (Prophetic: the church's mission is to be a voice for communal reform) – represented by Bruce Fields Reformed (Transformationist: emphasizes God's sovereignty over all things, including churches and governments) – represented by James K. A. Smith Catholic (Synthetic: encouragement of political participation as a means to further the common good of all people) – represented by J. Brian Benestad Each author addresses his tradition's theological distinctives, the role of government, the place of individual Christian participation in government and politics, and how churches should (or should not) address political questions. Responses by each contributor to opposing views will highlight key areas of difference and disagreement. Thorough and even-handed, Five Views on the Church and Politics will enable readers to consider the strengths and weaknesses of the most significant Christian views on political engagement and to draw their own, informed conclusions.
Download or read book Why Is the Lord s Supper So Important written by Aubrey M. Sequeira and published by Crossway. This book was released on 2021-05-19 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 5 Ways the Lord's Supper Is Important for the Local Church Church Questions is a series that seeks to provide ordinary Christians with sound and accessible biblical teaching by answering common questions about church life. Each volume offers biblical answers and practical applications with the goal of nurturing healthy church practice and commitment. Have you taken the Lord's Supper without understanding what it means? Do you wonder about its relevance to your Christian life? This ordinance doesn't have to be mysterious. Pastor Aubrey Sequeira shares five ways the Lord's Supper enriches the church as it invites believers to look backward (remembrance), outward (togetherness), upward (spiritual nourishment), inward (reflection), and forward (anticipation).
