The Old Word for a Modern Church

The Tuesday feature of the Worldly Saints blog examines something I have been reading lately. Usually, I can read about one book per week. These posts are meant to share some of my reflections from the latest book I have or am reading.

It seems like I books that I come back to every so often. This year in particular I have been mostly reading books for the second time. For example, I re-read Dangerous Calling by Paul Tripp, Caring for Widows by Wesley Teterud and Biblical Eldership by Alexander Strauch.

Another re-read for me in 2014 is Mark Dever and Paul Alexander’s The Deliberate Church: Building Your Ministry on the Gospel. I first read this book about two years ago when I started exploring the country for full-time ministry. I found the book to be timely in my life as I was looking for “the right fit” for a church to serve in. At that phase of my life I was asking myself a number of big questions:

• What is a church? • In my own search for a church to serve in, what are the essentials I need to look for? • What are my preferences I need to be willing to give up?

The book’s real help to me came from the authors’ desire to show the centrality of the Gospel in all facets of church ministry. So what they do is go through the different compartments of the church and give all of uis tools to evaluate their purposes, goals, etc. And all of this evaluation is for the purpose of making sure it fits within the greater context of having a Gospel-anchored body.

While I would not agree with Dever on some of his ecclesiology (e.g., his embracing of the regulative principle, going too far with church membership and not far enough with church discipline), I would commend his book to any pastor – young or old – who is looking to assess what is church is doing and why.

Some of the topics he covers are: expository preaching, prayer, personal discipleship, patience, church membership, evangelism, church discipline, the worship service, the duties of a pastor, baptism, Lord’s Supper, the one another’s, music, elders, church staff, etc.

Dever writes on pgs. 23-24 – “Many church leaders today are saying that the church will be catapulted into the future only when her methods catch up with the times. We’re saying the exact opposite. In a sense, our goal is to take the church in the future by reminding her of who she was originally intended to be. We think the church will be catapulted into the future only when the most noticeable thing about her corporate life is that it is carefully governed and powerfully driven by God’s age-old, time-tested Word.”