Becoming A Healthy Church

Real stories illustrate the top ten qualities of healthy churches, based on extensive surveys, to encourage creating a healthy climate in every church.

"A wonderful tool that I recommend to every church that is serious about being purpose-driven." -Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Church Now available in trade paper, Becoming a Healthy Church illustrates the ten most important characteristics of church health. Based on extensive surveys, this helpful volume is designed to encourage the creation of a healthy climate for your church and its ministry.

Biblically and practically instructs church members in ways they can labor for the health of their church. What Is a Healthy Church Member? takes its cue from Mark Dever's book What Is a Healthy Church?, which offered one definition of what a healthy church looks like biblically and historically. In this new work, pastor Thabiti Anyabwile attempts to answer the natural next question: "What does a healthy church member look like in the light of Scripture?" God intends for us to play an active and vital part in the body of Christ, the local church. He wants us to experience the local church as a home more profoundly wonderful and meaningful than any other place on earth. He intends for his churches to be healthy places and for the members of those churches to be healthy as well. This book explains how membership in the local church can produce spiritual growth in its members and how each member can contribute to the growth and health of the whole.

Guides both pastors and members to recognize key characteristics of a healthy church and then challenge each person to do his or her part in developing those characteristics in the local church body.

A healthy church is possible. Here are ten traits to help you diagnose the state of your church and start it down the path to improvement.

The winds of change are blowing. In this time of massive political and social upheaval, many people are questioning the relevance or established institutions like the church. At the same time, others are looking to the church in hopes that it holds the life-changing answers they desperately need.

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.