The Deliberate Church

Dever and Alexander propose a model of complete reliance and submission to the gospel when building a healthy church. Great resource for pastors, elders, and others interested in the vitality of their church.

A Newly Updated and Rebranded Edition of The Deliberate Church If churches are the dwelling place of God's Spirit, why are so many built around the strategies of man? Eager for church growth, leaders can be lured by entertaining new schemes, forgetting to keep doctrinal truth as their driving force. Churches must find a way out of the maze of programs and methods and humbly lean on the sufficiency of God's Word. How to Build a Healthy Church, a revised and expanded edition of The Deliberate Church, challenges leaders to evaluate their motivations for ministry and provides practical examples of healthy, deliberate leadership. Written as a companion handbook for Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, it covers important topics including membership, worship, responsible evangelism, and church roles. This is more than a step-by-step plan to mimic; it's a biblical blueprint for pastors, elders, and anyone committed to the church's vitality.

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.

The local church is meant to embody the vibrant diversity of the global church, transcending racial, cultural, and economic boundaries. Yet local churches too often simply reflect the same societal divisions prevalent in our world today—making them more akin to social clubs filled with like-minded people than the supernatural community the New Testament prescribes. Pastors Mark Dever and Jamie Dunlop argue that authentic fellowship is made up of two crucial ingredients: commitment (depth) and diversity (breadth). Theologically rooted yet extremely practical, this book sets forth basic principles that will help pastors guide their churches toward the compelling community that we all long for.

Learn how a "less is more" approach to church can equip believers for eternal influence. Church innovator Dave Browning unpacks the six elements of a new equation for church development. These concepts---minimality, intentionality, reality, multility, velocity, and scalability---provide a realistic plan for streamlining church while maximizing impact.

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.

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.

"Ps 71:1 In thee, O LORD, do I put my trust: let me never be put to confusion." The Deliberate Design of Destiny incorporates the great and courageous recent works of intelligent design scientists into a workable theory. This book answer the "Who, What, When, Where, Why and How" of creation from the Intelligent Design perspective. Understand the mystery kept secret since the world began. (Rom 16:25) The world blunders in confusion because largely the academic and industrial science institutions confuse the origins of human destiny and purpose. Their aversion to faith and their exclusion of God confuses their efforts to understand this Mystery keep secret since the world began. The Deliberate Design of Destiny explores the reason people, society and nations do not comprehend creation's design and purpose and become doomed to confusion and chaos. It explains how this ignorance allows the enemy of God to manipulate the world of men unto a destiny of destruction.