Does Your Church Do This?

Coming Soon I'll be launching a new feature on KLMP the Light radio. It's called the Book-Nook and its a chance for our listeners to hear from authors as we discuss important new books. Our first book is "What is a healthy Church" by Mark Dever. Mark is an author and pastor of Capital Hill Baptist Church on, you guessed it, Capital Hill in Washington DC. He's also the founder and leader of Nine Marks Ministries, who's purpose is to help churches become more healthy. Is your church a healthy church? I found this passage particularly interesting...

"If a healthy church is a congregation that increasingly displays the character of God as his character has been revealed in his Word, the most obvious place to begin building a healthy church is to call Christians to listen to God's word... Fundamentally this means that both pastors and congregations must be committed to expositional preaching...Sometimes people confuse expostional preaching with reading a verse then preaching on a topic loosely related to that verse. Yet when a preacher exhorts a congregation on a topic of his choosing, using biblical texts only to back up his point, he will never preach more than what he already knows... Expositional preaching reqires more than that. It requires careful attention to the context of the passage, because it aims to make the point of the biblical text the point of the sermon. When a preacher exhorts a congregation by preaching a passage of Scripture in context-where the point of the passage is the point of his sermon- both he and the congregation will end up hearing things from God that the preacher did not intend to say...When [this isn't done] it hampers growth, ensuring [the people] will never mature beyond the level of the pastor. The church will slowly be conformed to the image of the pastor, rather than the image of God."

Who are we conforming to? Who are we leading others to be conformed to?