Can one belong to the church without belonging to a church? Not likely, says Mark Dever.

   Sometimes theologians refer to a distinction between the universal church (all Christians everywhere throughout history) and the local church (those people who meet down the street from you to hear the Word preached to and to practice baptism and the Lord’s Supper). Other than a few references to the universal church (such as Matt. 16:18 and the bulk of Ephesians), most references to the church in the New Testament are to local churches, as when Paul writes, “To the church of God in Corinth” or “To the churches in Galatia.”
   Now what follows is a little intense, but it’s important. The relationship between our membership in the universal church and our membership in the local church is a lot like the relationship between the righteousness God gives us through faith and the actual practice of righteousness in our daily lives. When we become Christians by faith, God declares us righteous. Yet we are still called to activity be righteous. A person who happily goes on living in unrighteousness calls into question whether he ever possessed Christ’s righteousness in the first place (see Rom. 6:1–18; 8:5–14; James 2:14–15). So, too, it is with those who refuse to commit themselves to a local church. Committing to a local body is the natural outcome—it confirms what Christ has done. If you have no interest in actually committing yourself to an actual group of gospel-believing, Bible-teaching Christians, you might question whether you belong to the body of Christ at all! Listen to the author of Hebrews carefully:

Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching. If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. (Heb. 10:23–27)

   Our state before God, if authentic, will translate into our daily decisions, even if the process is slow and full of missteps. God really does change his people. Isn’t that good news? So please, friend, don’t grow complacent through some vague idea that you possess the righteousness of Christ if you’re not pursuing a life of righteousness. Likewise, please do not be deceived by a vague conception of a universal church to which you belong if you’re not pursuing that life together with an actual church.

—Mark Dever, What is a Healthy Church? (Crossway, 2007), 21–22.

My church isn’t perfect. I could write a medium-sized post listing the improvements I’d like to see. How about you? Does your church fall short of your expectations? Mark Dever has a word for us:

Does a particular church fail to meet your expectations in terms of what it does, as in whether or not it follows what the Bible says about church leadership? If so, remember that this is a group of people who are still growing in grace. Love them. Serve them. Be patient with them. Again, think of a family. Whenever your parents, siblings, or children fail to meet your expectations, do you suddenly throw them out of the family? I hope you are forgive and are patient with them. You might even stop to consider whether it’s your expectations that should be adjusted! By this same token, we should ask ourselves whether we know how to love and persevere with church members who have different opinions, who fail to meet our expectations, or even who sin against us. (Don’t you and I have sin that ever needs to be forgiven?)

—Mark Dever, What is a Healthy Church? (Crossway, 2007), 36.

Mark Dever on expositional preaching:

   The practice of expositional preaching presumes a belief that what God says is authoritative for his people. It presumes that his people should hear it, and need to hear it, lest our congregations be deprived of what God intends to use for shaping us after his image. It presumes that God intends the church to learn from both Testaments, as well as from every genre of Scripture—law, history, wisdom, prophesy, gospels, and epistles. An expositional preacher who moves straight through books of the Bible and who regularly rotates between the different Testaments and genres of Scripture, I believe, is like a mother who serves her children food from every food group, not just their two or three favorite meals.

Back to the Heart of Worship
During a daylong seminar on Puritanism that I taught at a church in London, I remarked at one point that Puritan sermons were sometimes two hours long. A member of the class gasped audibly and asked, “What time did that leave for worship?” Clearly, the individual assumed that listening to God’s Word preached did not constitute worship. I replied that many English Protestants in former centuries believed that the most essential part of their worship was hearing God’s Word in their own language (a freedom purchased by the blood of more than one martyr) and responding to it in their lives. Whether they had time to sing, though not entirely insignificant, was of comparatively little concern to them.

—Mark Dever, What is a Healthy Church? (Crossway, 2007), 65, 67.

A Biblical Understanding of the Good News is, according to Mark Dever, one of the marks of a healthy church. What is the good news? Is it “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life”?

Gospel Basics
The Gospel is not the news that we’re okay. It’s not the news that God is love. It’s not the news that Jesus wants to be our friend. It’s not the news that he has a wonderful plan or purpose for our life. As I discussed at greater length in chapter 1, the gospel is the good news that Jesus Christ died on the cross as a sacrificial substitute for sinners and rose again, making a way for us to be reconciled to God. It’s the news that the Judge will become the Father, if only we repent and believe.
   Here are four points I try to remember whenever sharing the gospel, whether in private or in public—(1)God, (2) man,(3) Christ, and (4) response. In other words:

• Have I explained that God is our holy and sovereign creator?
• Have I made it clear that we humans are a strange mixture, wonderfully made in God’s image yet horribly fallen, sinful, and separated from him?
• Have I explained who Jesus is and what he has done—that he is the God-man who uniquely and exclusively stands in between God and man as a substitute and resurrected Lord?
• And, finally, even if I’ve shared all this, have I clearly stated that a person must respond to the gospel and must believe this message and so turn from his life of self-centeredness and sin?

   Sometimes, it’s tempting to present some of the very real benefits of the gospel as the gospel itself. And these benefits tend to be things that non-Christians naturally want, like joy, peace, happiness, fulfillment, self-esteem, or love. Yet presenting them as the gospel is presenting a partial truth. And, as J. I. Packer says, “A half truth masquerading as the whole truth becomes a complete untruth.”
   Fundamentally, we don’t need just joy or peace or purpose. We need God, himself. Since we are condemned sinners, then, we need his forgiveness above all else. We need spiritual life. When we present the gospel less radically, we simply ask for false conversions and increasingly meaningless church membership lists, both of which make the evangelization of the world around us more difficult.

—Mark Dever, What is a Healthy Church? (Crossway, 2007), 75, 77.

   Each local church has a responsibility to judge the life and teaching of its leaders and members, particularly when either compromises the church’s witness to the gospel (see Acts 17; 1 Corinthians 5; 1 Timothy 3; James 3:1; 2 Peter 3; 2 John).
   Biblical church discipline is simply obedience to God and a confession that we need help. Can you imagine a world in which God never uses our fellow human beings to enact his judgment, one in which parents never disciplined their children, the state never punished lawbreakers, and churches never reproved members? We would all arrive at judgment day never having felt the lash of earthly judgment and so been forewarned of the greater judgment then upon us. How merciful of God to teach us now about the irrevocable justice to come with these temporary chastisements (see Luke 12:4–5).
   Here are five positive reasons for practicing corrective church discipline:

1. the good of the disciplined individual;
2. other Christians as they see the danger of sin;
3. the health of the church a whole;
4. the corporate witness of the church and, therefore, non-Christians in the community;
5. and the glory of God. Our holiness should reflect God’s holiness.

It should mean something to be a member of the church, not for our pride’s sake, but for God’s name sake. Biblical church discipline is another important mark of a healthy church.

—Mark Dever, What is a Healthy Church? (Crossway, 2007), 106.