What does it look like to be a healthy church member? Is there a place for ordinary Christians to contribute to the health and flourishing of their local churches? In today’s world, we are constantly catechized to believe that a fulfilling and God-honoring Christian life can be lived quietly and privately. The church has been likened to a shopping mall: where people go to receive spiritual help but then retreat to everyday life. This individualistic and consumer-driven mentality has fostered unhealthy churches, which promote man-centered worship, and man-centered church leadership, with a bent on cultural conformity instead of the pursuit and proclamation of the glory of God. What we need is two-fold: one, a biblical understanding of what it means to belong to a God-glorifying, Gospel-centered, healthy local church – this has been ably addressed in other books in the 9Marks series; two, a practical understanding of what makes a healthy church member.
Anyabwile’s, What is a Healthy Church Member? Is written with precision, clarity, biblical depth, and profound relevance to the local church member. In this book, Anyabwile seeks to convince the reader that healthy church membership is a call to a deliberate and dutiful pursuit of Christlike maturity, gospel unity, and the proclamation and demonstration of the gospel to the glory of God. This profound and practical book surveys ten marks of a healthy church member.
Three foundational themes stand out:
- A healthy church member adheres to a gospel-centered blueprint in their engagement with God’s word
- A healthy church member displays a gospel-centered commitment to the local church in their relationship with God’s people
- A healthy church member is dedicated to God-glorifying growth on their journey toward Christlikeness.
A Gospel-centered blueprint
What is the church member’s posture towards God’s word? The faithful preaching and teaching of God’s word, through God’s power, produces God’s people in conversion, grows God’s people in discipleship, and is the means and motivation for God’s people to go in proclamation. In the first three chapters, Anyabwile ably begins the book by challenging the reader to grow in their handling of God’s word. A healthy church member is an expositional listener in their engagement with the preached word.
What does it mean for church members to be expositional listeners? Anyabwile writes, “It is listening for the meaning of a passage of Scripture and accepting that meaning as the main idea to be grasped for our personal and corporate lives as Christians” (p19). While many books have been written with an emphasis on expository preaching, the skill of expository listening is as crucial to the growth of the Christian. Among many other benefits highlighted in the book, expository listening guards the Church against the “itching ear”, and against a man-centered, deceptive bent towards the dangerous and destructive false gospel(s), by equipping him to discern truth from error.
Another poignant mark following expositional listening is the handling of God’s word through a biblical theology framework. A healthy church member is a biblical theologian. Biblical theology is the ability to see the overarching story of the bible and how its various parts fit together. This model from the bible is helpful, “Jesus and the apostles did not need the New Testament to proclaim the gospel. They relied on the Old Testament and understood that the Old Testament Scriptures pointed to Jesus (Luke 24:27, 44–45). The biblical theologian follows in the steps of Jesus and the apostles by mastering the unity of Scripture, seeing Christ and the gospel throughout” (p31).
A Gospel – oriented Commitment
The 4th to 6th mark of a healthy church member highlights the necessity and sufficiency of the gospel in the Christian life. Many today think the gospel is only essential for the unbeliever, it is like the door that gets you into the household of God. Anyabwile reorients our thinking about the gospel to entail the truth that the gospel is the very message that not only forms the house of God, but that which upholds it. He says, “The gospel distinguishes the church from the world, defines her message and mission in the world, and steels her people against the fiery darts of the evil one and the false allurements of sin” (p39).
Anyabwile challenges the Christian to know and believe the gospel, grow in the understanding of the gospel, and guard the gospel. This gospel-oriented commitment is first seen clearly in the believer’s conversion, this radical change that begins with a genuine conviction of sin, leading to a reliance on the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation (faith) and a turning from sin to the pursuit of holiness (repentance). This very gospel message becomes the message of hope that they bear as good tidings to the lost as well as to fellow pilgrims.
A God – Glorifying growth
The gospel is what produces growth. What this means is a growth not in the structures of the church but in the lives of people. What is the best strategy for church growth? What is the best way to grow the church really fast? In most cases, when this question is asked, the anticipated answers will usually have something to do with practical steps to grow numbers and increase traction. However, what we should be concerned about is every member’s spiritual growth.
In the last four marks of a healthy church member, Anyabwile challenges the Christian to practical Christian living as an objective trajectory towards healthy church membership. A healthy church member is one who regularly attends church services and members’ meetings. They actively engage in scripture both at a personal level and corporately, and they pray for each other – at my local church, the members are given a list of all the members, and a platform is created where every member is able to see prayer requests as they are posted every other week. A healthy church member will actively seek to build discipleship relationships, seeking to spur one another toward love and good deeds. They will not only honor God-given authority, but they will practice biblical discernment, guarding the gospel from any corruption. They will humbly submit to the Lord’s discipline as it is exercised through the church, and in all these, their gospel-shaped minds and hearts will always remind them that all of these is only possible through a faith-filled trust in Christ who is at work in us.
Conclusion
In a time when individualism seeks to trump a call to self-less covenant commitment to one another in the body of Christ, Thabiti Anyabwile has provided the church with an invaluable resource in What is a Healthy Church member? The biblical clarity and pastoral tone exude confidence in the reader as they are called to hold first to the trustworthy gospel as their only hope if they are to ever seek to pursue any and all of these ten marks. It is the gospel-centered nature of the book that makes it exceptional.