Sam > Recent Status Updates

and the long awaited journey begins. wish me luck.

This man knows how to cut through the Western Evangelican Christianese fluff so well. Already inspiring me to simply be with Jesus

The last two marks on prayer and missions felt more like a list of things you could try in order to encourage your church to care more about them. Felt a lot less emphasis and necessity than i got from the other chapters.

finished part I. I forgot how much the movie actually took out

7th Mark: Biblical Church Leadership
Long, distracted, opinionated. It had some good points, though: about authority and trusting it. However this chapter had its distractions: section on spiritual gifts that did not belong, a bad mnemonic device; and its strong opinions: non-supernatural spiritual gifts, egalitarianism as the biggest underminer of the authority of Scripture, & a distinction between elder and pastor.

6th Mark: A Biblical Concern for Discipleship and Growth
Honestly I was surprised when I wrote down the title of this chapter because there wasn’t any discussion on what discipling someone else looks like. A more apt title would be “A Biblical Concern for Growth.” This one didn’t feel like its own mark. It was more of an expectation to be followed within the other marks.

5th Mark: Biblical Church Discipline
"But it is only the church that may and must finally enforce discipline." Good teaching on church discipline from 8 biblical passages as well as a brief historical perspective on discipline.

4th Mark: A Biblical Understanding of Church Membership
“Church leaders often ask, how inclusive should we be? ... But the question of how apparently exclusive we should be perhaps gets to the point more quickly.”
It seemed to me Dever’s point was mainly semantic, not actually calling for a lot of specific changes to how churches function, but rather the perspective in which we view them.

Third Mark: A Biblical Understanding of Conversion and Evangelism
This one was definitely my favorite so far. Dever elegantly expressed the dichotomy between the need to call on the the Lord and the Lord's sovereignty in first calling us. He also has a nice part calling churches not to keep their members too busy as to not allow them time build relationships with non-believers.

2nd Mark: Gospel Doctrine
Overall, Dever was spot on for content, but this chapter was structured very poorly.
These are going to be a little shorter because of space, expect an essay for a review at the end though ✍🏼

1st Mark: Expositional Preaching
I honestly thought I would disagree with this a little, but he defines expo-preaching well. Not as some rote, culturally irrelevant ritual how I have sometimes seen it argued, but simply that content should be drawn from scripture, rather than finding scripture to back up a point. He also makes allowances for occasional topical preaching, which he says can be done expositionally.