Heritage Booktalk

Thabiti Anyabwile’s newest book, What Is A Healthy Church Member?, is now available for distribution. We have already posted a book review of it, and figured our readers might also appreciate an interview with the author.

1. What drove you to write What Is a Healthy Church Member?

I wanted to see more Christians understand that the health of their local churches and their personal spiritual health are profoundly connected. The Lord granted me the privilege to serve with the brothers at 9Marks ministries. I’ve had the repeated experience of talking with many pastors who want to lead their churches in healthy directions but who struggle to transfer their ideas and vision to their people in a way that aids reform. But most Christians I know also want to participate in sound, healthy churches. So the problem wasn’t merely or always a problem of resistance, but oftentimes of understanding. It seemed that a companion volume to Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, written for the average person in the pew, could be useful in helping church members support their pastors in strengthening their churches and in helping Christians make their local churches more central to their understanding of what it means to be a healthy Christian.

2. The book is patterned after Mark Dever’s book 9 Marks of a Healthy Church, but you address 10 marks. Is this a case of one-upmanship, or do you have a more noble explanation?

I don’t think I’ve seen many people “one up” Mark! Sometimes people comment that Nine Marks is missing some crucial marks like missions and prayer. It’s not an omission as much as it is a focus on some issues of crucial importance that are sometimes debated or neglected in discussions of church health. Few people deny the importance of prayer or missions.
But having said that, Healthy Members focuses on practices that are important for our individual devotion. I don’t know many Christians who have not at some point struggled to pray consistently and fervently. So, I added a chapter on prayer given its importance in the Christian life and the struggles we all have with it. Prayerfully it will encourage the Lord’s people in this vital communion with the Savior.

3. Of the 10 marks you discuss, which one do you feel is most lacking in the church today?

That’s a great question.  One could make the case for several marks being critically missing: expositional listener, biblical evangelist, seeks discipline, and humble follower. If I were forced to choose one, I would have to see the essential mark that’s missing is “expositional listener.” How we listen to or heed God’s word impacts everything else in life. I fear that the weakened listening ability of this hyper-electronic, image-saturated age creates the stony ground that refuses the implantation of God’s word. Listening spans are contracted. And often when we do listen, we’re listening for things that scratch our itching ears.
Expositional listening calls us to listen for the original intent and meaning of the passage preached. It calls us to set aside our “practical” and “felt needs” in order to hear what’s important and needful to God. The habit of our culture is to begin with self and seek a response to ourselves in God’s word. The healthier habit is to begin with God and His word and seek to be conformed to it (Rom. 12:1–2). If we do that, all the other healthy practices will tend to follow suit.

4. Reformed Christians have lamented the downgrade of evangelicalism in recent years. Yet, picking at specks in the eyes of others does little good when there is a log in our own. Which of the 10 marks, if different from the previous question, do you feel Reformed Christians need to work harder at?

Same as above.

5. How does being a healthy church member bolster the ministry of the bride of Christ and make the church more beautiful?

Biblical Christianity is a remarkably corporate or group faith. The contemporary tendency to think almost exclusively in terms of a “personal relationship with Christ” has steadily undermined the public and collective relationship we have with the Lord as His body or His flock. But when we stress, as the New Testament does, the inescapably family-centered nature of Christianity, the glories of Christ come into fuller picture.
For example, Jesus says that our love for one another would make it known to all men that we are His followers (John 13:25). When Christians gather together in loving relationship to one another we demonstrate to those outside the love of God what it means to follow Him. More glorious still, we find that it’s in the church where this love—the love of God—is made complete (1 John 4:11–12). Think of that. God’s love is made complete in the world in the church as Christians love one another as He loved us. And Ephesians 3:10 tells us that “by the church the manifold wisdom of God” is made known to rules and authorities in the heavenly realm.
In effect, being a healthy church makes the task of evangelism and missions more compelling and effective. When the Bride of Christ gathers and commits herself to loving the way she is called to, then the supremacy of Christ and the love of God are made brilliant for an on looking, perishing world. But if we undermine or downplay the centrality of the church, we in effect undermine the one institution wherein Christ is embodied and His glorious wisdom made known.

6. You write “Conclusions” and sections “For Further Reflections” at the end of every chapter. If you were to write something comparable for the end of this interview concerning What Is a Healthy Church Member?, what would you say?

Based on Ephesians 4:11–5:2 and comparable passages, I would ask the readers to consider how essential God intends the local church to be in their lives. I would ask that they see how intertwined their spiritual health is with the life and witness of their local fellowship. The very purpose for which Christ gives gifted people to the body is to prepare them for works of service (4:12). Their spiritual maturity is not a matter of completing consecutive months and years of “quiet times”—though personal devotion is critical—but of being an active member of the body of Christ exercising your gifts so that others are built up even as they are built up by receiving the blessings stemming from the gifts of others (4:13, 15–16). We learn to put on Christ in the church (4:20–25). And as we are kind and forgiving of others in our churches, we increasingly become imitators of God, living a life of love which pleases God (4:32–5:2). All that we need to grow up into Christ and to see others grow in Him, God provides in and through the Body of His Son. I would want to ask if we have deeply understood this stunning reality and if that is reflected in our involvement in a local body of Christ.