Accessible Guide from 9Marks Equips Believers to Steward Their God-Given AuthorityIn every position of power—from executives and world leaders to church elders and parents—lies the potential for life-giving leadership or destructive corruption. Driven by sinful pride or opportunism, many people abuse their God-given authority, harming the ones they're called to lead and contributing to a skeptical attitude toward leadership. The answer to bad authority, however, is...

How can the church move forward in unity amid such political strife and cultural contention?As Christians, we've felt pushed to the outskirts of national public life, yet even within our congregations we are divided about how to respond. Some want to strengthen the evangelical voting bloc. Others focus on social justice causes, and still others would abandon the public square altogether. What do we do when brothers and sisters in Christ sit next to each other in th...

What is the Church's mission? What does it mean to participate in God's mission personally? How do "mission" and culture interact and conflict?This book articulates various evangelical views regarding the church's mission and provides a healthy, vigorous, and gracious debate on this controversial topic. In a helpful Counterpoints format, this volume demonstrates the unique theological frameworks, doctrinal convictions, and missiological conclusions that inform and ...

Pastors from America and India Share How They Patiently and Faithfully Lead Missions in Their Local ChurchesWhat role should the local church play in the mission to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth? Many Christians view missions work as a task for large churches or parachurch ministries. But God commands all believers in churches of all sizes to protect and proclaim his word. Working together patiently and faithfully, we can reach nations with the gospel....

Congregational authority is less about the meetings and more about the mission.Congregationalism has a bad rap for well-known reasons: inefficient meetings, upstart members, browbeaten ministers. But biblical congregationalism isn’t so much about the meetings. It’s about empowering the whole church to promote and protect the gospel. Pastors lead and equip. Members get to work strengthening one another and pursuing Christ’s mission in the world.

Church membership is not just a status, it’s an office. Leaders shouldn’t fire members from the responsibilities given to them by Jesus—they should train them! When members are trained, the church grows in holiness and love, discipleship and mission. Complacency and nominalism are diminished.Jesus gives every church member an office in the church’s government: to assume final responsibility for guarding the what and the who of the gospel in the church and its mini...

Accessible Guide from 9Marks Equips Believers to Steward Their God-Given AuthorityIn every position of power—from executives and world leaders to church elders and parents—lies the potential for life-giving leadership or destructive corruption. Driven by sinful pride or opportunism, many people abuse their God-given authority, harming the ones they're called to lead and contributing to a skeptical attitude toward leadership. The answer to bad authority, however, is...

How Can We Know What the Church Is Supposed to Do?Jesus commissioned the local church to carry out a mission. Yet local churches often disagree over exactly what Jesus commanded them to do, leading them to align their mission with current political or economic trends. So what does the Bible have to say?In this short ebook, Jonathan Leeman argues from Scripture that the mission of the church is first and foremost to make disciples—the task that each...

God Is Love vs. Love Is GodOur culture's view of love—with no boundaries or judgments or conditions— justifies whatever our hearts want and whatever our hearts feel, rejecting any authority that gets in the way. Falsely heralded as the only path to true selfexpression and self-realization, this kind of love diminishes—if not completely redefines—the holy love of God revealed in the Bible.In this book, Jonathan Leeman directs us toward a biblical definition ...

Who leads a church? Why is this important to God?God cares about his glory, and he means to display his glory through the church. For this very end, God has established elders and deacons, members, and congregational authority. This primer on church structure connects the different offices of the church to one another and to the glory of God.

Many new believers have questions about what it means to live as a Christian in the context of a local church, and pastors are looking for resources to pass along to their congregations to help them think biblically about the Christian life. Church Questions is a series by 9Marks that seeks to provide Christians with sound and accessible biblical teaching by answering common questions about church life. Each booklet offers biblical answers and practical applications with the goal of nurtur...

God means to fulfill the Great Commission through local churches.How did the apostles and the churches of the New Testament obey the Great Commission? By gathering Christians together in churches. The church is God’s plan for evangelism, discipleship, and the Great Commission. This connection between the Great Commission and the church dramatically impacts how both leaders and members should think about their work of making disciples. We do it together.