Overview 

If your church went in for an annual checkup, what would the doctor say? Is your church glowing with a clean bill of health? Is it limping along? Or is it in danger of being on life support?  

But another question is even more important. What criteria would be used to make the diagnosis? To claim that a church is healthy or unhealthy begs the question: what makes a church healthy? Is it average attendance compared to the previous year? Quantity and quality of pastoral vestments? Offerings?  

Nine Marks of a Healthy Church is one pastor’s attempt to provide a framework for church checkups. Mark Devers, who holds a Ph.D. in church history from Cambridge University, is the senior pastor at a large Baptist church in Washington, D.C. After the success of the book Nine Marks, first published in 2000, he founded the organization 9Marks to help pastors build healthy churches. 9Marks is influential in the broader conservative evangelical world. It is also prolific, having published dozens of books, releasing a quarterly journal, holding conferences, and producing ten podcasts.  

Here are the marks, as found in the newest edition of the book, which also form its outline:  

1. Expositional Preaching. (Since expositional is a contested word in homiletical circles, Dever’s definition is worth noting: “Preaching that takes for the point of a sermon the point of a particular passage of Scripture” [45-46]. Devers strongly favors systematically preaching through books of the Bible.)  
2. Gospel Doctrine. (i.e. Is the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ recognized and consistently preached as the heart of the Bible?)  
3. A Biblical Understanding of Conversion and Evangelism 
4. A Biblical Understanding of Church Membership 
5. Biblical Church Discipline 
6. A Biblical Concern for Discipleship and Growth 
7. Biblical Church Leadership 
8. A Biblical Understanding and Practice of Prayer 
9. A Biblical Understanding and Practice of Missions 

The book concludes with short appendices that discuss wise implementation of these principles. 

Evaluation 

Evaluating a church based on its health is a helpful framework. It avoids, or at least contextualizes, our modern obsessions with quantifiable metrics, growth, and organizational efficiency. Large, growing churches can be deeply unhealthy. Numerically stagnant churches without mission statements or core values can be quite healthy. Speaking of the health of a church is also biblically appropriate, especially given the frequency of “church as body” metaphors in the New Testament.  

At the same time, health is a nebulous concept. Different pastors with different priorities would look for different health indicators. Devers admits this, noting that these nine marks are based on his experience and expertise.  

I found this approach that Devers outlines to be a faithful one. He gets the most important thing right: the primacy of the proclamation of the Word of God. For a church to have any hope of being healthy, it must draw deeply and frequently from the fountain of Israel. Even more, the purpose of Scripture – the salvation of souls by faith in the blood of Christ – must be clearly understood. Devers frequently emphasizes that everything in a church must support the preaching of God’s Word with the goal of producing repentance and faith. 

In other areas, too, Devers shows a refreshing concern for God’s priorities for his churches. Admittedly, the emphases in Nine Marks slot neatly in the reformed congregationalist Baptist school of ecclesiology, but Devers comes by it honestly. He argues from Scripture, with a more robust framework than usually found in modern church-help literature. As a historian by training, Devers also understands the pre-Willow Creek ecclesiological world. He quotes, approvingly, from Augustana VII and Melanchthon’s Loci Communes (29), as well as from other Protestant theologians. (Interaction with pre-Reformation literature is unfortunately absent.)  

Non-congregationalist readers will often disagree with where Devers draws the prescription/description line as he applies Scripture to the life of the church. Even more, his misunderstanding of the sacraments is a fatal flaw in his ecclesiology. Lutheran readers will occasionally have to swallow hard, like when Devers compares the error of egalitarianism with the “error” of infant baptism (214). Other emphases specific to Devers’ context as a pastor in a Southern Baptist Convention church will not resonate with our Shepherd’s Study audience, like his strong pushback against spontaneous baptisms (116-117).  

That said, because of Devers’ scriptural approach, I found even the areas of disagreement thought-provoking. When it comes to articulating ecclesiology in an open religious marketplace, congregationalism had a 300-year head start on Lutheranism. This is their turf, so to speak, and I found it useful to listen in. There are indeed other pastors who care about church membership, even more than I do! Devers encourages high expectations for members (139-141). He robustly outlines the importance of church discipline, saying that churches should “close the front door and open the back door” (150). Better discipline will, he argues, lead to a healthier, more energetic body of believers who preach the gospel and more clearly display the glory of Christ because of their love for each other and their distinction from the world. Pastors might consider the downsides of dividing this body of Christ (259-260). Devers pushes back against the normalization of a church meeting across multiple services, a new practice in the past 100 years. (To say nothing of the even newer push to describe multiple bodies of believers meeting in multiple locations as a single church.)  

Recommendation  

Nine Marks is not a must-read for a Lutheran pastor. It might, however, be a worthwhile conversation partner if you are looking to evaluate your local congregation. Some of the healthiest people I know rarely think about their health, and I suspect the same might be true for churches. Still, periodic checkups can be helpful. This book provides a starting place, but it might perhaps be even more useful as a prompt for you to come up with your own nine marks, based on Scripture and your experience, and to think carefully how they might be pursued by the proclamation of the Word and the work of the Spirit. As we confess in Smalcald XII, our “holiness exists in the Word of God and true faith.”