How to Build a Healthy Church: A Practical Guide for Deliberate Leadership (Second Edition) (9Marks)

A Newly Updated and Rebranded Edition of The Deliberate Church

If churches are the dwelling place of God’s Spirit, why are so many built around the strategies of man? Eager for church growth, leaders can be lured by entertaining new schemes, forgetting to keep doctrinal truth as their driving force. Churches must find a way out of the maze of programs and methods and humbly lean on the sufficiency of God’s Word.

How to Build a Healthy Church, a revised and expanded edition of The Deliberate Church, challenges leaders to evaluate their motivations for ministry and provides practical examples of healthy, deliberate leadership. Written as a companion handbook for Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, it covers important topics including membership, worship, responsible evangelism, and church roles. This is more than a step-by-step plan to mimic; it’s a biblical blueprint for pastors, elders, and anyone committed to the church’s vitality.

• Revised and expanded edition of The Deliberate Church (978-1-58134-738-8) featuring a new title, cover, and added chapter on the role of exposition in evangelism
• Foreword by D. A. Carson
• Includes “think tank” questions on key topics for personal or group reflection

Mark Dever (PhD, Cambridge University) is the senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, and president of 9Marks (9Marks.org). Dever has authored over a dozen books and speaks at conferences nationwide. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Connie, and they have two adult children.

Paul Alexander (MDiv, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is the pastor of Grace Covenant Baptist Church in Elgin, Illinois, where he lives with his wife, Laurie, and their six children.