church health

A few years ago, I wrote about Isabella Graham [1] . the Scottish educator who founded one of the first women's societies to be legally registered as a charity, for the improvement of lives of needy women and children. Her accomplishments were so striking that she is now widely recognized as one of...

If someone were to ask you what passions, pleasures, or desires you have, what would you say? Upon further reflection, how would you respond if they asked how these passions, pleasures, and desires cause fights with those who stand in your way of them? When we think about passions, it’s important...

We often see ourselves as the heroes of the stories we read. We identify with noble characters like Atticus Finch, Elizabeth Bennett, and Frodo Baggins—rarely do we align ourselves with flawed figures like Bob Ewell, Mary Bennett, or Gollum. This tendency extends to how we view the early church in...

Has the church has missed God’s plan for spiritual growth? Conventional wisdom promotes pragmatic self-help schemes, elaborate church programs, and charismatic leaders. But what if God actually authorized a simpler way? Early Christians committed to expository preaching, fellowship, and prayers (...

The visible church is an institution. Like any other organization the church has structure. Anyone who takes the Bible seriously realizes that the gathered community of God has leaders, doctrine, and rules for membership. As unpopular as it might be to say, Christianity is a religion and the...

“A Christian without a church is a Christian in trouble.” [i] Like a lion hoping to snatch prey that wanders alone Satan aims to devour professing Christians who are disconnected from God’s family. We need the church. To become persuaded of this truth we need to know what the church is. It isn’t an...

At our once-rural (now-suburban) church, we have two weekly prayer meetings. On Wednesday nights, we gather to pray for an hour, structuring our time around praise, confession of sin, and supplication. On Lord’s Day afternoons, we gather for just twenty minutes to pray for the extension of Christ’s...

According to The Beatles, love is all you need. Of course, you won’t actually learn anything about love from their vapid lyrics, yet we need to learn about love, if we are to know God, and live glorifying him and blessing others. Unquestionably, 1Corinthians 13 is the text that readily comes to...

Editor's Note: Taken from forthcoming book, Daily Doctrine by Kevin DeYoung, Copyright © 2024. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org . As a Protestant pastor I’ve lost tracked of how many times a congregant has asked me...

Taken from forthcoming book, Daily Doctrine by Kevin DeYoung, Copyright © 2024. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org . The holiness of the church is both a present positional reality—ours through union with Christ—and an...