Prayer, the Gospel & Missions (Building Healthy Churches)

Since getting the new gig working at Church I thought it would be a good idea to get some foundational ideas on what a healthy Church is on about, so I bought the whole Building Healthy Churches series by 9Marks. Here are the summaries of the next three books I read. I am glad they have added these to their series as originally the nine marks didn't include prayer or missions.


Prayer: How Praying Together Shapes the Church by John Onwuchekwa

Prayer wasn't in the nine marks of the church, but I am glad they added this. The author argues that prayer is like breathing, it is essential to the Christian life. They define prayer as "calling on God to come through with His promises" (cited from Garry Miller), which I think is very helpful. With this approach to prayer, it becomes more God-centric and Biblical, as you have to know and recall what God's promises are.

The main spin on this book is that it isn't about private prayer, but about prayer in a congregational setting, either in a service or at a prayer meeting. The book spends two short chapters on the Lords Prayer (normative prayer) and another on Jesus' prayer in the garden of Gethsemane (prayer in hard times) and then dives into the ACTS model of prayer with a corporate spin which I took to be the guts of the book.

I appreciated this book and thought it had some helpful reminders about prayer and church. The one main thing that stuck out for me was that this author was pretty much crying out for some sort of prayer book to help church services with some sort of gospel-centred flow. I found this a little amusing as the Anglican Church (Church of England) had been doing this for about 400 years (and they took that from the Roman Catholics who have been doing that for even longer). It made me a little bit more appreciated of the tradition that I have landed in. While the Anglican Prayer Book does have its criticisms, it does help guide the congregation in public (trinitarian) prayers of adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplications.

This would be a good book for anyone on the praying roster in Church, and for ministers wanting to build a culture of prayer in their church.

It seems this author gave a talk on this topic at this year's Gospel Coalition conference. I haven't heard it, but it might be worth your time.

The Gospel: How the Church Portrays the Beauty of Christ by Ray Ortlund

I liked this book. It defined the gospel as John 3:16 and spent a chapter going through each phrase of that verse, pointing out the love and grace of God. From that, the book tried to show what a church or a culture of people's lives looked like in response to God's love and grace. Predominantly, it would look like a gracious and loving community. The community will look different as it strives for holiness and one that is hopeful as it looks forward to the renewal of all things and the fixing of all the brokenness.

The last few chapters were honest in how it is actually a hard thing to build a gospel culture in a church but then encouraged you to aim for that with a picture of what that community might look like.

From what I have read in this series so far, this book was the most footnoted. It had loads of great quotes. One by Johnathan Edwards stuck with me, in the context of courage in building a culture and way forward. Edwards said that ministers need zeal and resolve. An ordinary person can accomplish much with zeal and resolve, ten times more someone who is more gifted but lacks these traits. Zeal and resolve can also inspire or influence others to follow them, more so than those who are dull and cold.

This is a good sharp book to help keep the main thing the main thing.

Missions: How the Local Church Goes Global by Andy Johnson

This was a really practical book in how your church can relate to missionaries. The book stressed that just because there is an urgency to missions, the church is not to be frantic. The church needs to train, build up, send out and be prudent in who it supports and cares for.

The initial chapters set up a Biblical view of missions and looks at the tension between providing "spiritual" care vs"material" care for those overseas, and what the local church should be supporting.

It then goes into practical steps in giving a framework to work out which missionaries to support and what your discernment process should be. While it does say missionary organisations are useful and helpful, they argue that the church should also do some discernment and due diligence before deciding to support a missionary.

The book also argues that it may be better to support fewer missionaries in order to give them more resources and it really pushes the idea of a strong relational partnership with them, not just praying or giving, but also visiting them and being in constant communication with them. They give six characteristics of healthy missionary partnership that the church should consider, these include, finding servant-minded missionaries; pastors leading from the front encouraging missions; being committed as a whole congregation, not just a few to support the cause of the mission and to be in it for the long haul.

There is a bit about short term mission trips to help them, and being American it assumes flights are cheaper than they are in Australia. However, there are some good points in there and realistic expectation settings on how it may go when you are overseas. It encourages someone who is going on a short term overseas mission trip to be humble, patient, flexible, low maintenance, willing to be spent and to serve all the while focusing on God's glory.

This would be a useful book for anyone at church who is the missionary coordinator, or missionary point person, or rector who decides what missionaries their church supports.