Biblical Theology, Expositional Preaching & Sound Doctrine (Building Healthy Churches)

Since I am now working for a 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. It is taking me a while to read and write these reviews, but here are the next three books which are kinda all along the same theme of teaching Biblical content.

Biblical Theology: How the Church Faithfully Teaches the Gospel By Nick Roark, Robert Cline

This was a great little book that captures what Biblical Theology is. They define Biblical Theology as a way of reading the whole Bible as one big story that culminates in Jesus and attempts to relate each part of scripture to the whole.

The bulk of this book is two chapters which is just going through the story of the Bible, from creation to covenants, with judges, kings, and Israel from the exodus to exile, to Jesus the king and His church. Thought this overview, there were little preaching tips, point out how you might relate the situation to the whole Biblical story.

The first and last chapter of the book used a really useful teaching process. They presented four different ways certain churches (prosperity driven church, the civil-gospel church (pro-American churches), soup kitchen churches and immorality affirming churches) view themselves, based on different texts may deal with different texts. And then at the end, after going through the Biblical story, they corrected each of these views of Church, by looking at their proof passages in context to the whole Biblical story and by looking at the broader idea they affirm in balance to the rest of the Bible.

To make this book even more useful, in the appendix at the back they take six example passages (Deut 28:1-6, Ps 47:8, Prov 2:1-6, Mark 6:45-52, John 10, Col 1:12-14) and show you how you can use them in a Christ centred Biblical theological way. There were nuances I would have done differently, but I really did appreciate this. It helped put legs on what they were saying.

This whole Building Healthy Churches series is aimed at ministers, so I would hope that those running churches would already know the overarching Biblical story, but this was a good reminder. It was really clear and had some great practical examples. It is worth a read, even if you are not in full-time ministry.

Expositional Preaching: How We Speak God's Word Today By David R. Helm

Expositional Preaching is a common method that evangelicals use to prepare their preaching schedules and talks. The idea is that the preacher is duty-bound to say what is in the passage at hand to the people in front of them. A preacher isn't to use the text to support our arguments, the text itself is the argument. The text isn't used to uncover any new insight or inspiration that the preacher may have experienced or heard privately from God, instead the two tensions in Expositional Preaching is getting the original meaning of the text across in a contextual way for today.

This book lays a framework/process on how to study and apply a text for preaching. I think I had heard Helm give a similar talk on some audio years back, but still, it was a good reminder and useful to now have this in writing for reference. The process goes from 1) Exegesis to 2) Theological Reflection to 3) Today.

From the picture below (which is a combination of two pictures in the book), you can see we don't just jump from the text to us, nor do we jump from the original setting to us. The goal or process is to go from the text to us, via the original setting and Jesus.

The appendix in the back of this book was a really useful summary, pretty much stepping over the major headings in the book and asking a question for the preacher to answer, to help build a sermon from it. That alone is a useful resource that I may come back to in the future.

While this presents kind of a structured approach, detailing steps and methods, I found the reliant of prayer a good reminder. We may be super smart and work out all the right tenses of the Greek, know the historical background, be able to contextualise the message today, but in the end, we should be reliant on God. It is His word and it is His Spirit that moves hearts. The preacher is there to just speak and encourage people. Real change from the sermon comes form God.

I would hope a preacher would already know the things in this book, but still, this was a good reminder and maybe seen as a "refresher course" to try and get the main thing the main thing.

Sound Doctrine: How a Church Grows in the Love and Holiness of God By Bobby Jamieson

If you had to skip one of the three books in this post, this would be it. Not because this one is a terrible book, but I think the previous two were just clear in it's teaching and in giving practical methods.

This book is about how having sound doctrine helps you live in the Church and how sound doctrine gives life to the Church. I thought it was stronger on the individual point and not very strong on the corporate aspect. There are a bunch of personal or individual stories from people in the church as examples on how certain sound doctrine topics have affected their life. But I didn't really see many wholistic, or church-wide examples of how a church really focused on say, holiness and the change that it had to the overall life of that church. The gist was kinda like, here is an individual who was affected by this topic, just imagine if the whole church was like that.

The book is kinda is arguing for systematic theology, which I am cool with. Except there isn't really a method given in how sound doctrine is taught in the church. I think it is assumed that the topics raised in the book, will be dealt with when going chronologically through a book in an expositional sermon or small group.

The sound doctrine topics coved in this book are holiness, love, unity, worship and witness along with lightly touching on joy and reading the Bible. These are good topics to deal with, quite practical. However, I was surprised that it didn't go with the traditional Systematic framework of say, God, man, salvation and the church.

Other books in this series:

Prayer, the Gospel & Missions (Building Healthy Churches)
Evangelism, Conversion & Discipling (Building Healthy Churches)