The Compelling Community: Where God's Power Makes a Church Attractive (9Marks)

by Mark Dever

In this book, I’ll define local church community as a togetherness and commitment we experience that transcends all natural bonds—because of our commonality in Jesus Christ.

Scripture teaches that the community that matters is community built by God. We may cultivate it, feed it, protect it, and use it. But we dare not pretend to create it.

In gospel- revealing community, many relationships would never exist but for the truth and power of the gospel—either because of the depth of care for each other or because two people in relationship have little in common but Christ.

You can’t physically see the gospel; it’s simply truth. But when we encourage community that is obviously supernatural, it makes the gospel visible.

When Christians unite around something other than the gospel, they create community that would likely exist even if God didn’t.

Supernatural depth and breadth of community make the glory of an invisible God to be visible. This is the ultimate purpose statement for community in the Ephesian church. This is the ultimate purpose statement for community in churches today. Is it the ultimate purpose for community in your church?

In his book Revival and Revivalism, Iain Murray traces the root of American Protestant liberalism to a tendency among Christians to seek seemingly supernatural results through entirely natural means.

We build a demographic phenomenon, not a gospel phenomenon.

we cultivate this kind of community by not paying it too much attention.

church community is the shadow, not the substance.

we must remember that community isn’t the point. The point, the substance, is God.

describing community in the local church is like describing the light radiating from the heavenly throne. The point is not the community; the point is God. Community is merely the effect.

not a mutual admiration society, but a shared admiration society.

I have more in common with my working class, rural, Sudanese brother in Christ than with my own non-Christian blood brother.

God and his glory in the church are the point, not the community we seek.

When the gospel is believed, the supernatural community described in the New Testament happens. Our problem is that our impatience for this all-important work of the Spirit leads us to construct it artificially.

what you win them with is how you’ll keep them. Attract people as consumers, and you’ll wind up with a church of demanding consumers. This may allow our people to feel some level of commitment quickly, but it compromises long-term depth of love for each other. And consumerism is the antithesis of the gospel of grace.

Instead of prophetically calling Christians to love those with whom they may have little in common but Jesus, we patch people into affinity groups where we know relationships will prosper. As a result, our church “community” is really pockets of independent, homogeneous communities that do not display the supernatural breadth God intends.

In all our efforts to build community, we so often destroy the very elements that should mark it out as a supernatural act of God.

It was community they could not explain as non-Christians, and yet found profoundly attractive despite the offense of the gospel at its core.

This, then, is the thesis of this book: Authentic, gospel-revealing community with supernatural depth and breadth is a natural outgrowth of belief in God’s Word.

hypothesis: These miraculous signs were a temporary means of confirming the truth of the gospel. Temporary, that is, until the permanent miraculous means of confirmation was up and running: the local church. When the gospel first enters a region, the Spirit enables miraculous signs. Once the gospel takes root, the Spirit enables miraculous community.

nothing safeguards the gospel quite like the supernatural community of faith that gospel preaching produces.

That’s why culture is so powerful. It shapes our perception of what is true, what is plausible. In a fallen world, culture becomes a plausibility structure for unbelief, for the denial of God and the exaltation of self. That is why the apostles are so concerned about the unity of the local church. The church is a counterculture, an alternative plausibility structure for faith.

We need people who are different from us to keep us faithful to the gospel.

I defined supernatural in chapter 1 as the biblical idea of God working in space and time to do what confounds the natural laws of our world.

Our love is proportional to our understanding of forgiveness. And because our forgiveness is supernatural, we have ability as Christians to love God supernaturally.

avoid any kind of community that will encourage nominal Christians to maintain their blithe disinterest in life’s ultimate questions. You must believe that because supernatural community is God’s plan as instructed in Scripture, it is the best means to reach the unbelievers in your church.

Be patient for now, even at the cost of letting community languish, and focus on preaching the gospel. At times, this will take years to come to fruition—but it is well worth it.

our love isn’t proportional to our forgiveness; it’s proportional to our understanding of forgiveness.

When commitment in a local church transcends the benefits we receive from it, it points to something deeper.

It turned out that the thing she found offensive—membership—was essential to the thing she craved: authentic relationships. As she visited church after church that downplayed the commitment they required, she found church after church where relationships proved shallow.

commitment is foundational to community.

if you attract people by appealing to them as consumers, you’ll most likely retain them as consumers. And consumerism stifles authentic relationships.

something everyone is talking about—authentic community—is bound up in something people rarely ever talk about: church membership.

we should stop viewing commitment to a local church as a process and start viewing it as an event. The event is our salvation, and commitment is something that inevitably follows—not something that merely happens as we mature.

If we lower our initial expectations for newcomers3 to near zero and rely on Comfort-Based Commitment to kick in over time, we will have community that is consumerist, relationship-light, and not-that-different-from-the-world. Instead, we should call true believers to commit in deep and meaningful ways to the local church community and then increase their love from there. This is what God calls them to do—even before they’ve developed any particular affection for our community. Then we will find a community that’s honest about what it means to follow Christ and that serves as a rich catalyst for Christian relationships.

As it turns out, encouragement in the book of Hebrews is much more than brief compliments as we dash for the exits after a Sunday service.

Encouragement is an antidote to unbelief. To encourage means to strengthen each other’s faith. It means being merciful to those who doubt (Jude 22). It means helping each other hold the shield of faith (Eph. 6:16). A commitment to encourage is a commitment to fight for faith together.

But however you do membership, you need to make it self-conscious. That is, when people join they understand the commitments they’re making—and the rest of the church should understand their responsibility as well.

We continually update a paper copy of a membership photo directory and encourage our members to pray through the entire membership over the course of each month.

In so many cases, when one person says to another, “I love you, but let’s not ruin it by getting married,” that person really means, “I don’t love you enough to close off all my options. I don’t love you enough to give myself to you that thoroughly.” To say, “I don’t need a piece of paper to love you” is basically to say, “My love for you has not reached the marriage level.”

Formal commitment clarifies who is making the decision to love your church as Scripture describes—and who is still weighing whether or not they really intend to follow Jesus.

To what extent does your church’s concept of formal commitment help or hinder a culture of informal commitment?

Comfort-Based Commitment offers a familiar and appealing “try before you buy” mentality. Calling-Based Commitment, on the other hand, with meaningful and formal commitment that precedes deep relationships, offends.

the Bible tells us that a universal skepticism of authority isn’t wise; it’s satanic. The idea of distrusting authority didn’t originate in our own generation but with the Serpent in the garden. The lie he planted in Eve’s mind was that God cannot love us and say “no” to us simultaneously. That affection necessarily implies approval. We must recognize that Calling-Based Commitment goes against everything our culture stands for. Yet confidence in such a countercultural stance is well-grounded because the Bible assures us that the basic concept of authority is for our good.

Paul asks for the impossible. But if God’s power is “at work within us,” God will do it, and so he will gain fame.

The diversity I’m writing about is any multiplicity of backgrounds where unity is possible only through the gospel.

The local church must speak strongly on moral issues. But rarely does that moral authority translate cleanly into the details of public policy. As a result, Christians with divergent views on government policy should find unity in the more ultimate reality of God’s kingdom.

In his book, Love in Hard Places, Don Carson tells us, “Ideally … the church itself is not made up of natural ‘friends.’ It is made up of natural enemies. What binds us together is not common education, common race, common income levels, common politics, common ancestry, common accents, common jobs, or anything else of that sort… . In this light, they are a band of natural enemies who love one another for Jesus’ sake.”