The Church is the Gospel Made Visible

Mark Dever had the pleasure of getting the T4G 2010 conference off to a start. My first observation is that Dr. Dever has lost serious weight since I last saw him (30 to 40 pounds). He looks great, and he is his normal straight forward, convicting self! After seeing the title of his talk, I knew that as a young pastor it was going to be a challenging 90 minutes.

His first two questions set the table: How does Grace Fellowship make the gospel visible? Would it be better for the evangelization of our community if Grace Fellowship did not exist?

Those are not the questions you here at your typical conference. Most people are trying to promote their big idea on church growth at a conference. Mark is challenging 7,000 people to seriously consider if their local congregation displays the gospel, and he goes on to have us question if our church should exist as a part of the transformation movement in the community. Typical of Dever, things got better from that point. By better I mean more convicting!!

"A healthy congregation displays the proclamation of the gospel in living color - the church is created by the gospel, and then the church exists to reflect the gospel" He explained with precise detail the process of reflecting the gospel by doing the following things well:

1. We reflect the gospel by displaying and proclaiming the character of God. Specifically we are to make known the holiness, love, and authority of God.
2. We reflect the gospel by truthful analysis and insightful teaching on the nature of human beings. All humans are created in the image of God, but all humans are totally depraved. Mark did a great job of emphasizing the necessity of humility, confession and the need to keep the church gathering from becoming a gathering of self-righteous people rather than gospel transformed followers of Christ.
3. We reflect the gospel by holding out the beautiful Savior! Under this point Dever stressed that the unity of a church congregation should be Christ and Christ Alone. If our churches are nothing but homogeneous gatherings, then the world we see little difference between us and a social club! Christ unites us by his grace, and this should challenge us to reach beyond all man made boundaries of race, social, economic, etc. Though Dever is strongly Southern Baptist by denomination, he challenged everyone to move beyond denominational boundaries to come together for the gospel!
4. We reflect the gospel by responding rightly to the gospel. Repentance and Faith! We should be a group of people who live in daily repentance, God's grace, and full faith in Jesus Christ. Dever said, "The local church is a group of people acting on what they cannot see with their physical eyes. The church is people acting on what they see with eyes of faith!"

To answer the questions from earlier. I believe that Grace Fellowship by the grace of God does display the gospel. We are not perfect but we are on a gospel trajectory. I do believe that we can and are able to be part of God's awesome work in transforming the community by His Gospel!!
Talk to you soon....CW