BIBLE-CENTRED CHURCH:
Running a church the biblical way
By John Temple
Day One. 144 pages. £7.00
ISBN 978 1 846 254 338
It is a very encouraging thing to see a church planted and yet how sad to see such a venture, once full of prospect and potential, flounder.
It started so well and yet, from the perspective of following years, it never really grew. The promising plant withers into a staid and stolid traditionalism.
This book, endorsed by many church leaders, is written to help fledgling churches from dying early on. John Temple has much experience as a church planter, elder and in management, and he writes to help and to challenge. Potential church planters ought to be very grateful to him for providing a handbook that is very helpful in establishing a biblically functioning leadership.
Well grounded
The advice given is well grounded in the Scriptures and the appendices are truly helpful templates that will save church planters from much work. So we must say ‘thank you John!’ The confusion that has beset some churches over establishing an eldership could have been avoided. The book is a very useful and welcome tool. And yet even the author would agree that, while this is a huge need, it is not the most important issue facing churches today. That is surely to hold fast to the gospel of God’s grace, to defend and proclaim it by life and lip, and to see believers motivated by and living under that gospel day by day, unashamed and unafraid. The hostility and challenges we all face in our culture today are such that we dare not trifle.
The day in which we live and work is too serious to succumb to trivialities. I have known churches distracted from the gospel by forcing through leadership by elders upon an unpersuaded church, with sad results. Certainly John would not endorse that. How needful for servant-hearted, humble, godly men to lead as elders and encourage dynamic gospel-driven local churches. Oh, for more of them! Lord, hasten the day when our land throngs with such!
