Church Growth

“A Christian without a church is a Christian in trouble.” [i] Like a lion hoping to snatch prey that wanders alone Satan aims to devour professing Christians who are disconnected from God’s family. We need the church. To become persuaded of this truth we need to know what the church is. It isn’t an...

Evangelism is a dying art in the Church today. Gone are the days of faithful witnessing, preaching, and motivation to see lost souls saved for eternity. We simply have no passion or desire to declare this essential message. This is sad to witness today. Our hearts should be on fire to proclaim this...

Editor's Note: Taken from forthcoming book, Daily Doctrine by Kevin DeYoung, Copyright © 2024. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org . As a Protestant pastor I’ve lost tracked of how many times a congregant has asked me...

Obadiah is a neglected text in the Old Testament. It is a short text, weighing in at twenty-one verses. A lightweight for sure. However, this is probably not the reason for its neglect. No, neglect likely stems from its subject matter. It is a book about Edom. You heard me right, Edom, the...

Perpetua and Felicitas – Two Martyred Mothers In A.D. 202, Emperor Septimius Severus tightened his measures against Christians who refused to pay homage to the imperial genius, the spirit of the emperor. Compliance required a minimal effort: a simple sprinkling of a few grains of incense on a...

Estifanos of Gwendagwende – Reformer and Martyr Around the time when John Wyclif and Ian Hus shook the western church by challenging its authority and traditions, a lesser-known monk did something similar in Ethiopia. He was known as Abba Estifanos (in English, Father Stephen). Estifanos’s Early...

The Spiritual Marriage between Christ and His Church Believers tend to regard our union with Christ as a merely spiritual or even mystical bond. But 16th-century Italian priest-turned-Protestant theologian Gilorama Zanchi maintained that our spiritual marriage with Jesus joins us as one flesh with...

The East African Revival As many other events in global church history, the East African Revival is still fairly unknown in America. And yet, it spread rapidly through most of east Africa and lasted over 50 years, leaving a profound mark on the local churches. Eager to pinpoint dates, scholars...

Hannah Marshman – A Pillar of the Serampore Mission Did Hanna Marshman know, when she left England for India, how much the missionary community would depend on her for wisdom and strength? It’s hard to imagine what she expected to do or find. As one of the first female missionaries, she had few...

Watson McMillan Hayes, Ding Limei, and the Battle for Christian Orthodoxy In late September 1919, eighteen students walked out of their classes at the Union theological faculty of Shandong Christian (Qilu) University. Based in Jinan, capital of Shandong, China, the university was a joint project of...