9Marks Lectures

At the 2017 SBC, Jonathan Leeman interviewed Russell Moore, Mark Dever, and Philip Bethancourt on building healthy churches in a confusing culture.

Perhaps one of Satan’s greatest exploits in American church history is to keep the church divided along racial lines. These days the racial lines divide fairly consistently along partisan lines, with white evangelicals often moving rightward and minority Christians often moving leftward. At worst, this divide compounds fear and mistrust, and exacerbates our disunity. Is this an accurate assessment...

Would you believe it if someone told you church structure actually plays a crucial role in your individual discipleship?

In this 9Marks interview, missions pastor Andy Johnson sits down with two international Christians—"Arnold" and "Vincent"—to discuss the role the Western church plays in the growth of Christianity abroad, particularly in the Muslim world and China.

"If you say you're a Christian, but you're not helping other Christians follow Jesus, I'm simply not sure what you mean."

Prayerlessness is a problem in so many churches. What can we do about it?

Practicing church discipline is difficult. Perhaps this is why many churches seem to have neglected it.

Christians should be persuasive, and with his new book Fool's Talk, Os Guinness offers a comprehensive presentation of the art and power of creative and distinctly Christian persuasion. How should this desire to be persuasive affect our evangelism? Does God expect us to know the answers to every question? And how can we do this while remaining humble, recognizing that salvation is all of grace? Fo...

What is baptism? What does baptism mean? Is it simply an individual's declaration that they now belong to Jesus? Is it a sign and seal of the new covenant, just as God intended circumcision to be a sign and seal of the old? And what does all of this have to do with church membership? Is church membership for everyone? Only baptized believers? Baptized believers and their children?

How do we apply the gospel to same-sex attraction? Why does a teenager struggling with self-cutting need to hear about justification by faith alone? How in the world can a biblical doctrine of God help a husband prone to anger?

If God the Holy Spirit left your church this weekend, what would happen next?

Where do elders come from? Is there a way to raise them up without trying to "reverse engineer" a man-made process? And once a church has elders, how can they stay unified? What does "unity" among elders even look like? Must they agree on every single thing?

Mark Dever interviews Tim Keller about his pastoral legacy, what a typical Sunday morning looks like for him, his dichotomy-refuting "third way-ism," and much more.

Mark Dever interviews Tim Keller about his conversion, what led him to New York City, why the cultural gap between generations has exponentially grown in recent decades, and much more.

Should the everyday Christian care about something as old-fashioned and outmoded as church membership? Does its practice make sense in contexts without church discipline? Isn't it just a "Baptist thing"? Mark Dever interviews Ligon Duncan about all this and more in the latest 9Marks Leadership interview: "Church Membership in Theory and Practice."

Is expositional preaching the only kind of faithful preaching? Are personal illustrations useful or unacceptable? How can preachers encourage obedience without veering toward moralism? In this wide-ranging interview, Garrett Kell talks with Mark Dever on the art and practice of preaching.

Mark Dever interviews CBMW President Owen Strachan on Chuck Colson, Carl F. H. Henry, and the state of the complementarian debate.

Anthony Moore, a pastor at the Village Church in Texas, answers Mark Dever's questions about a discipler's personality, practical ways to build meaningful friendships, and the Puritan Richard Sibbes.

Each nation and age has a unique way to express its depravity, to attack God. But none will succeed any more than the crucifixion succeeded in defeating Jesus.

A Kenyan pastor reflects on the prosperity gospel, urbanization, biblical literacy, Islamic influence, meaningful membership, and more.

How do we help church members who prefer anonymity to love and open up to each other?