Mark Dever to headline Pastors’ Confab
By Allen Palmeri
Associate Editor
JEFFERSON CITY – Mark Dever, pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., and executive director of 9Marks Ministries, is coming to the Missouri Baptist Convention (MBC) Pastors’ Conference Oct. 29 at Tan-Tar-A, Osage Beach.
Dever will speak as part of a 9Marks team that will be teaching six sessions on “Building Gospel-Centered Churches.” He is the author of “Nine Marks of a Healthy Church” and lost a tightly contested runoff election for first vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention last year to Jimmy Jackson after winning a plurality of the votes on the first ballot.
“I’m praying and hoping it will serve Missouri Baptist pastors well in terms of how we shepherd our churches and lead in our churches—to make sure that we keep the Gospel the center of our life together as pastors and as churches,” said Joe Braden, president of the Pastors’ Conference and pastor of First Baptist Church, St. Peters.
Braden said the conference will concentrate on the sufficiency of the Good News of our Lord Jesus Christ in the sense that it will be “not so much built upon a technique to present the Gospel as much as built upon the content of the Gospel itself—the implications for the message that we preach (and) the life together, how we live together as members of the body of Christ, based upon (and) rooted in the Gospel.”
Dever has laid out the mission of 9Marks to be a belief that the local church is the focal point of God’s plan for displaying His glory to the nations. The vision of 9Marks at www.9marks.org is for churches to reflect the character of God, and the mission is to cultivate and encourage churches characterized by the nine marks.
The nine marks are as follows: expositional preaching; Biblical theology; Biblical understanding of the Good News; Biblical understanding of conversion; Biblical understanding of evangelism; Biblical understanding of membership; Biblical church discipline; promotion of Christian discipleship and growth; and Biblical understanding of leadership.
