50 Marks of the Christian Church

You’ve heard of the “Purpose Driven Church,” the “Disciple Making Church ,” and the like. You’ve heard of the “Deliberate Church,” and “9 Marks of a Healthy Church,” but have you heard of the “50 Marks of the church?”

The phrases below describe very much what I believe is an extremely exciting movement in the evangelical Church in America! Check out Ligon Duncan III’s blog post here for the 50 different descriptors he lists about healthy churches.

(1) Renewal of old evangelical alliances, around the Gospel
(2) Strong coalition of Bible-saturated
(3) Truth-driven
(4) God-entranced
(5) Prayer-soaked
(6) Aggressively evangelistic
(7) Christ-treasuring
(8) Christ-exalting
(9) Spirit-filled
(10) Sovereign grace-loving
(11) Missions-advancing
(12) Hell-robbing
(13) Strong-thinking
(14) Real-need-exposing
(15) Soul-winning
(16) Mind-engaging
(17) Vagueness-rejecting
(18) Wartime-life-style-pursuing
(19) Self-denying
(20) Self-giving
(21) Risk-taking
(22) Justice advancing
(23) Scripture-expounding
(24) Cross-cherishing
(25) Homosexuality-opposing
(26) Abortion-denouncing
(27) Racism-resisting
(28) Heaven-desiring
(29) Imputation-of-an-alien righteousness-proclaiming
(30) Justification-by-faith-alone-apart-from-doing preaching
(31) Error-exposing
(32) Complementarian
(33) Joyful
(34) Humble
(35) Loving
(36) Courageous
(37) Happy pastors working together for the Gospel
(38) Robustly doctrinal
(39) historic
(40) orthodox
(41) reformational
(42) world-opposing-while-at-the-same-time-world-loving
(43) Bible-preaching
(44) Scriptural-theology-inculcating
(45) Real-conversion-prizing
(46) Deep biblical evangelism-practicing
(47) New Testament church-membership-implementing
(48) Church-discipline-applying
(49) Healthy and growing Disciple-making
(50) Biblical church leadership teaching-obeying – for the display of God’s glory in the churches.

Wow!