Preachers will welcome several important books published over the last year. John MacArthur and the faculty of the Master’s College have produced two volumes of direct relevance to preachers. Counseling: How to Counsel Biblicallyand Pastoral Ministry: How to Shepherd Biblically (Thomas Nelson Publishers) will be welcomed by pastors looking for practical and convictional advice onmatters of church ministry.

Thom S. Rainer, just elected as President of LifeWay Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention, continues to make his signal contribution to the field of Church Growth in Breakout Churches (Zondervan). Once again, Rainer combines painstaking research with deep theological commitments. Rainer also released The Unexpected Journey: Conversations with People Who Turned from Other Beliefs to Jesus (Zondervan). “In the course of a year, only one person becomes a Christian in America for every 85 church members,” Rainer explains. “Christians have become spiritually lazy and disobedient. Telling others the good news of Jesus Christ is not optional for any Christian. It is not something left to the pastors and ministers we sometimes treat like hired hands. It is the calling and the mandate of every Christian.”

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If Thom Rainer is concerned with what makes churches grow, Mac Brunson and Ergun Caner are concerned with the opposite end of the spectrum. In Why Churches Die: Diagnosing Lethal Poisons in the Body of Christ (Broadman and Holman), Brunson and Caner demonstrate concern for the health of the Body of Christ.

Chuck Lawless, the newly-installed Dean of the Billy Graham School at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, considers the vital importance of church membership in Membership Matters (Zondervan). “On any given Sunday, uninvolved churchgoers sit in almost every congregation in America,” Lawless observes. Lawless’ research affirms the vital importance of church membership in the life of a Christian.

Bryan Chappell offers an insightful understanding of prayer in Praying Backwards: Transform Your Prayer Life by Beginning in Jesus’ Name (Baker Books). “Jesus so loves us that He uses the privileges of His exalted position and the affection of His heavenly Father to ask the best for those who pray in His name,” Chappell explains. “And because Jesus speaks for us, the Father who loves Him treats us with affection out of love for His own child.”

Other works of interest in this area include Stop Dating the Church: Fall in Love with the Family of God by Joshua Harris (Multnomah), Perfecting Ourselves to Death: The Pursuit of Excellence and the Perils of Perfectionism by Richard Winter (InterVarsity Press), This Little Church Went to Market: Is The Modern Church Reaching Out or Selling Out? by Gary Gilley (Evangelical Press), Our Hymn Writers and Their Hymns by Faith Cook (Evangelical Press), A Mirror for the Church: Preaching in the First Five Centuries by David Dunn-Wilson (Eerdmans), Children Matter: Celebrating Their Place in the Church, Family, and Community by Scottie May and a team of others (Eerdmans), The Passion of Christ and the Purpose of Life by Adrian Rogers (Crossway), and The Deliberate Church by Mark Dever and Paul Alexander (Crossway).