The Church and the Surprising Offense of God's Love: Reintroducing the Doctrines of Church Membership and Discipline (9Marks) by Jonathan Leeman

The Church and the Surprising Offense of God's Love: Reintroducing the Doctrines of Church Membership and Discipline (9Marks) Reviews

• 
  John

  What a book this was. I really can’t say enough about Leeman’s book. The book itself is surprising. When one picks up a book subtitled “Reintroducing the Doctrines of Church Membership and Discipline” one might expect a tract or a booklet, but instead one is met with a book over 350 pages long. What in the world could be so complicated about church membership and doctrine so as to require 350 pages? What sort of intricate minutiae must Leeman get into to fill 350 pages?
  
  But that isn’t at all the sort of task Leeman has in mind. The book is practical, but Leeman is much more concerned about setting right our understanding of God’s love and what the love means for his people as he is about dealing with the procedures of a church discipline issue.
  
  While the content itself is fantastic, Leeman’s writing is so good it is almost worth the read. He has a sort of neo-puritanical style where he lays out the main question and answer at the front of the chapter and then helpfully provides the shorthand steps of the argument at intervals along the way. It makes for a very well paced and tight read. Further, Leeman has broad literary and historical knowledge and he incorporates them both masterfully.
  Leeman’s book is the standard – not just the standard on a practical theology of church discipline, but the standard to which practical theological writers should aspire.
  
• 
  Martin Beamer

  I don't even know where to begin with this book. This might be one of the most helpful and well-written books I have ever read. This book took every idea I had of the love of God and the church and pumped it full of steroids until I was bursting with thanksgiving for God's work in His people.
  
  Leeman begins the book by rooting out our idolatry of love and replaces it with the love of God. Then, he brilliantly unpacks our hatred of authority as the root of individualism. Then, he forces you to concede that submission to proper authority is the only way to bring about true and lasting community. With this foundation, Leeman begins his treaty on the church: what it is, what membership and discipline are, and how practically it should look.
  
  I will forever keep this book on my shelf and will make it a must-read for anyone who aspires to the ministry. I cannot believe I had never been shown this book until recently. There were many places in the book in which I felt like he gave me whole pages of the Bible back as I finally understood how those passages fit into the whole of Scripture - specifically his exposition on the Great Commission. But it wasn't just the theology, but the practical outflow of the texts he spoke of that made the book incredibly helpful.
  
  I also want to say that Leeman is a great academic writer. Without sacrificing the practical, Leeman interacts with hundreds of works and many different authors of all different backgrounds to discuss his position. He uses contemporary pastors, Puritans, Presbyterians, Baptist, anthropologists, scientist...etc, and interacts with them all at a very high, but understandable level.
  
  Overall, I can't recommend this book high enough. Please read it. When you finish, I pray you'll say with me: "Lord, I praise you for your love and work in and through the church. Teach me to love the church like you do!"
• 
  Mark Jr.

  Love is our response to value, and human value derives from God, so our love for others is not meant to be unconditional in the sense that we let others do whatever they want with no church discipline for sin.
• 
  Mark Nenadov

  A very helpful read. It is broad and sweeping, it thoroughly and insightfully deals with what love is and what that means for church polity and practice. It is a challenging read. I started it over 7 years ago and set it aside and a couple months ago I got back into it.
• 
  Jim

  Jonathan Leeman has written a good book here. It is thoughtful, deep, well nuanced. He explores church membership and ecclesiology from the perspective of a theology of a law-first interpretation of love. The argument seems to be if God is loving and sin is despicable, then people who join the church need to be loved in a way that leads them away from sin. And if they choose to fight the church's discipline then they need not be members of that church anymore.
  
  I struggled with my star rating, as theologically I disagree strongly with this interpretation of God's love. But the book deserves three stars because Leeman is true to his theology and he has written a strong, well-written, well considered book.
  
  This is a particularly good read for law-first pastors, but there is value here for progressive pastors as our theology must be challenged by scripture and different theological understandings of God.
• 
  Rafael Sales

  O livro é muito bom apresentando de maneira bem sólida o conceito de membresia e como a disciplina faz parte da membresia cristã. Só me incomodou o tanto com o autor tenta concluir que o melhor governo de igreja é o congregacionalismo, sendo que em minha opinião as conclusões dele parecem sempre cair para o lado do presbiterianismo. O autor tenta promover demais o governo dele e esquece que no começo do livro ele diz que essa não era uma questão relevante para os fins do livro. Achei um pouco embolado o conceito de autoridade e como o amor de Deus retorna para ele mesmo, essas partes me apresentaram um pouco de redundância e repetições. Fora isso, é um excelente livro, vale muito a pena a leitura!
• 
  Carmen Thong

  Assumes his reader to take the opposite stance to his argument - which can be tiring if you're fairly moderate or in agreement to his general theology.
  
  His writing can also be a little repetitive, and I am convinced that the book could be half as short and be more effective as a result.
  
  Otherwise, he makes good points with some argumentative fallacies here and there but nothing major.
• 
  John Brackbill

  Leeman defines love as "the lover’s affirmation of and affection for the beloved and the beloved’s good in the Holy."
  
  This is a book that explains this, argues for it and applies it to what that necessarily looks like in a local church.
  
  Very helpful step by step summary of the book's argument in the back.
• 
  James Ruley

  In this work, Leeman helpfully explains what church membership is, and how it works. This book is quite detailed, and rather dense, but a useful explanation of the inner workings of how the gospel should be lived out in the church.
• 
  Kimberly

  I think this is a good argument for church membership, healthy relationships with others believes and non especially if you are struggling with the idea/church culture as it is presented in our society. It a a dense read though.
• 
  Daniel Junior

  Todo cristão precisa conhecer e viver as verdades bíblicas escritas nesse livro...
  “Unir-se a uma igreja vai muito além de acrescentar o nosso nome ao rol de membros.” Jonathan Leeman
  E todo cristão deve estar ligado a uma igreja local.
• 
  Daniel

  Good Stuff. Leeman articulates well meaningful church discipline and membership.
• 
  John Gardner

  One of the fastest ways to get Christians squirming these days is to bring up the subject of church discipline. The Bible is clear that Christians are to exercise authority and discipline over one another, but everything in our culture tells us that we have no right to do so. How can I — a sinner myself — presume to tell another sinner what to do about his sin? Isn’t this unloving? How do we address such a difficult topic?
  
  Jonathan Leeman certainly chose a weighty subject for his first book, but he handles the subject extraordinarily well. Rather than begin with a list of practical applications (where most discipline discussions begin and often abruptly end), Leeman takes aim at the very foundation of the church, and the purpose of church membership and discipline. These two things, he says, “define God’s love for the world.”
  
  More than anything else, then, this is a book about God’s love. After all, if the church is to model God’s love to the world (a point on which Christians of all theological persuasions are agreed), we must first have a biblical definition of God’s love upon which to build our doctrines of the church.
  
  Leeman begins by looking at some “cultural baggage” which has caused many people to have wrong and unbiblical perceptions of God’s love. These contemporary issues includes individualism, consumerism, commitment phobia, and skepticism. Each of these have contributed to a general confusion about what love itself is, which in turn has affected our ideas about what churches should be. For instance, the belief that love must include no judgment results, among other things, in churches which are designed to make people feel relaxed and comfortable, not judged.
  
  In the next section of the book — at 195 pages, nearly a book in itself — the author systematically defines God’s love, and the implications in the life of the church. First, he describes why God’s love offends our modern sensibilities, and the connection between our understanding of his love and church membership. He then goes on to discuss the nature of authority, and the delegated roles of authority and submission within the church. These are almost alien concepts in most churches, but Scripture is clear that God has given authority to some, and the responsibility to submit to that authority (even as those in authority submit to Christ) to others.
  
  The final section fleshes out the true purpose of membership and discipline in the church: to define love for the world by marking off God’s people from the world and holding them up on display. Here Leeman finally gets to the nitty-gritty. How should a church responsibly affirm, oversee, and remove members? What does it mean to submit to a local church?
  
  The practical answers given in this section will truly offend many, but they are tried and proven over centuries in the life of countless local churches. It is particularly difficult to reconcile God’s revealed plan of the authority of the local church when we see how often this authority has been abused, often with grave consequences for believers and nonbelievers alike. However, the abuse of authority — while never excused — does not negate the fact that this authority does exist, and has been plainly prescribed for us in God’s Word.
  
  It should be noted that Leeman’s ecclesiology is unapologetically Baptist, but what he says will appeal to conservative Protestants of other denominations as well. The Baptist distinctives do not come into play too often in this book, and even when they do, one could easily take what Leeman says about baptism and the Lord’s Supper and apply it to, say, a Presbyterian understanding of the sacraments with little trouble.
  
  As with any “IX Marks” publication, the merits of this book are many. It is worth the purchase price just for the outline in the appendices! The middle section by itself would be one of the best books ever written on the nature of God’s love. It takes a difficult and often dry area of theology and presents it in a clear and engaging way. Its size will be a deterrent for many, but please, please, PLEASE don’t let it scare you! This is a book worth spending some serious time with. I highly encourage any Christian to dig into it, but consider it an absolute must-read for any pastor or elder.
• 
  Ryan Shelton

  There are few areas of theology that interest me as much as ecclesiology, the doctrine of the church, and this is the best book in that category I have encountered. I am not trying to exaggerate or overstate my case by saying that anyone who is responsible for shaping the structure and governance of their church (so, especially any pastors, ministers, or elders) should consider making this book required reading. Most books are not worth the time to read carefully, cover-to-cover, with a pen in hand, but this is not a book to skim. Trust me, I’ve tried.
  
  You can pan some gold if you simply use it as a reference on your shelf to pick out a few pages here or there, but Leeman could have a successful career as a prosecuting attorney with rigor in his argument from cover to cover. It’s hard to imagine parting ways with him if you agree with the foundations he establishes in the first chapters.
  
  The book presents the doctrines of church membership and discipline against our popular, and according to Leeman, idolatrous conceptions of love. Chapter 1 deconstructs the false love that prevails in Western minds, which has no authority or demands. Then chapter 2 presents a different and biblical definition of love that originates in God and is expressed through godly people. Chapter 3 examines our typical assumptions about authority, and shows how a distinctly gospel-shaped authority plays out in the church.
  
  Chapter 4 might be the most important if you need to pick where to focus careful reading. With the philosophical and theological foundations of love and authority in place, here Leeman carefully and exegetically portrays the specific contours and aims of loving authority as given to local churches as an extension of the Lord Jesus himself. One of the key ideas upon which Leeman rests his case is that all authority in heaven and earth belongs to Jesus Christ, and he has particularly authorizes his church through local assemblies to exercise that authority. The church’s authority is derivative and given a specific “charter.” That authority is to recognize, affirm, mark-off, and exercise oversight over those who get to represent Jesus on earth. Leeman employs a central metaphor, that autonomous local churches function as embassies of Jesus’ eschatological kingdom.
  
  Chapter 5 argues that the relationship between the church’s authority and its members forms a covenant-like bond. There is a submission and rule that is more than a contract, because it is a commitment involving all of life.
  
  Chapter 6 contains the most practical application of the book, especially as it deals with the bookends of membership/discipline. Readers interested in best practices for how to embody the kind of loving authority articulated in chapters 1-5 will find this chapter invaluable. This would be the most important chapter for those already convinced by the necessity of church membership and discipline, but interested in how to practice it. Chapter 7 provides very helpful and important qualifiers for how this loving authority should look in more daily life, between the bookends (chapter 6). Here Leeman contrasts authority with authoritarianism, and defines a distinctly Christian concept of freedom and liberty.
  
  If you are a pastor, elder, or ministry leader, or aspire to be one, read this book.
  
• 
  Mike Phay

  I picked this book up after reading Leeman's shorter primers on Church Membership and Church Discipline, specifically as resources in preparation for a class on Church Discipline that I was preparing to teach. I found this book to be several things at the same time: profound, thorough, thoughtful...and honestly, a bit tedious.
  
  Leeman proves himself to be a gifted and intelligent theologian, Bible teacher, and philosopher at the same time - which are all things that I naturally gravitate towards. In that, I appreciated his thorough handling of tough topics in a very deep, profound and even practical manner. Rethinking and redefining God's love is an ingenious and essential starting part and theme that undergirds his entire approach/argument. This important doctrine informs the entire doctrine of the church - what we are about, how we bring glory to God, and how we live with one another.
  
  The thoroughness of the book is shown in the outline. (If you choose not to invest the time into slogging through the entire book, he thankfully provides the entire outline in concise form as an appendix. Unfortunately, much of what is presented in outline form necessitates deeper explanation, so this is definitely a helpful launching point for digging deeper into your own areas of interest or focus.) Yet, this outline brings some tedium to the book - much like reading Aquinas or Edwards - as Leeman does not hesitate to go down deep and explore every single question until the life has been completely sucked out of it. This is not a light or quick read. It's intended for thoughtful study...and, I think, conversation. I intend to recommend it to the other Elders at the church where I serve as a book to read and discuss over a 6 or 9 month period.
  
  This is a scholarly and thoughtful work, yet the ideas presented are so profound and practical, that it is also a necessary work for anyone who leads or cares about Christ's church. I am thankful that IX Marks also published Leeman's (much) shorter works on Membership & Discipline, for those who do not have the time or inclination to give the time to this work.
• 
  Alyssa Bohon

  This book is one of the best I've read this year. Long, deep and challenging, but wonderfully enlightening and convicting. For some reason, the title sounds a bit obscure, but it could almost be subtitled Basic Christian Life Together for how very key and important its teaching is. I grew in my understanding of how integral my church family is to my very life and breath as a Christian, and how my submission to Christ is tied to my submission to His church. This book will tell you that you are not your own, and if you learn from it rightly, you will find that is a place of freedom and comfort, greater than the independence and isolation our culture provides.
  
  "We're not left to swim upstream all by ourselves."
  
  "As Christians join together to be formed by the same preaching, prayers of confession, songs of praise, and gospel pictures of baptism and the Lord's Supper, they are given a common language or currency for negotiating daily life. When the temptations, tragedies, or triumphs of the week come, they have this shared language or currency to encourage and challenge one another through it all. It's here, throughout the week, that Sunday's ministry of the Word echoes back and forth between one life and another....If we allow hour after hour of media (radio, movies, television, Internet) to form us through the week but resist any more than an hour of church on Sunday, will it not be the media that provides us all with a common language and currency? When we discover on Sunday after the sermon that someone saw the same move last night as we did, is it more natural to talk about the movie of the sermon?"
  
  "We count them more significant than ourselves by binding our identity to theirs and giving them all the honor we want for ourselves - the honor of Christ. We stake our joy and sorrow in their progress in the faith, since love always hopes, always trusts, always perseveres. As we love like this, we define Christ's love for the world"
• 
  Shaun Lee

  As a student of theology that leans more toward biblical theology, no wonder I felt that I did not like this book as much as I thought I would - Leeman states he is attempting to lay out a systematic theology! So perhaps the more systematic scholars would find this a more enjoyable read.
  
  Brevity is not one of Leeman's strength. This book makes Dever's original 9marks book look pint sized! As I read through the pages, often I would be wondering to myself, why couldn't he just write more concisely; how I wish I did not have to wade through so much murky water just to find that gem or two? This is a pity because there were plenty of nuggets of wisdom for reflection between the pages, but you'd need to get through quite a fair bit to find them.
  
  I've yet to encounter a book that exceeded 300 pages that I found still managed to capture my attention, and this was no different (the sole book that did was Stott's The Incomparable Christ -
  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...). But alas! Leeman mercifully includes a summary of the main substantives of the book in the Appendix. Perhaps one could start from there, see which topic interests you and then dive into deep depths of the chapter.
  
  If he, like Dever, would shrink this immense amount of research into a shorter book, that would probably make for a 5 star masterpiece (Dever shrank his 300+ page long book into a 130 page book titled "What Is a Healthy Church? -
  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9...)" While the sister volumes in the 9marks series titled Church Discipline and Church Membership may fit the bill, I cannot really tell much from the amazon previews what they really are like. Ideally it would be great if they were merged into shorter one combined title given the numerous overlaps between the two topics.
• 
  Coyle

  I'd give this 4 1/2 stars, except goodreads doesn't have that option.
  Basically, all of his thoughts on love are right on (both what our culture gets wrong, and what the Bible gets right). His arguments about the church are fine as well, and written generally enough that most Christians would agree, even those as cantankerous/apathetic as I can be about issues like church government.
  I particularly appreciated his point that in the modern world, love has come to be self-centered and focused on what others can do for or give to us, instead of being focused on how we can serve and care for and (particularly offensive to Americans) obey those with whom God has placed us into a relationship.
  The down-sides of this book are about what you'd expect. It is fairly long, and written in a style more consistent with pastoring than with Englishing. For example, on page 153, he discusses the how in a fallen world, authority very often abuses love: "Usher love into the same room as authority and love will often find itself battered and thrashed, like a person in a cage with an ill-tempered gorilla." Pastorally, the point is conveyed well and you know exactly what he's saying. The wretched language just has to be endured, because clarity is more important than eloquence in this particular style of writing. Fortunately, unlike some writers in this vein, this author is much more restrained in his use of tortured examples, and generally the book reads easily and well.
  
  Recommended for those who want to know more about the theology of life in the church.
• 
  John

  Let me give four reasons why I loved this book:
  
  1 - Its the best book on the love of God since Carson’s The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God. That may sound like a ridiculous statement about a book on church membership and discipline, but I don’t think its misguided. Leeman grounds the love of God in a biblical understanding of the Gospel and how Christians should function together as the body of Christ. The love of God is not an etherial concept, but a subject of deep consequence for Christians and how they care for one another.
  
  2 - Leeman allows the Bible to speak on its own terms. Rather than allowing culture or felt needs to inform the issue of God’s love or the church’s life together, Leeman defines them in the context of the redemptive history of Scripture. This ground is rarely broken in discussions on membership and discipline.
  
  3 - Leeman answers all the difficult questions. Those, like Leeman, who argue for the Christ-given authority in the Church to regulate membership and discipline its members are faced with many accusations of neglecting the love of Christ in favor of authoritative, loveless exclusivism. Leeman doesn’t evade the difficult issues, nor does he neglect the love of Christ. His answers are lucid and clear.
  
  The Gospel is offensive to our culture and Leeman doesn’t take the offense out of it. He argues, convincingly, that we must not take the offense out of Church membership and discipline either, for the sake of the Gospel.
• 
  William

  I was given a copy of this book while attending a IXMarks conference and was really expecting more from it. Leeman does a good job of looking at the theme and idea of love in the Bible and then demonstrating how it differs from contemporary cultural expressions and definitions and how the present-day Church has gravitated toward the latter. This is helpful. Leeman has a lot of good things to say about Church discipline and the the Church's responsibility to call people to be different from the world...even when that means exercising discipline. That said, the Baptistic "pure church" ecclesiology of the book proves to be problematic and that's where Leeman loses me. Yes, I'm an Anglican. My ecclesiology is different. I understand that there will be tares growing alongside the wheat and that come the Last Day, the vine will require pruning of dead wood. Jesus warns us that such pruning, such uprooting of the tares, and such sifting of wheat and chaff is not our responsibility...it's his. I'm with Leeman when it comes for the need to exercise discipline in the Church and to expect and call for holiness, but when it comes to "membership" in the Church he and I are simply on different pages.
• 
  John

  Leeman provides a very comprehensive and helpful overview of the doctrine of church discipline and church membership and how they represent the "operation of God's love." The local church is God's chosen manifestation of his glory in this age. The foundation of his premise is based on a building block argument from Matt 16, 18, and finally 28. He argues that the "bind and loose" responsibility to separate a people for God is given exclusively to the church (Matt 16, 18). We are then exhorted to take that message to all nations, teaching, baptizing and binding new disciples (Matt 28). This binding is a very meaningful covenant that represents an agreement to submit to the leadership of the church in return for affirming the profession and discipling the believer. A heavy read but Leeman is an intellectual powerhouse that provides a very convincing case for taking membership much more seriously.
• 
  Allen Tsai

  An excellent read. This book blew away my expectations. Leeman encompasses the much needed topic of church membership and discipline in biblical love and authority. He not only makes a convincing case for why these structures are necessary, but beneficial for any true Christian. I also greatly benefited from his pastoral perspicuity on how these principles shaped church life and practice in the last two chapters.
• 
  Matt Tyler

  This is a great book. Leeman does a very good job arguing biblically and theologically for the importance of the local church, and specifically for the need for church membership and discipline. He employs both logic and biblical theology.
  
  I enjoyed this book, but it isn't an easy read. It is long and requires time and effort. But, it also helpfully frames and speaks into an important conversation that will have a profound impact in making a church more biblical if followed.
• 
  Pete

  Many of you who have read this would probably disagree on this review and keep in mind this is coming from a layman: Practically speaking I think Leeman could have said everything he needed to in 3-4 chapters and made this a much easier read! From a laymen's perspective, this was very wordy.
  Theologically he hit on the lack of understanding in ref. to true biblical love and authority in the church (he does a great job of unpacking that).
• 
  Sally

  This book was not a light read, but a well-reasoned defense of church membership and discipline. The author's first chapter on love is excellent. "We have made love into an idol that serves us, and so redefined love into something that never imposes judgments, conditions, or binding attachments.". This is a great book, and one that all church members would do well to read and heed.
• 
  David

  Leeman challenges the current paradigm of what love is. He then goes on to explain why the church needs lines drawn for its membership and why membership and discipline are ultimately loving things. Yeah, I know it goes contrary to most of what we have been taught and believed, but he is correct in his conclusions. Be stretched and read it!
• 
  Keri Murcray

  This book gave me a lot to think about. Ultimately it didn't completely change my decision about whether or not church membership is a necessity, but it did make me think about what I believe, why I believe and it did help to deepen my faith. I really appreciated the outline of the book given in the back as it neatly summed up what was included.
• 
  Matt Pitts

  I received this at Together for the Gospel '10 and (if I remember rightly) read it soon after. It was a little 'heady', maybe even philosophical, but well worth working through. If you are interested in matters of church membership and discipline and willing to think hard about them, this is a great book.