What is a Healthy Church Member, by Thabiti Anyabwile

Thabiti Anyabwile gives us a great little tool to help each of us who are church members to understand what it is that will help us grow to our full potential in a very healthy manner. Often times we attend church without a clue as to what our responsibility is, what our reason for being there truly is or we think that just because we attend that gives us brownie points towards the ultimate goal of being allowed into heaven. 

Thabiti though gives us very practical guidelines to remind us that we are not to sit there and be pew potatoes but we are to be interactive with the process, highly involved and even proactive in our Spiritual life and church experience. 

Many of the reviews already posted give you a good outline of the book so I will not repeat that. 

What I found the most helpful was the very first chapter on How to be an Expositional Listener. We know that many of our Pastors are Expositional preachers, but we don't know how to listen well to those sermons. Thabiti gives us five benefits of expositional listening that will encourage you about what you can and will receive from a sermon if you learn to listen well. 

He then goes on to give six habits of an expositional listener; 
1. Meditate on the Sermon Passage during your quiet time the week before the sermon 
2. Invest in a good set of commentaries 
3. Talk and pray with friends about the sermon after church 
4. Listen to and act on the sermon throughout the week 
5. Develop the habit of addressing any questions about the text itself 
6. Cultivate Humility 

Those six items will assure you of learning from the text, learning from the spoken word (the preaching) and growing in your walk with Christ because of the growth that will take place. 

Many of the remaining chapters have very similar outlines that give you good habits to strive for that will help you grow in being a Christian as well as help you grow in being a productive Church Member. 

This short book is something that will help every member of any church anywhere to learn how to become a productive growing member of the congregation. I would highly recommend that this be a short text that your church incorporate into your new members class to help those new members learn how to become healthy and growing. 

Enjoy!