Mark Dever
Template:TOCnestleft Mark Dever (born August 28, 1960) is the senior pastor of the Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., and the president of 9Marks (formerly known as the Center for Church Reform), a Christian ministry he co-founded "in an effort to build biblically faithful churches in America." He is known as a Calvinist preacher.
Background
Dever grew up in rural Kentucky where he was an avid reader. He began reading sections of the World Book Encyclopedia and the Harvard Classics before he was ten years old and based upon his reading and thinking considered himself an agnostic in his younger years. Later rereading and thinking about the Gospels and the change that he saw in the life of Jesus' disciples led him to become a Christian.
Dever earned the degrees of Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, from Duke University, Master of Divinity, summa cum laude, from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Master of Theology from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Doctor of Philosophy in ecclesiastical history from Cambridge University.
Influence
In the last several years, Dever has become a more widely recognized name among conservative evangelicals, due in part to his appearance at large, nationwide conferences such as the Desiring God National Conference, the Ligonier Ministries Conference, the Shepherd's Conference organized by Rev. John F. MacArthur, and the Together for the Gospel conference (which Dever co-founded with C. J. Mahaney, Ligon Duncan, and Al Mohler).
Dever and Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, also train church leaders on a smaller scale. Every year, twelve interns pass through the church's internship program that centers around ecclesiology. Many of these interns have gone on to seminary education, at the same time becoming active reformers in their current local churches. In addition, 9Marks hosts semi-annual weekend conferences at the church where pastors, elders, and seminarians from around the country experience the inner workings of Dever's church.
Dever narrowly missed being elected as the convention's first vice-president in June 2006.
Dever is also a member of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals where he leads the Alliance Forum.
Gospel Coalition
Mark Dever of Washington DC is a Council member of The Gospel Coalition.
Divided by Faith
Book review: Divided by Faith. Reviewed By Mark Dever for the ERLC of the Southern Baptist Convention.
- If you are one of those people who thinks that racism is created mainly by the way we talk about it—or by talking about it at all—you should cancel your appointments one day in the next week, and read Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. This almost 20-year-old book of sociological reflections helps me see our nation more as it really is.
- I purchased the book when it first came out (because the topic was and is of great interest to me). And I put it on my shelf. And it lived there, closed and ignored. Fifteen years later, a good friend of mine, Shai Linne, told me to read this book. I knew Shai well and knew that he knew me, so I trusted his recommendation. I took it with me on vacation and devoured it.
- The term “racism” is a hard word for anyone who self-consciously entertains no negative prejudices against someone because of their ethnicity. This book explains, and documents irrefutably, the simple fact of the racialized nature of our society. If racism is blatant prejudice, racialization is simply the state of race being significant enough for it to regularly be mentioned.
- For example, why would I mention that John Jasper was an African-American preacher in Richmond, rather than simply a preacher in Richmond, especially if I do not introduce Billy Graham as a Caucasian-American evangelist in the 20th century, but merely as an evangelist in the 20th century? Race has not been so significant in every time and place. “Racialization” seems like a more accurate description of the thought-structures of our culture than the blunt personal prejudice that “racism” evokes.
- Such structures, the authors maintain, are easily invisible to evangelicals like us, who tend to see everything in individual terms. If you’re reading this as a Caucasian-American, circumstances are not arranged for you to have to engage this issue. But if you’re reading this as an African-American, you’ve never been given that choice. As our authors put it, “Not having to know the details or extent of racialization is an advantage afforded to most white Americans.”
- And yet, for us to live out the kind of Ephesian unity that we’re called to, we need to be able to see what is inhibiting us. If that is personal ill will, we need to see and confess it. But where there is no personal ill will, there could still be structures which perpetuate and even increase such racialization. In fact, one of the unintended consequences, our authors argue, of the church growth movement was churches that are even more racially homogenous and therefore more divided from each other.
- This won’t be the most exciting book you read this year, but it may have the most exciting results in your life. [1]