Church Life & Pastoral Care

Baxter's charge to ministers (1656) on Acts 20:28: first guard your own soul, then the flock — above all through personal, household-by-household catechising, as he practised in Kidderminster. "Reformed" means renewed, not a denomination.

J. Oswald Sanders, General Director of the China Inland Mission (OMF) 1954–1969, on leadership as servanthood (1967): the qualities of a spiritual leader drawn from Scripture and missionary lives, and the costs of leading. A staple of church leadership training.

Dever's account (2000) of what makes a church healthy by the Bible's measure rather than by size: expositional preaching, biblical theology, the gospel, conversion, evangelism, membership, discipline, discipleship and leadership.

Written in 1938 after the Gestapo closed Bonhoeffer's underground seminary at Finkenwalde: Christian community as God's gift rather than our ideal — the day together, the day alone, ministry to one another, confession and communion.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones's lectures on preaching, given at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, in 1969 after thirty years at Westminster Chapel, London (published 1971): why preaching is the church's primary task, the preacher's call and preparation, the sermon, the congregation, and the power of the Spirit.

Tripp's widely translated guide (1995) from Proverbs 4:23: behaviour flows from the heart, so parenting aims not at mere compliance but at leading children to the gospel, with practical counsel for each stage from infancy to the teenage years. Published in Chinese as 子女心，父母情 (simplified) and 牧養孩子的心 (traditional).

Gary Thomas's Sacred Marriage (2000; Chinese edition 2006) asks: what if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy? Marriage as a spiritual discipline in which we learn to love, forgive, persevere, pray and serve.

Timothy and Kathy Keller's 2011 book, from a sermon series on Ephesians 5: marriage as covenant rather than feeling, shaped by the gospel of Christ's self-giving love, with chapters on singleness and on complementary roles.

Gary Chapman's 1992 bestseller: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service and physical touch. Learning to speak your spouse's love language fills their "love tank" — the most practical book on this path.

Robert E. Coleman's The Master Plan of Evangelism (1963): not techniques but the method of Jesus himself — selection, association, consecration, impartation, demonstration, delegation, supervision and reproduction. His plan was not to win crowds but to raise up disciples who would make disciples.

E.M. Bounds (1835–1913), Methodist pastor and former Civil War chaplain, famed for his early-morning prayer. Power Through Prayer (1907) insists that the power of preaching lies not in method or eloquence but in the praying life of the preacher. Chinese translation by Philip Teng.

Toward a Missional Church (2015) by Chinese New Testament scholar Che-Bin Tan: from the Gospels, Acts and Paul, mission not as one programme among many but as the church's very nature — applied to the realities of Chinese churches today.