Book Review: The Vanishing Church

Dr. Bob Pearle, pastor of Birchman Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, and current president of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention, has recently published The Vanishing Church: Searching for Significance in the 21st Century. It is published by Hannibal Books, and is available from, among other places, Amazon.com. We are grateful to frequent guest contributor Dr. Bart Barber, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Farmersville, Texas, who has provided our review:

The first decade of the twenty-first century has included a renaissance among Southern Baptists in the area of ecclesiology. It is too early to determine whether this renaissance will outpace competing factors to become the defining mark of Southern Baptist life at the beginning of this millennium, or even whether it will emerge from its infancy to become a powerful influence in the life of our churches, but at this moment more Southern Baptist authors and pastors are writing more, preaching more, and doing more to shore up our ecclesiology than at any point in my lifetime, the lifetime of my parents, and the lifetime of my grandparents. The genre has included works written by and for the academy, such as John Hammett, Biblical Foundations for Baptist Churches; and Thomas White, Jason Duesing, and Malcolm B. Yarnell III, Restoring Integrity in Baptist Churches. Works such as R. Stanton Norman, The Baptist Way: Distinctives of a Baptist Church, have represented efforts by members of academia to provide primers on ecclesiology to those outside their guild. New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary has hosted a conference regarding “The Mission of Today’s Church,” resulting in a book by that title, and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary is now hosting annual conferences on Baptist Identity for theologians of both the professional and the armchair variety. Any discussion of this category would be remiss in passing over the works of Mark Dever, whose ministry and writings are both academically rigorous and practically oriented.

As important as it is, academic work alone will never succeed in restoring vigor to Baptist ecclesiology. Ecclesiology is, after all, the doctrine of the church, not the doctrine of the seminary, and in a Southern Baptist church the coin of the realm is good preaching. For our churches to find their way back to a biblical concept of the church, their pastors must learn to see the doctrine of the church in the Bible and learn to preach it with conviction and power.

Enter Bob Pearle and The Vanishing Church. The book decidedly has the tone of a collection of sermons, and with good reason—Pearle first developed this material to preach at Birchman Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, and then adapted the sermons into this monograph. Adaptation did occur—these really are now chapters rather than sermons—but the strongest use of this book will be as a resource to develop good preaching on ecclesiology. The resulting sermons will carry forward the thesis of the book: “Churches that have lost their doctrinal core are struggling with an identity crisis. . . . The effectiveness of a church’s ministry is largely dependent upon knowing her confessional identity and staying true to her original purpose.”

The book groups the chapters into three sections. “Looking Inward” posits a turbulent world in desperate need of receiving God’s loving truth from churches, too many of whom at this very moment of crisis are succumbing to lies that counterfeit the truth. “Looking Backward” provides biblical and historical rationales for sound Baptist ecclesiology, including defenses of the concept of church membership and baptism. “Looking Forward” challenges seeker-oriented ecclesiologies, asserting that the key to tapping the power of the gospel lies in allowing the gospel appropriately to set the church apart from the culture rather than in churches’ sidling up to culture. Pearle favorably quotes David Wells: “It is surely ironic that those who seek to promote the church have adopted strategies that deliberately obscure its essence.” Likewise he brings forward anew the words of Charles Spurgeon, “Put your finger on any prosperous page in the church’s history, and I will find a little marginal note reading thus: ‘In this age men could readily see where the church began and where the world ended.’” The key to looking forward into the twenty-first century and liking what we see there, asserts Pearle, lies in the look backward provided in the center of the book.

In this book the reader will find good guidance as to the content of sound sermons on ecclesiology, as well as a number of strong illustrations and well-phrased points. But the pressing need of the hour is that we be not merely hearers of the word, nor even merely preachers of the word, but faithful doers of the word in heeding the biblical teachings that Pearle has highlighted and transforming this budding renaissance into a reformation and a revival.