Charting
a child’s yearly growth by putting marks on the wall is
interesting. It is fun to
see progress. On the other
hand, that same exercise is less
exciting with a twenty-five-year old.
To chart
their current development, different qualities must be considered.
When
churches
want to measure how they are doing, they most often turn to the
ABCs: Attendance,
Buildings and Cash. Interestingly,
the New Testament never
comments on any of those categories.
How
big was the church in Corinth? Where
did
they meet? How much was
their
budget? We have no idea!
A
more
Biblical model would be to think about church health. To do that, here are three
indicators to
measure ourselves against.
First,
healthy churches do not just exist, they respond. In 2 Corinthians 8, we are
told that the
Macedonian churches, “Gave as much as they were able, and even
beyond their
ability” (verse 3) and that they “Urgently pleaded with us for the
privilege of
sharing in this service to the Lord’s people” (verse 4). When a need arose, they
stepped up! This is
essential. As someone
said, “It is no good to sit up and
take notice if we just keep sitting!” Action
is required, because, “Faith without works is dead” (James 2:17).
Secondly,
healthy churches believe that they have a God-given job to do in
their
community. They are
“compelled by the
love of Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:14) and believe that they are
“Christ’s
ambassadors” (verse 20). This
is
important because the gospel is contextual.
In other words, our faith must be lived out in a certain
time and
place. A good question to
ask here is,
“If your congregation ceased to exist, would your town miss you?” If not, something needs to
change.
Lastly,
healthy churches recognize that they are completely dependant on
God. They understand that
nothing happens without prayer,
trust and faith. We like
to talk about
what the early church did, but they did nothing on their own. Anything good that happened
was the result of
God working through them. Even
Jesus
said, “The Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he
sees his
Father doing” (John 5:19). If
Jesus was
completely dependant on his father, how could we do anything by
ourselves?
In
summary, healthy churches are busy making a difference in their
communities
because they believe that they are doing the work of God by his
power and not
their own.
When
we
as individuals start living this way, the church becomes what it
ought to
be.
We like counting
big numbers, but
any congregation, whether it has 20 members or 2000, can be
healthy.
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