Thursday, November 13, 2008

Healthy Churches

What is a healthy church?

I have this picture in my head of going to the doctor. The first thing I do is get on a scale and they input a number in their little computer. Then they take my blood pressure and input another number. Then they take my pulse and input another number. Then they take my temperature and input another number. Then depending on my symptoms they do more tests and come up with more numbers. They look at all these numbers and tell me what is wrong with me or use these numbers to determine the current condition of my health.

Interstingly enough I could be walking around with a major artery blocked by 80-90% and die tommorow! The numbers would have never predicted that event nor indicated my lack of true health.

Working in a place where we look at numbers to determine a church's health is a daunting task. One of the things I keep asking myself... "Are we looking at the right numbers?" Are the numbers (avg. worship attendance, professions of faith, apportionment giving, & mission involvement) we look at really giving us a picture of church health?

Jesus gave us a whole other persepective on this in Matthew. Throughout the Gospel he and John the baptist use the metaphor of a tree and it's fruit. "Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit." (Matthew 12:33 red letter edition :) In another Gospel episode Jesus curses a tree for having no fruit. Jesus was simply looking for something that should be so obvious to determine the health of the tree; FRUIT.

I picked up the book Natural Church Development again and read in it that 7 out of 10 healthy growing churches have no numerical goals yet keep growing by 10% over several years. My assumption is that they may be focused on producing something else. My guess is they are focused on their fruit.

Now if we look at the church as a tree what is it's fruit? I would propose the fruit are followers of Jesus Christ. Are there fully devoted followers of Jesus hanging on that church? Maybe the only thing we should be counting are those disciples. What do you think?