It is easy for us church leaders and pastors to become preoccupied with what we can do to make the church grow numerically. Indeed, churches ought to be attracting and reaching people with the gospel! Church gatherings should be well-conceived and led with excellence. Pastors should abhor mediocre, boring, and repetitive programming. However, in a way that they cannot quite identify or describe, many church leaders intuitively sense something is missing. The missing emphasis lies in a lack of attention on the health of the church.
Does Church Health Matter?
Although dozens of metaphors exist in the New Testament describing the church, the image most applicable to developing a philosophy of church health is a “body” or organism. In the same way a doctor assesses a human physical body, leaders can conclude that the church as the Body of Christ is either healthy or unhealthy. The New Testament writers use the word “church” (ἐκκλησία) to describe both the universal church and the local church, as well as any distribution of believers in a region. Therefore, to describe the health of a congregational “body” is to evaluate a group of people against a biblical template of what they should be and do together.
What Does a Healthy Church Look Like?
Here are four ways to think about church health:
1. Healthy Churches Worship and Fellowship Together
In Acts 2:42-47, the daily worship gathering of the church was a public and corporate focus on “the apostles’ doctrine.” The study of truth was central to the early Christians and served as a foundation for their shared life together (“fellowship” or κοινωνία). Mentioned twice in the passage, eating together indicated intimacy and acceptance in the ancient (and modern) Middle Eastern culture. They prayed together. They experienced a deep reverential fear, sensing and seeing God’s activity in their midst. God’s presence also generated joy and praise within the fellowship (Psalm 16:11). Outsiders liked these people. It is no wonder that new believers were coming into the church every day!
2. Healthy Churches Make Disciples
In Matthew’s expression of the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20), Jesus commanded the remaining eleven disciples to “make disciples of all the nations.” A healthy church makes disciples—but what is a disciple?
When a person becomes a disciple of Jesus, it means that this person was not always a disciple. A life was changed, and a disciple was “made.” The concept of making a disciple suggests a process that is spiritual, intentional, and relational.
Healthy churches have developed clear responses to three questions:
- What is a disciple? (Meaning)
- How do we make them? (Method)
- How do we know when we have made them? (Metric)
The essence of discipleship is “follow-ship.” Just as men and women followed Jesus during His earthly tenure, disciples today need to envision themselves as following a living Jesus who goes before them every day. To follow Jesus is to embrace His mission and reflect His life—to live as He lived (1 John 2:6). To follow Jesus is to experience personal transformation into His likeness, and that transformation occurs through His active presence in the believer’s life.
3. Healthy Churches Seek the Presence of God
Everything in the church rises and falls on the presence of God. In his book God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul (1994), Gordon Fee argues that the entire corpus of Paul’s teaching cannot be properly understood apart from his constant reliance upon and experience of the Holy Spirit.
Throughout the Bible, God’s presence is the leading indicator of the spiritual health of the people of God. For example:
- Moses refuses to advance to the Promised Land apart from the accompanying presence of God (Exodus 33:15).
- Jesus directed His disciples to wait in Jerusalem until they were “clothed” with the Holy Spirit (Luke 24:49).
- Markers of God’s presence in the Bible include:
- A sense of awe (Revelation 1:17)
- A sense of His love (Ephesians 3:17-19)
- A crushing awareness of personal sin (Isaiah 6:1-5)
- A deep desire to confess sin and make things right with others (Luke 3:8-14)
Throughout the book of Acts, the church carried reports of God’s activity to one another (Acts 11:18).
4. Healthy Churches Demonstrate Love for One Another and the World
Jesus exhibited great compassion for people (Matthew 9:36-38). Healthy churches understand that Christ-followers will demonstrate His compassion to others as well, sharing His heart for a broken and lost world.
If His heart is “moved with compassion,” how can the heart of the church beat in any other way? Christ’s love extends beyond the church to the world. The consequence of an intimate, dependent relationship with Jesus is that the disciple begins to share Jesus’ concern. He will lead His disciples to care about the spiritual condition and well-being of every person they meet.
Like Paul and Moses (Romans 9:3; Exodus 32:32), the disciple of Jesus will experience a burden for hurting and lost souls—a visceral response to human need. Over time, the thoughts and actions of the disciple will begin to align with the heart of Jesus.
This is equally true within the church. Love for other believers is expressed in many different reciprocal behaviors—also known as the “one another” commands of the New Testament.
How does a church overcome its relational deficits and dysfunctions? Love is the key. For example, love that heals relationships appears in the way members are “extending grace to one another” (Romans 15:7). In 1 Thessalonians 2:3, Paul refers to the Thessalonians’ “labor of love.”
Healthy churches are populated by people who are prepared to work—to exert themselves even when it hurts—in order to love others within the Body. Healthy churches are loving churches.