Measuring a Healthy Church
When people are looking for a church to join, what do they look for? Many people look at the quality of the Sunday morning services, as well as the number of programs offered. While I understand why people do this, that is not the real measure of a healthy church.
The challenge is that measuring the health is not as simple as those things that we often look for. Real health is something that you cannot manufacture a test for.
Here is one example.
In our area, we recently had a hurricane pass through and cause significant damage. We even ended up cancelling our services last Sunday.
But church went on.
What we saw was people reaching out to others. People called people in the congregation (including us) to see if everything was okay. They provided what they could to help out.
Some people might say that is not distinctively Christian. And in fact, we saw much help being offered by people in our community by people who do not attend church. But that does not take away that such mutual support is an important measure of health for the church.
There are times that the church needs to learn from the wider community about what it means to be the church.
The point is that church health is measured by how we do when life becomes difficult and we cannot focus on just the Sunday morning event. For many churches, this was demonstrated during the pandemic.
This is not a metric we can list on a website but it is what we must be aiming for.
