Church health Archives - Church Executive


Healthy churches

Pastor Rick Warren, author of the best-selling Purpose Driven Life, is often quoted as saying, “Healthy things grow.” As the pastor of one of the largest and most influential megachurches at the time, many pastors used Pastor Warren’s quote to push for numerical growth.

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How to evaluate your church’s health — key questions

I’ve consulted with dozens of churches formally, and perhaps hundreds informally. However, many churches never evaluate their ministry with any rigor.

The reason, these churches say, is because they don’t see the need for the effort, expense and potentially difficult season (emotionally) inaugurated by bringing in someone from the outside or going through an evaluation process. In my experience, those who refuse to evaluate themselves are either trying to avoid seeing empirically what they already know to be true through experience (painful), or are deferring pain in hopes it can be avoided by grasping for quick-fix solutions in the present (“We got this”).

Such mindsets betray feelings of, We could fix this if we really wanted to or really thought there was a problem. The words of the late Dr. Charles Siburt come to mind here: “Then why haven’t you?”

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How a healthy church can spiral — quickly — into dysfunction

Churches are more like organisms than they are organizations. Like an organism, when church health declines, it typically does so slowly. But there are cases when an otherwise healthy person experiences a sudden deterioration. Healthy churches can also experience a sharp decline in health. There are cases of healthy churches quickly becoming dysfunctional. Below are five ways I’ve seen churches spiral downward quickly, almost overnight.

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The healthy church

The Bible has a clear definition of faith in Hebrews 11:1 — “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Simply put, the biblical definition of faith is “trusting in something you cannot explicitly prove.” As church leaders, we walk every day in faith. So, how do we marry faith and facts? The church has been put in our care, and we must be good stewards of what God has given us. So how do we care for the church?

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Your church is larger than you think

In order to understand the true size of your church, you must take into account membership and attendance frequency along with the average weekly attendance.

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Signals for a maturing church

Is your church healthy or not? It’s a difficult question to answer. When people ask, I often reply, “What’s your definition of ‘healthy?’” There are many metrics that point to — or signal — the health of a congregation. If attendance has declined for 50 years and the church has not baptized anyone in 10 […]

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