Leading Healthy Churches

June 2009

Last month it was my privilege to participate in the North American Mission Board’s annual gathering of “Northern Plains” directors of mission known as the APPLE conference. For the life of me, I don’t know what APPLE stands for, however the conference is a time of fellowship, sharing and peer learning. About 50 directors of mission from states all across the nation attended the Denver Colorado event.

There were informative workshops, knowledge imparting seminars, facilitated discussions, and a director of missions “prep” course for those interested in becoming associational missionaries. The workshops ranged from “how-tos” all the way to “how shoulds”.  The seminars covered ministry areas of interest such as conflict resolution, risk-management, and intentional strategy development. There were only a couple of facilitated discussions, and it was my pleasure to facilitate a dialogue on leading a healthy church.

To prepare for this challenge, I conducted a Google search of the words “church health” to get a feel for how the subject might be defined today. To my surprise, that search resulted in 110,000,000 references. Obviously, there is much interest as well as numerous opinions on this subject. There were websites devoted entirely to the subject along with doctoral papers arguing varying points of view.

Most of these efforts focused on identifying the right mix of generally agreed to functions that would result in congregational membership numerical growth. Some, like Rick Warren, author of the popular book The Purpose Driven Church, took the position that a church’s health is better gauged by counting the number of believers going out from the pews taking God’s message of love and reconciliation through Jesus into their workplaces and communities than in counting the number of people in the pews on Sunday.

Simply put, the result of my limited research indicated that this world needs healthy churches and most western church leaders find themselves running on a treadmill answering to the tyranny of the urgent while focusing no further into the future than next Sunday’s sermon.

Not surprisingly, the healthy church “take-a-ways”, those things we didn’t want to forget, were simple and straightforward.

Healthy churches do mission “things”, not simply activities. Success in western culture today is gauged by the amount of activity present in a person’s life. Web sites such as Twitter and Facebook are examples of activities that promote quantity over quality in relationships. Sadly, this seems to be the case for churches also. Regardless of where this “gauge” comes from, activity for activity’s sake robs us as individuals and the church of the quality of life we desperately need. Externally focused mission activities introduce people to Jesus to meet their individual spiritual needs and provide for their physical and emotional needs also.

Healthy churches develop people not programs. A feeling of resistance sometimes referred to as “push-back” toward traditional Southern Baptist program ministry surfaced. The general consensus was that ministry activity must be based on guidance and priority established by Jesus and scripture, namely the development of disciples (Matthew 28:18-20 and Acts 1:8) and the work of the local church today. The ideas expressed in Tom Rainer’s book Simple Church were very popular.

Healthy leaders are essential to healthy churches. Intentional leader development is essential to church health. Helping church leaders refocus from church-activity based leadership to community-engaged leadership is accomplished through relational coaching. The ability to coach church leaders is perhaps the most essential skill an associational missionary must possess.

I thank God for those who participated in this dialogue. Their faith in God and devotion to Jesus and His church inspired me. It is my prayer that this report has stirred your heart, as the experience stirred mine. I am thankful to be counted as worthy to share it with you. God bless you as you serve and lead and remember to enjoy the blessings He created for you this day.

As always, if you would like to learn more about helping believers become disciplers of disciples through “mission” activities that make a difference one soul at a time please call me at (316) 204-7889.

Send this Column to a Friend






Past Columns

Return to top