“A Healthy Church Will Always Grow” – Or Will It?

A friend of mine pastors a wonderfully healthy Small Church.

One of the ministries they have invested in is a partnership with a nearby halfway house for men who have recently come off of drug and/or alcohol dependency. Each week, faithful church members drive 8-10 of these men to and from church.

The people in the church invite these recovering addict with open arms and hearts. They befriend them in many ways, including inviting them into their homes for holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. Through this church, these men receive tangible evidence of the love of Christ during a particularly difficult time of their lives. Many of them come to faith in Christ.

This wonderful, Jesus-style ministry to “the least of these” is just one evidence of the compassion, health and outward-reaching attitude of this great church.

But the loving care they’re showing towards these men has not and probably will never add one single permanent member to the rolls of their church. And it certainly doesn’t add to their financial bottom line.

After all, this is a temporary home for men who have nothing – literally nothing – but the clothes on their backs. When they’re done with this stage of their sobriety, they move away.

This church invests significant amounts of time, friendship, money and other resources into people who will never be able to give anything back to their church – not even to their permanent attendance numbers. But they do it anyway.

That’s a healthy church. Read more

A number of factors influence the numerical growth of a church’s congregation. Some of these factors are internal; others are external. Where conditions are favorable, a healthy small church will experience growth. This growth may not be rapid or spectacular. It may be intermittent. The church may never become a medium-sized or large church. But it will replace congregants who leave the area, switch to another church, drop out, or die. Over time it will add more congregants. The danger is making numerical growth the sole or primary measure of church health. As the experience of Willow Creek and other large churches has shown, a large congregation and high worship attendance does not necessarily mean that a church is healthy. A church’s health is its spiritual condition. Numerical growth is only one of a number of factors that must be considered in evaluating a church’s health. Some of the characteristics of a healthy church is that it is outward-looking. It is open to newcomers. It is well matched with its community. It is reaching and engaging the unchurched. It is producing new disciples. Its members and regular attenders are discovering and developing their spiritual gifts. It is impacting its community. It is planting new churches. We should always be cautious about tying the health of a church, small, medium-sized, or large, to a single factor. Irrespective of its size a spiritually healthy church will show signs of  spiritual health in a range of areas in its life and ministry.